No Trace Found Of The Missing Air Liner

Wanganui Chronicle, 29 October 1948, Page 4

No Trace Found Of The Missing Air Liner

AUCKLAND, Last Night (PA) —Fourteen low-flying aircraft searched 11,000 square miles of the central North Island today for traces of the missing air liner Kaka. It was a fruitless mission.

Tired crews, who accomplished more than 100 hours of intensive flying between dawn and dusk, returned to their bases with nothing to report from the day’s operations that rperesented the greatest air search in the history of New Zealand aviation.

Reports from the aircraft having been seen or heard at critical times on Saturday afternoon when the Kaka, and its 13 occupants, disappeared between Palmerston North and Hamilton continued to be received today. Often they were contradictory. However, there was a slender thread of evidence to suggest, after being possbily sighted at Te Kuiti and heard at Waitomo, the airliner may have reached Kawhia harbour on the West Coast, and then turned inland for Hamilton. This involved a flight over rugged mountainous country, shrouded in treacherous cloud.

Searches in the Kawhia-Raglan area, where Mount Pirongia stands as a 3100 ft. sentinel, yielded no results. Police parties have covered the slopes of the mountain and a report of possible wreckage on its southern side was discounted when it was later identified as a white scar left by a recent fall of earth.

Search To Include Stratford Area Today

WELLINGTON, Last Night (Spec.). —Bad weather for the search for the missing airliner is expected tomorrow, when the search area will be extended to include the Stratford district.

Twenty planes were engaged today, when the task again proved fruitless.