Barrington Tops refuses to yield the 32-year mystery of the missing Cessna

IT'S a mystery that has confounded searchers for 32 years: how could a plane with five people on board crash without trace?

barrington Tops

A HUNDRED million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed Gondwana, much of the supercontinent that included Australia and Antarctica was blanketed in lush, green rainforests. As Australia tore loose and drifted north to warmer latitudes, the frugal eucalypt began its relentless conquest of the browning continent. But there were pockets of resistance.

On the eastern slopes of the Barrington Tops, 100km northwest of industrial Newcastle, these dinosaur forests survived. Protected from bushfires by consistent rains, they are dominated by gnarly Antarctic beech, which grow to 50m and can live for many hundreds of years. It is a mysterious, mythical place that contains some of the most rugged country in Australia. "The ravines drop off incredibly sharply," says park ranger Anthony Signor. "It's well shaded with lots of moisture and so the vegetation, even at ground level, is very dense." This Gondwana forest does not give up its secrets easily.

On the afternoon of August 9, 1981, a single-engine Cessna 210, registered VH-MDX, was flying south from Proserpine in Queensland to Sydney, via a fuel stop in Coolangatta. On board were four Sydney men - Noel Wildash, 42; Sydney Water Police deputy chief Ken Price, 54; Rhett Bosler, 33; and Philip Pembroke, 43 - who had been sailing a yacht up the Queensland coast and were returning home with the pilot, Michael Hutchins, 52.

All was going well until they reached Taree, on NSW's mid-north coast, when Hutchins requested permission to fly through restricted airspace around the Williamtown RAAF base near Newcastle in order to avoid some nasty weather inland. But before permission was granted, Hutchins decided to continue along his original route away from the coast towards Singleton in the Hunter Valley and then on to Sydney's Bankstown airport. From that point, everything that could go wrong did.

Sometime after Taree, a vacuum pump failed. The pump powered two vital flight instruments - the artificial horizon, which allows a pilot to remain level in cloud, and the heading indicator, which tells him where he's going. Instead of flying east of Barrington Tops, Hutchins mistakenly flew west - and then did a U-turn, thinking he was heading for the coast when in fact he was pointing back towards the dense mountain forests. "He's got problems, this boy," the air traffic controller in Sydney remarked to his colleague at Williamtown as they attempted to direct the Cessna to safety, tracking its progress on their radars.

The crackly recordings between the pilot and the controllers reveal the horror within the tiny aircraft that day as it was buffeted by wild winds. "We have a little bit of a problem, our standby compass is swinging like blazes"; "We're picking up ice"; "Just to compound things, we thought we had a cockpit fire but we seem to have resolved that little problem"; "We just got caught in a downdraft and we're down a thousand [feet] a minute"; "We're losing a hell of a lot ... we're down to six and a half." The plane was being pounded by turbulence and thick clouds restricted the pilot's view and ability to stay level. Snow was falling on the mountains. The plane lacked the power to punch its way up through the crushing downdrafts.

"Mike Delta X-ray," a controller implored, using the aircraft's call sign, "your lowest safe [altitude] in that area is six thousand [feet]." Then came the pilot's terrified, high-pitched reply: "Five thousand ... " And that was it - silence. The controllers pleaded into dead air for a response and scanned their radars. Nothing. Other aircraft were diverted to look but there was no sign of fire below. The Cessna's emergency beacon did not activate.

The following day, an extensive land and air search was launched involving helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and hundreds of men on the ground. They could find no signs of scarring to indicate the plane may have ploughed into the forest. After nine days, the search was called off. A month later, another huge ground search, involving 400 police, army reservists and bushwalkers, failed as well.

In the 32 years since, dozens, possibly hundreds of official and unofficial searches have been mounted to find VH-MDX. Clairvoyants and psychics have been consulted and found wanting. Two men have written a book on the subject, claiming to have pinpointed the spot. A couple of dozen aviation tragics have devoted years of their lives to the complicated algebra of wind speeds, aircraft velocity, engine capacity, last-known radar blips and pilot behaviour, and mounted their own searches.

