Aviation Historian Searches For Clues

Illawarra Mercury

Saturday June 12, 1999

AVIATION historian Bob Piper from Canberra, who has been researching and writing about the missing Dragon for 20 years, is involved in the latest hunt for the wreckage.

Other searchers from as far afield as Murwillumbah on NSW's North Coast, Melbourne and Sydney also have been scouring bushland on the Wanganderry Tableland between Lake Burragorang and the Nattai River.

``It's the last great Australian aviation mystery," said Mr Piper, who worked as an RAAF historian for 15 years and has written two books on aviation.

``We'll all work together or work separately but keep in touch with other.

``I don't think there's any over-riding ambition - certainly not from my side - to be the first in. If you work with each other, there's more chance of being successful."

But searchers will have to be keen-eyed because after 56 years of rotting in the bush, all that would be left of the wood-and-fabric aircraft would be the wheels, engines and wires, he said.

There is a possibility that bushwalkers in the past may have stumbled across something.

``They may have found a little bit of wreckage and not worried about telling anyone about it," Mr Piper said.

``As with the famous Southern Cloud lost in the Snowy Mountains for so many years, someone may have to physically tread on the very wreckage of the bi-plane before it is discovered."

In 1931, the Australian National Airways' Southern Cloud crashed during a storm while on a flight from Sydney to Melbourne.

Pioneer aviators Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm searched in vain for the wreckage which, over the years, was buried slowly in the forest litter and bushfire regrowth until a young carpenter from a Snowy Mountains Authority construction camp found it in 1958.

There have been a number of private and RAAF searches over the years for the missing Dragon.

The RAAF's No22 Squadron (Citizens Air Force) searched for 10 days in March 1980, after consulting 1943 search leader Laurie Carlon, who now lives in Woonona.

But the air force searchers found a notorious ledge, which Mr Carlon had edged across in 1943, had been wiped out in a landslide, forcing them to climb the mountain from the other side.

There also is a school of thought which believes the Dragon's resting place is below the Lake Burragorang waterline.

However, Mr Carlon said this was not possible because the flooded area was cleared of vegetation and the wreckage would have been found.

Mr Piper, who has held a pilot's licence for 30 years, has a long history of finding and identifying aircraft which crashed in wartime.

He has identified aircraft in Papua New Guinea for the United States Embassy in Port Moresby.

He has helped find aircraft in remote areas near the NSW towns of Tumut, Gunning, Gundaroo and Eden and has organised for memorial plaques to the airmen to be placed in schools or churches of those towns.

In addition to the plaque which now is in the Wagga RAAF Base museum, Mr Piper plans to have a plaque laid in a Camden church in memory of all five men aboard the Dragon.