COCOS ISLAND AIRPORT

Press, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 26854, 6 October 1952, Page 3

COCOS ISLAND AIRPORT

CREATION BY N.Z. ENGINEER MR M. HILGENDORF’S WORK A New Zealand engineer from Canterbury was responsible for the creation of the international airport on Cocos Island, which is one of the stopping places on the new Qantas Empire Airways service between Sydney and Johannesburg. He is Mr Murray Hilgendorf, who is now with the Australian Department of Civil Aviation. In a national broadcast last evening Mrs Joan Faulkner Blake, who represented the New Zealand Press Association on the first flight of the new service, said that Mr Hilgendorf was the engineer who planned the unique coral airstrip on Cocos Island, which is an island of six square miles in 28,000,000 square miles of ocean. He took over a derelict military airport that had been hastily constructed in 1942 after the fall of Singapore. From it he salvaged the control tower and not much else. Mrs Faulkner Blake said that Mr Hilgendorf planned and was overseas for the construction of the two-mi]e runway which took a Royal Australian Air Force unit 15 months to build. Other work included housing, administration buildings, meteorological and radio offices, a marine sea-rescue patrol, and the supply of stores and aircraft fuel.