Passengers’ Effects Scattered All Around

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26917, 1 November 1948, Page 4

Passengers’ Effects Scattered All Around

P.A. NEW PLYMOUTH, Oct. 31. A Taranaki Daily News reporter who reached the scene of the crash found that the port wing and motor of the plane were embedded in snow. A cowling was torn off and it now remains on the side of the gully about half-way down from the point of impact. Apparently because of heavy snowfalls since the Kaka was lost, there is no trace of marks in the 100 feet or so of snow between the port wing and the rest of the machine. Snow round the aircraft on Saturday was scattered with the personal effects of the 13 victims which were flung out by the force of the crash and blown out by the wind to lie half buried in the snow or to be removed by the searchers as they combed the wreckage. As searchers approached the wreck, a magazine lying in the snow, with its pages flapping, and a handbag al-

most completely concealed, brought home the personal aspect of what until then had been merely a job and an arduous one, became something different. The realisation that men and women had died in the machine and that they had been reading magazines changed the whole aspect of the search for the individual members of the parties. A small bag containing a child’s care-fully-folded clothing and personal effects and luggage made the point far stronger than the remains that were carried down the mountainside. The buckled and skewed twin tail of the machine was the least affected part of the' fuselage. The cabin and cockpit were a telescoped maze of tortured duralium, so that the first men on the scene were forced to use a tomahawk to hack access to the interior. Most of the victims were found inside some part of the machine but the second pilot was buried in the snow underneath the starboard wing of the machine which remained attached to the fuselage.