On numerous walks through Barrington tops on my own and with my mates we've seen the extremes of this wilderness. From triple canopy rainforest to scrub you have to hack through with a machete. Covering sometimes as little as five kilometres in a day. Climbing up the sides of hills with a slope of forty five degrees in forty degree heat. Walking past creek beds with the ice cracking under your feet and icicles on the trees. I've lost count of how many times we've lost our way when we were'nt concentrating. Every time we come back from a search theres always a debrief about lessons learned on the walk.
On every search we now carry a GME EPIRB, GARMIN GPS, flares, maps, first aid kit, marker tape and I leave a copy of my planned walk with my wife.
Always on the lookout for a smarter (lazy) way to do things I decided I would charter a plane to speed up my search of an area. I found a pilot who early one Saturday morning took me over the tops lifting off from Scone aerodrome. We ran the length of area i needed to check out but even with the pilots considerable skill at low level flying we only got a fleeting look over the terrain. Whilst flying back over the tops the pilot forgot to mention to me that we were in an acrobatic plane. He then proceeded to do a couple of "barrel rolls" With me screaming like a girl. The newspaper headlines flashed in front of my eyes. " Plane lost while looking for lost plane".
It would be nice to have some funding to organise some serious " Quickbird" satellite imagery. But until then the only way this plane is going to be found is on foot with a systematic deletion of a grid area.
The Bushwalkers wilderness rescue uses this technique every year in their annual search and rescue training on Barrington tops.
Speaking of deletion of grid areas. A bloke from work named Dave Warland gave me the idea back in 2002 to delete hundreds of hectares out of the equation. Since the area is state forest, why dont i ask the state forests department for a map of all the areas logged since 1981. On the assumption that if an area was logged and the plane was in there it would have been found. This brilliant idea helped to remove quite a few hundred hectares off the maps.
