Aerodrome

Overshot The

Fatal Plane Crash in Wau

From Our Own Correspondent WAU, Feb. 1.

A DRAGON two-engined plane, be longing to Mandated Airlines Ltd., crashed in an unusual manner in Wau on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 30, when it was coming in from Sala maua. The pilot and two native passen gers were killed.

Pilot Ron. Doyle, in charge of the plane, had been on the New Guinea- Australia run, and was relieving Pilot

Nicholls, who had gone to Australia on urgent family affairs.

After a flight from the beach, without incident, Pilot Doyle appeared to over shoot his landing on the Wau drome, according to eye-witnesses, and then endeavoured to rise again to avoid the hangars and buildings at the top of the drome. Barely missing the roof of the Hotel Bulolo, and taking away the wire less aerial, the plane skimmed over the roofs of Carpenter’s store and the theatre and, taking a turn towards the drome again, failed to get height, and crashed into the southern bank of the Little Wau Valley, burying its nose deeply.

When rescuers got there, the pilot and one native passenger were dead, and the other native died shortly afterwards.

At the annual meeting of the board of the Methodist Missionary Society of New Zealand, which carries on a mis sionary enterprise in the Solomon Islands, high tribute was paid to the ser vice rendered by Rev. J. F. Goldie, who has been chairman of the mission dis trict for 38 years, and to the service also of Sister Ethel McMillan, who has completed 25 years’ work on the island of Choiseul, among the native women.

The Dragon plane, where it crashed in the scrub, in Little Wau Creek, near Wau—photo graphed from the air.