The Kaimai crash: 50 years on

On July 3, at 8.05am, it will be 50 years since a DC3 took off from Whenuapai airport in northwest Auckland. It was a veteran of World War II, one of thousands of the big twin-engined cargo workhorse built to haul troops and weapons around.

It had been spruced up and now flew for the National Airways Corporation, (NAC), trolling up and down the country, taking people to work or holidays or home. Flight 441 was to stop in Tauranga, Gisborne, Napier and Palmerston North, before reaching Wellington in the early afternoon.

NAC publicity from the day used shots from inside the upgraded ZK AYZ. Flying was still an event and a bit of an extravagance, with men dressed in suits and mum and the kids in their Sunday best.


Almost all the pictures of the 20 passengers which were to fill the newspapers in the coming days showed the men wearing ties, their hair slicked and parted in the middle, and the women in Jackie O hats. All the window seats were full.

Tauranga air-traffic control heard from the plane at 9.06am when it began its descent into the coastal town. The tower called again at 9.14am, but there was no reply, because by then everyone on board was dead.

Flight 441 had failed to clear the highest ridge in the area by a small margin. It had hit a rock wall in the Kaimai Range. Investigators later estimated the impact speed at about 140kmh, the aircraft going from that to zero in roughly 3.5 metres. It exploded and burned and tumbled down the face of the rock.

It had flown over the quarry at the small settlement of Gordon, about halfway between Te Aroha and Matamata. Workers heard it pass over, low. Then a noise like a door banging far away. Despite the witnesses and a search starting immediately, the terrain and the weather were so bad that the wreck wasn't found until the next day. It was another day until ground crews reached it.

Peter Ryan has flown out of the nearby Matamata airport for more than 50 years. In 1963, he was 21, when his friend Geoff Pullum turned up to tell him that his dad was on a plane missing in the range.

Frederick Pullum, a stalwart in the Auckland community of Birkenhead, was a consulting engineer on his way to a job.

Peter and his friend went to the quarry, where searchers had started to assemble. They went to Te Aroha, where the bodies were being stored. They thought they might help identify them, but it was a waste of time. The impact and fire had left nothing but charred, blackened trunks that could only be sorted out by a pathologist.

As well as the passengers, the plane had two pilots and an air hostess. The 23 dead means it is still the worst air crash to happen on New Zealand soil.

An investigation began into what went wrong. The weather was not supposed to be as bad as it was. It was all right at Auckland and Tauranga, but in between an easterly gusted to 150kmh and visibility was nil. The pilots flew blind. They had radio compasses, but they failed often and were known to be unreliable in the weather conditions on the day.

The DC3 had distance-measuring equipment that would have given pilot Len Enchmarch and first officer Peter Kissel a clue as to where they were, but Tauranga airport didn't yet have a transmitter to talk to the plane. They navigated by the crude device of determining how fast they had been flying for how long.

The wind and lack of technology meant the aircraft flew to the west of the Kaimai Range. The pilots probably thought they had crossed and were tracking down the eastern slopes. Radar coverage in 1963 was sparse and no-one could see their error.

The hills were known to cause a wave effect in the atmosphere as wind struck them - huge downdrafts followed by huge updrafts, like water streaming over a rock in a river.

Investigators talked to another crew that had flown over the Kaimais earlier in the day who told of an extreme downdraft and, to escape from it, the airliner needed to use maximum power. The inquiry reasoned that Flight 441, descending and turning for what the crew believed was an unimpeded run into Tauranga, had been caught in something similar.

If there is an expert on what the pilots on Flight 441 were facing, Peter Ryan is it. He runs Sky Venture Flight Training at the Matamata field. He was also the chief flying instructor at the gliding club for years, specifically teaching the newcomers how to ride the massive waves of air coming over the range, the same ones that affected Flight 441.

He has been in aircraft that climb when idling in the updraft and has dropped parachutists into the air mass and seen them go up instead of down.

He has flown on DC3s and knows exactly how much power they have in reserve. Not too far from here is one that was rated to carry 26 passengers in its flying days, but regularly trucked about six-tonne payloads no bother.

Still, the crew of the ZK AYZ wouldn't have had a chance. By the time they were that low and in the kind of waves that were happening on the day, there was no way out of the accident.

The crash happened before the Accident Compensation Act existed and the families of survivors still had the right to sue. NAC settled the cases out of court.

From his flying school at Matamata, Ryan can see the crash site. Not long after it happened, the SAS blew up the wreck, because people were getting upset at catching glimpses of the smashed metal. Today it is overgrown and hidden by the type of easterly that was blowing on the day of the crash.

The official memorial is near Gordon, nowadays a T-intersection and about six houses. The crash site is over the fields and into the bush about 9 kilometres away.

Next week a crowd will gather to remember the crash. Noted aviation historian Reverend Dr Richard Waugh, who also wrote an excellent book on the accident called Kaimai Crash, will lead a service. An old DC3 will do a flypast and later offer trips out of Ryan's airfield at Matamata.

Visited alone, it is the same as a million other vantage points in New Zealand. Some of the buildings look as if they were here in 1963. It's silent and still and unchanging and unremarkable.

Part of the fascination and sadness that surrounds air disasters is that strangers' lives all end together at some random, lonely place.

There's added poignancy here because, only 16 years later, the circumstances would be echoed when another New Zealand flight crew would become lost in zero visibility, without knowing it, near another mountain in Antarctica.

The memorial service will be held July 3, at 9am at the memorial plaque on Old Te Aroha Rd, 600 metres southeast from the intersection of Old Te Aroha, Gordon Rd and Armadale Rd.

Tuesday 2 July 2013

http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/life-style/8863466/The-Kaimai-crash-50-years-on