November 4, AUCKLAND: Ground parties battled atrocious weather in the Kaimai Ranges near Matamata all yesterday in a fruitless search for a National Airways Corporation Skyliner that went missing on an early morning flight from Auckland to Tauranga.
Twenty passengers and a crew of three were in the aircraft, which left Auckland at 8.5 a.m. for Tauranga, Gisborne, Napier, Palmerston North and Wellington.
The last message from the pilot, at 9.6 a.m., said he expected to land at Tauranga airport in two minutes' time. Contact was then lost.
The search is centred on Mount Ngatamahinerua, a 2,787ft peak and two and a-half miles north-east of Gordon and 10 miles from Matamata - where an aircraft was heard shortly after 9 a.m.
SILVERY OBJECT
At first light this morning search parties equipped with radios and rescue gear will continue their struggle through the thick bush towards a "silvery white" object briefly seen through the storm yesterday afternoon on a bush-clad ridge.
November 15: Rescue parties failed to reach the site of the crash in the Kaimai Ranges near Matamata yesterday, in spite of an all-out effort from dawn to darkness. A six-man "crash" team which was dropped by helicopter nearly 2,000ft below the site of the crash within half an hour of the first definite sighting about noon had to turn back in the afternoon when lashing rain and swirling mist cut their visibility to zero.
They had spent more than three hours fighting their way through the matted bush without gaining a sight of the wreckage.
But officials could offer little hope that the 23 people on board the airliner were alive.
The charred skeleton of the plane is wedged in an almost perpendicular ravine about 2,500ft up in the ranges. The field search controller, Mr B. Spring-Rice, of the Civil Aviation Administration, Auckland, and the pilot of the helicopter, Mr M. J. Alexander, of Wanganui, definitely identified the wreck and midday and hovered only 50ft above the wreckage lying below a burned spur.