Random reminder

Press, 2 April 1979, Page 26

Random reminder

GHOST SHIP

We learned from a rather macabre little recent news item that the fuselage of the Friendship which crashed at Mangere is to be handed to the Army for use as what the report describes as "a training aid.” This conjures up a rather odd picture, of the sort Of commands that used to be issued by drill instructors during the school .cadet days of our youth, as applied to the fuselage of 6 crashed Friendship: “Rayt now. On the word One. the fuselage is dropped into the harbour. On the word Two. she is filled with water —- get your ideas waked up there, Private Showers. On the word Three, two small rubbet dinghies ate slowly paddled towards the aircraft. On the word Foar. the Minister of Transport claims that fescue facilities at Auckland are second to none in the world. On the word Five, he says it would have been better if the aircraft had ploughed into i hill.” I It turns Ait that the fuselage is to

be moved ta Papakura camp, where it will be reconstructed and mounted to provide a training aid for aircraft loading and unloading. Well, fair enough, we suppose, and Of course soldiers by the very nature of their occupation have to be more phlegmatic and less neurotically imaginative than other people. But there is something creepy, isn’t there, about the idea of loading up and unloading, over and over again, the fuselage of an aircraft which is only available for this purpose because of a m shaper of the sort one would rather not think about? Economy is, of course a desirable adjunct of military operations, but would it not have been better, if the Army needed a fuselage for training purposes, rather than use this particular fuselage, to have purchased an old DC-3 from the Air Force, stuck it out on the runway, shot it full of hdtes, and then started loading and unloading it?