On August 9, 1981, a Cessna 210 disappeared without a trace in an area some call the Devil’s Triangle, creating an impact that would continue to resonate for decades.
It is a dark, bitterly cold winter’s night in 1981, and rain hammers against the tin roof of an old timber farmhouse.
Tucked under the shelter of the verandah, nine-year-old Renae Wilkinson sits beside her dad in her flannelette pyjamas and pink slippers.
The smell of her dad’s cigarette hangs in the air.
Beyond the verandah, they can just make out the foothills of the towering Barrington Tops ranges on the New South Wales Mid North Coast.
It’s an imposing wilderness, carpeted in a tangle of dark forest.
Then, another sound cuts through the drumming rain.
“It was just like that real labouring of the plane,” Renae says.
“Like the plane was really working overtime to try and stay up there.”
The Wilkinsons struggle to spot the plane in the darkness.
“We only saw it for a minute, if that, and then we lost sight of it.”
Renae wouldn’t find out until later, but just after 7:30 that evening, a light plane, registered VH-MDX, was plummeting.
There were five men on board on their way home to Sydney from Queensland.
Leaving from Proserpine in the Whitsundays, the plane stopped to refuel at Coolangatta.
Towards the end of its long journey the plane had turned inland north of Newcastle to avoid restricted airspace around Williamtown air force base.
This sent it toward the Barrington Tops National Park, a place sometimes called the Devil’s Triangle because it’s so dangerous for light planes.
At 7:18pm the small six-seater plane first hit trouble.
“We’re experiencing considerable turbulence now and quite a lot of downdraft,” pilot Michael Hutchins reports.
Within minutes, the plane was engulfed by cloud.
Five minutes later at 7:24pm, the plane lost two crucial flight instruments.
A minute later, another one went.
At 7:28pm, radar shows the plane is way off course.
At 7:34pm Hutchins reports ice is freezing onto the plane, dragging it down.
Less than a minute later, he reports in again.
“Just to compound things, we thought we had a cockpit fire but, ah, we seem to have resolved that little problem.”
Then, VH-MDX starts plummeting.
It’s 7:38pm.
“Mike Delta X-ray. We’re losing a hell of a lot … we’re down to six and a half.”
Air services responds: “Mike Delta X-ray, roger Sydney. Your lowest safe in that area is 6,000.”
The flight services officer goes to speak again, but Hutchins calls out.
“Five thousand!”
After that, silence.
The flight service officer left the control room to vomit, in shock.
Warning: The following is a recording of the final moments of audio from VH-MDX. Some readers may find it distressing.
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An icy mountain search
That radio call would become the only record of the final moments of one of Australia’s greatest aviation mysteries.
VH-MDX is the only civilian aircraft to crash on mainland Australia with no trace ever found.
Pilot Michael “Mike” Hutchins, 52, had been engaged to ferry home four passengers who had spent a week sailing a yacht north to Queensland for a friend.
They were Ken Price, 54, Rhett Bosler, 33, Noel Wildash, 40, and Philip Pembroke, 43, who was newly engaged.
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“He had warmth and charm and charisma, an outrageous personality … he would say, ‘I wouldn’t be dead for quids’,” Philip’s fiance Yvonne Pembroke says.
Yvonne smiles remembering the future they were planning together.
“I said, ‘I’m having a happy nervous breakdown’ … it was like an effervescence bubbling inside your body.
“He said, ‘I’ve never been this happy in my life’.”
Not long before the trip to Queensland, they discovered Yvonne was pregnant.
What he said the morning he left has stayed with her.
“He came over and said, ‘Don’t you have that baby without me’.”
Later on the night her fiance’s plane started plunging somewhere over the unforgiving mountains of the Barringtons, Yvonne was at her neighbour Gail Bosler’s place.
Gail’s husband, Rhett, was also on the plane.
Close to midnight, Yvonne got through to someone she thinks was the director of air traffic control.
“He said … ‘there was a fire reported in the cockpit and the plane has gone down’.”
Yvonne recalls looking at Gail.
“I saw her face screw up,” Yvonne says.
“And I thought that was a reflection of my face, screwed up and terrified that this plane had gone down.”
In the aftermath of that final radio transmission, a large-scale land and air search was mounted.
Barrington Tops National Park can be an unforgiving place, especially in winter.
Supplied: Barrington Tops Snow Chasers/Beata Cz Young
Searchers faced freezing weather, a daunting landscape and had dozens of contradictory eyewitness accounts to work through.
Police admitted to the media they didn’t know exactly where to look.
All they had to go off were two final radar fixes encompassing a large part of the national park.
An unforgiving landscape
For nine days, searchers fought their way through tangled vines, over wet, slippery rocks and down treacherous gullies.
Meanwhile, about a dozen aircraft traversed the search area each day.
