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calendar   Monday - January 04, 2010

Awesome find in arctic …. come fly with me …

Gee, what a great find this is.  Hope I’m not alone in finding this exciting. Buried all those years.
Typical of the Telegraph as I am forever saying, that I had to find the on line version someplace else. Ditto the photo which I had to enlarge, so I hope it’s clear enough on your screens.

I was on hold to the doc’s office waiting to confirm some sort of exam and while waiting on hold I was thumbing through the morning paper when I spotted this story.  So I hung up and found it on line so I could post it early. Neat Stuff!


`Blue moon’ luck leads to historic find in ice

Monday, January 04, 2010


Australian explorers yesterday credited record low tides and a blue moon for the “one-in-a-million” discovery in Antarctica of one of the world’s first aeroplanes, found buried in ice.
The monoplane, which was the first aircraft off the Vickers factory production line in Britain just eight years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, was taken to Antarctica by Australian explorer Douglas Mawson in 1911.

Mawson hoped to stage the first human flight over the Antarctic ice cap, but his dreams were dashed when the pilot who accompanied the craft from London crashed it during a demonstration flight.

“He’d had a rather long night at the local [armed forces] club in Adelaide the night before and apparently was not in the best of shape when he first flew it,” Australian conservationist David Jensen said.

Its wings were so badly damaged they had to be removed, but Mawson decided he wanted to take the Vickers to the Antarctic to use as an “air tractor” to pull his sledges with a specially made tail rudder and skis, Jensen said.

However, its engine seized up and Mawson abandoned the Vickers at Cape Denison in 1914, said Jensen, chairman of the government-backed Mawson’s Hut Foundation charity. The explorer paid a brief visit to the craft when he returned on a two-year territory-staking mission in 1929, before giving it up for good in 1931.

Three successive teams of conservationists and scientists from the Mawson’s Huts Foundation searched for the fusela
ge, which was last sighted almost totally buried in ice in 1975.

But it was the combination of historically low tides, prompted by a blue moon - the second full moon in a calendar month - and unprecedented melting of the ice that led to its chance discovery on New Year’s Day, Jensen said.

“It was probably one chance in a million that these conditions allowed us to spot it,” he said.

“One of our heritage carpenters was just wandering along the edge of the harbor and he by chance spotted the piece of metal amongst the rocks.”

“You talk about once in a blue moon, well it was so true.”

Team leader Tony Stewart said: “Luck has been on our side, and it’s a great episode in the history of Antarctic aviation.”

Had the carpenter failed to spot the relic, which was under “just a couple of centimeters of water” in rising tide conditions, it would have likely been lost forever, he added.

SOURCE

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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 01/04/2010 at 06:02 AM   
Filed Under: • Archeology / AnthropologyHistoryUK •  
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