MELROSE’S CRASH

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22755, 16 December 1935, Page 8

MELROSE’S CRASH

LUCKY ESCAPE FROM DEATH | NEW GULL PLANE WRECKED I ■ i (From Our Own Correspondent) SYDNEY, December 6. After having flown three times over the England-Australia route and round Australia without mishap and over thousands of miles of Malay jungle searching for Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, the young Australian airman C. J. Melrose met disaster on a flight from Melbourne to Sydney on Tuesday. He crashed in rain and fog in attempting to land because of bad weather at Penrose, near Bundanoon, about 100 miles from Sydney. He was badly cut about the hands and face and is believed to have concussion. His plane, a new Percival Gull, was wrecked. Melrose left Melbourne at 9.30 a.m., landed at Cootamundra, and took off from there for Sydney in bad weather. Heavy rain and dense fog enveloped the mountains when he was about to cut through to Sydney. Looking for somewhere to land, he flew round and round the little township of Penrose, where the residents watched him, realising the air-., man’s peril. He appeared to try to land on a cricket ground, then turned and put the machine down in a clear strip of paddock. The plane struck a stump, pitched forward on its nose, and the front of the machine was badly damaged. Melrose, bleeding from the face and half conscious, was lifted from the machine by railwayman who rushed to the spot. Melrose was carried through heavy rain into the home of a schoolmaster, where railway first aid men attended to him. A doctor and an ambulance were called from Bowral, 23 miles away. . _ . “Melrose is a real hero,” said Hrroi Blackett, an engine driver, who witnessed the crash. “He smiled a little when I rushed over to him, and said, * It feel 9 as if someone has hit me under the chin.’ ” , Blackett, who was driving a goods train to Mittagong, said he saw the plane circling around the engine, and realised that jt was in trouble. It kept disappearing from view in,the mist and was invisible when 200 feet up. I tried to direct him to the cricket pitch, said Blackett, “by waving my hands and pointing. It was raining like fury. Melrose was apparently trying to pick up his bearings from my engine’s position. He attempted to rise, and there was a terrific smash when the plane hit the tree stump. I rushed over, and while we were carrying him to the station he said his legs felt bad, but otherwise made no complaint. He tried to be cheerful.” “Who hit me?” said Melrose when rescuers lifted him from the plane. _ He was semi-conscious then. He revived swiftly and before the ambulance and the doctor arrived he left the cottage to which he had been taken and inspected the wreck, though his head and chin were deeply cut and his body severely bruised. “ Just too bad,” he ruminated, as he viewed the remains of the plane which had just brought him safely from England to Australia. He was by far the least concerned of any there. He apologised to his rescuers, the doctor and the ambulance men, and before being taken to the Bowral Hospital arranged for the wreck to be covered with tarpaulins and wrote telegrams to his mother and friends. “ Everything 0.K., he wrote, while, he was still suffering slight concussion, and his head was swathed in bandages. The wrecked plane also seemed to belie the words of the telegrams. _____