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The landscape gave nothing away.
Local television news cameraman Glenn Cook was among the searchers, hanging out the side of the NBN News helicopter, his camera sitting on the seat beside him.
“It was pretty heart-wrenching,” Glenn says.
“In my heart, my main priority is to find these people.”
There were moments of hope when searchers uncovered plane wrecks, but none were VH-MDX.
Nine planes have crashed in or around the region since 1945. Thirty people have not survived those flights.
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Hopes fade
Andrew Pembroke, Philip’s eldest son from a previous marriage, was 18 when the plane vanished.
“Every day you sort of wake up hoping something’s changed, and it hasn’t,” Andrew says.
“It’s just like a slow water torture.”
Andrew joined the search, but his hope quickly faded as he looked down from a plane at the vast landscape.
“When you see the canopy and the area, I mean … you could hide an aircraft carrier up there.
“[I left] thinking, they’re not going to find this.”
Survivalists at the time gave the men on board VH-MDX nine days at the absolute most, considering most nights were dropping to subzero temperatures and it was snowing.
Searchers knew they could not keep the effort going indefinitely.
At dusk on August 18, nine days after VH-MDX disappeared, police suspended the search.
They decided to go back in a month’s time, in better weather, on a body search and recovery mission.
“It was another stage towards hopelessness,” Yvonne says.
The conspiracies
The next search also yielded nothing.
Neither did the many searches that followed, conducted by professionals, amateurs and teams of bushwalkers over the years and, eventually, decades.
But the story stayed in people’s minds.
The weather might answer how the plane went down, but not why it was out there, over the national park at night, in the first place.
And with no trace of a plane wreck, or the men, theories started to swirl.
“Local radio stations were starting to throw theories around; there were all sorts of rumours as to what happened,” Glenn Cook says.
Over the years, stories ranged from the men having faked their deaths to fly overseas and start new lives, to claims they were part of a drug or gold-smuggling operation, covered up by corrupt members of NSW Police.
The theories even stretched to secret Cold War missions and claims the plane had been abducted by aliens.
There was also a belief circulated at the time that the RAAF forced the plane to detour over the Barringtons, which was not the case.
Once you start investigating all these theories, they don’t stand up to scrutiny.
They have also been difficult for many of the friends and family of those on board VH-MDX.
Living with the unknown
This year marked the 45th anniversary of the disappearance of VH-MDX, and for those who lost someone they loved, there are still no answers.
Even the coronial inquest, which was held in Sydney a year after the crash, did not provide much clarity.
“The occupants died each or separately on or about August 9, 1981 when the aircraft in which they were travelling crashed into the mountains in the Barrington Tops area,” the coroner found.
The coroner stated the cause of the accident would probably not be known until the wreckage was found.
The surviving family members have done their best to make peace with living with the unknown.
In many ways the loss has shaped the rest of Yvonne Pembroke’s life.
“I have thought about Philip every day. Not all day, but every day,” she says.
“I describe my life as bittersweet, happy, sad, lucky, unlucky. It’s all of those things, with a love child.”
Philip’s eldest son, Andrew, says he inherited a business and incredible opportunities when he was just 18 years old, but at the cost of losing his dad.
“I do remember feeling guilty about that.”
Andrew says he would like answers but no longer needs them.
“It’s horrible and tragic, but you have to move on.”
The search continues
Many of the men’s families and friends are astounded by the enduring interest in the disappearance.
There are dozens of people and independent search groups who have been searching and researching the case for years, and they have no plans to stop.
There’s a page on social media dedicated to the mystery, with users regularly sharing new information and theories.
In New Zealand, pilot Gavin Grimmer operates a website dedicated to finding lost aircraft and has spent years examining the evidence surrounding VH-MDX.
Among those who continue to search the Barrington Tops are Glenn Strkalj and Glenn Horrocks.
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Collectively, they have been searching for the plane for decades.
Each year they target a new area of the Barrington Tops. Their most recent search was in June.
“It’s always in the back of your mind that there’s family and friends of these people who want and need answers,” Glenn Horrocks says.
The pair are also keeping an eye on new technologies that might help locate the wreckage.
After meticulous research and computer modelling, they have narrowed down an outer-most boundary where they believe it is highly unlikely VH-MDX could have flown beyond.
But that boundary spans 9,000 square kilometres of dense jungle.
It is a daunting prospect.
Sometimes, though, things lost for decades do resurface.
In 2021 an Australian warplane, missing in a jungle in Papua New Guinea since 1943, was found when a pig hunter stumbled across it.
So, hope, however slim, remains.
“The chance of finding VH-MDX on any one day is not very high,” Glenn Horrocks says.
“But the only way you’re ever going to find it is if you look, and some day someone, somewhere is going to come across it.”
Credits
Source: www.abc.net.au