The disappearance of VH-MDX remains Australia's only unsolved aircraft crash since World War II. "Once you become involved there's no getting away from it," says Glenn Horrocks, from the Bushwalkers Wilderness Rescue Squad, who has been up to Barrington Tops with a team to search every year or so since 1994. "For people like me, VH-MDX is the Holy Grail. We would all love to get some closure for the families - that is our major concern. But it also comes back to the nagging question of how, in this day and age, can an aircraft with five men on board simply disappear?"

Brenton Charlton is a knockabout bloke with a couple of masters degrees who bounds out of bed each morning amazed that life has bestowed upon him "the best job in the world". His office in Alexandria, Sydney, is packed with kit to crack safes, abseil off skyscrapers and blow things up. As head of the NSW Police Rescue and Bomb Disposal Unit he became interested in VH-MDX when he discovered his squad had been involved in the search for the aircraft since 1981. For his proud unit, this was a loose end.

He began reading up on the case and found that while there had been dozens of searches, they had not been conducted methodically. He figured that using the latest geospatial technology, combined with the original data, he might be able to get an accurate picture of where the plane went down. He reckoned a fresh search could be launched as a multi- agency training exercise involving elite teams from the NSW Ambulance Service, the Rural Fire Service, the Volunteer Rescue Association, the Bushwalkers Wilderness Rescue Squad, National Parks and police, to test their capabilities and cooperation in extreme and remote circumstances. "The intent was to rip through everything, pull out all the records and give it our best shot," Charlton tells me.

"I took on an advice group and they re-examined everything in a surgical manner." This team included his intelligence officer Julian Hicks, Horrocks, and an army corporal and pilot, Mark Nolan.

The men spent months reinvestigating the crash. They talked to the air traffic controllers on duty that day. They pulled files from the National Archives and trawled through the original investigators' reports. They listened to the original recordings between the pilot and air traffic controllers. They uncovered a previously unknown last radar blip. They mapped every other known search.

What they came up with was a search box - an area 1km wide by 2km long - which they believed was the most likely spot for the plane to have crashed. It just happened to be in one of the most inhospitable parts of the Barrington Tops National Park, atop a steep gorge at the head of the Williams River - a 200ha patch in a forest of 75,000ha. After months of planning a four-day search involving about 100 elite rescue folk was launched last month.

Philip Pembroke Jr, 31, steps from his hired 4WD dressed in a knitted Superman jumper. Two hundred kilometres to the south bushfires are raging in the Blue Mountains but here, at an altitude of 1500m, there's a chill in the air. His mother, Yvonne, and his half-brother Damien, 46, follow him. The jumper, hand-knitted by Yvonne, belonged to the father he never knew.

That August night in 1981 changed forever the lives of these three people: Philip, then the unborn son; Yvonne, then 30 and eight weeks pregnant; and Damien, Philip Sr's son from a previous marriage. "It's an odd feeling for me," Philip Jr says, "to be up here looking for a man who I had no relationship with, but someone who obviously had a profound effect on my life and who I am."

Damien was 12 when his dad died and he says it left him with an overbearing sense of how fleeting life is; it unleashed a reckless streak that lasted for many years, saw him expelled from school and led him to get involved in "some mad things. I never thought I would live past 21," he says. "To be older now than my father was when he died is a total spin-out."

Yvonne says she and Philip Sr had been planning to get married and had set a date for a month after the crash. After his death she changed her surname to his. Philip Pembroke was a successful businessman who owned a string of nursing homes and Yvonne had been living with him for several years. "I'd been living the high life," she says. "Then suddenly I was a young woman carrying a baby - it was before women's rights - and I was jobless, homeless, pregnant and grieving."

Charlton takes them across the plateau to where the command centre has been set up in a tent. Huge maps line the walls and banks of laptops sit on tables - it's like a war room. The rescue folk jump to attention as the Pembrokes arrive. Suddenly, theory becomes reality. The family crowds around a computer, which shows three-dimensional imaging of the search area that reveals in graphic detail the steepness of the terrain. After a 10-minute brief they emerge into the sunlight and Damien wipes a tear from his eye. "We are incredibly grateful for what everyone here is doing," he says to a searcher. "It means a lot to us. Thank you."

One of the men from the tent is dressed in his army uniform. He is Mark Nolan, part of the advisory team. Nolan tells me that 15 years ago, after he got his pilot's licence, he was flying a light plane from Coolangatta to Bankstown. "I sort of overestimated my abilities and got into a place I shouldn't have been, flying in clouds near Barrington," he says. After a nerve-jangling hour he touched down safely at Singleton. An old pilot who was there gave him a stern dressing-down. "There are five men still up in those mountains who've never been found," the pilot told him.

Nolan accepted the criticism and became intrigued with the disappearance. He started investigating the crash and was enthralled. This is his eighth visit to Barrington Tops - his previous trips have been with a group of mates, traipsing about in the rainforest. "It would be wonderful for the families to get some closure, but I really want to know the end of the story," he says. "It is like reading a great novel with the last chapter ripped out. You can't do that."

During their research, Nolan and his team uncovered the original investigator's notes in the National Archives and the last recorded radar blip, which was vital, he says, in plotting where the plane is likely to have crashed. He and his team used a rigorous scientific approach to narrow down the search area. But, he concedes, it is an inexact process and any small errors in their calculations could leave them several kilometres out. He admits, too, that the search is not without its controversies; people who spend years of their lives investigating such matters hold strong and often opposing views.

"Let's hope they find it," says Sydney lawyer and pilot Gary Donovan. "I just don't think they will." Donovan and Don Readford, a retiree and pilot, have written a book about the disappearance of VH-MDX called Operation Phoenix, which they spent 10 years researching. They believe the aircraft crashed near Scattered Top Mountain, more than 10km away from where the current search is being conducted. "Being a lawyer," Donovan says, "I thought it was vital to go back and look at all the evidence and the witness accounts from the time." He cites a list of experts he's interviewed. However, previous searches initiated by him and Readford, involving SES volunteers and hikers, have also failed.

Nolan and his team reject key aspects of Operation Phoenix. They say its timings were incorrectly assessed using copies of voice recordings rather than the originals. "The problem with Readford and Donovan's account is that they have added extra time to allow [the plane] to get to Scattered Top - we have actually proved that there was no extra time," says Nolan. It's a case of aviation enthusiasts at 20 paces.

No matter what the theory, finding the plane comes down to one thing: searchers beating their way through the scrub. After their briefing at the command centre, Charlton leads the Pembrokes along a rough bush track and up to a mountaintop so they can view the terrain where the search will be conducted below. But even from the summit it is still difficult to get a clear view because the vegetation is so thick. There is a trig station at the top and on its base is a small plaque. The inscription reads: "In memory of Noel Wildash and friends who perished near here on 9th August 1981." There's a lull of silence as the Pembrokes consider this and all that it means to each of them.

After a final scour, at the end of a four-day operation, the search teams are pulled out from the rugged valleys below. There are volunteers from places such as Bega, Tumut, and Gundagai who've given up their weekends to find a plane that disappeared before some of them were born. Builder Gary Jol, an RFS volunteer from the Blue Mountains, is keen to get on the road because fire is threatening his house. Nicole Cooper, a real estate agent and RFS volunteer from Merimbula on the NSW South Coast, says the conditions were trying. "In places we had vine so thick that you had to get down on your hands and knees and crawl and use secateurs to cut your way through," she says. The vine is known as lawyer vine - once it takes hold it's a bloody, painful process to break free. But Cooper says it is an incredibly beautiful place and it was amazing to think that she may have been treading where no human had ever trod before. "It was absolutely pristine," she says. "For the two days we were walking around in it we did not see any evidence of human activity at all. No rubbish, nothing." No plane, either.

Charlton is outwardly upbeat, but he's a guy who likes results. As a training exercise it was a great success, he offers, and they'll probably come back in years to come and do it all again. The conditions were so extreme that the searchers were able to cover only about half the search box. Next time they'll forage through what remains and then work out from there.

Philip Pembroke tells me later that the experience of being part of the search, and being close to where his father died, brought him a degree of satisfaction and peace he hadn't expected. He's happy for people to continue the search but is unsure what should happen if, one day, they should find his father's bones entombed in the wreckage. Should they bring back his remains for burial in a suburban cemetery? Or should they be left on the side of a mountain in that beautiful, mythical place? "To be honest," he says, "it's a decision I don't think I'll ever have to face." He doesn't think the Gondwana forest will ever give up its secret.