Relic Of Antarctica's First Plane Found On Ice-Edge

You know that “joke” is only funny about the first 4000 times you hear it.
Call me touchy if you will, but does it really need to be added to every single thread on the forum?

Don’t see why not…..

Have a nice day!

Scotty

Surprised nobody has asked the age-old question…

…. when will it be at Legends??? :rolleyes:

Kind Regards,
Scotty

You know that “joke” is only funny about the first 4000 times you hear it.
Call me touchy if you will, but does it really need to be added to every single thread on the forum?

Surprising…

Surprised nobody has asked the age-old question…

…. when will it be at Legends??? :rolleyes:

Kind Regards,
Scotty

To expand on the above posts: my colleague, Dr Tony Stewart and I (both of us are doctors on the MHF expeditions), have been with the Mawsons Huts Foundation looking for Mawsons Air Tractor at Cape Denison Antarctica for the past two years (2009 and 2010 seasons). In 2010 we used a number of methods to locate the fuselage, but were unable to dig for it because of a blizzard.

There is another Mawsons Huts Foundation expedition going south this year 2011, which will dig for the fuselage – and hopefully find it!

Dr Chris Henderson

Chris,

Aviation enthusiasts and historians across Australia are wishing you luck in re-discovering and recovering this important Antartic / Polar Explorer / and Aviation heritage object, most would hope it can be located and brought back to Australia for preservation and display.

Has there been any consideration of a suitable and eventual public display location?

One obvious option would be the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, but a second and very appropriate location would be at Point Cook where all of the RAAF Antartic Flights departed from and where the Supermarine Walrus wrecked during the 1947 RAAF Antarctic Flight and recovered from Heard Island is now displayed?

While the Vickers/Mawson Tractor is NOT a relic of the RAAF, its relationship with aviation and the antartic exploration makes it a suitable display next to the Walrus? to further tell the story of the Antartic “flight”?

Regards

Mark Pilkington

Correct link

Mawsons Air Tractor no 1 or no 2?

Mawson bought the second of Vickers REP monoplanes. The first one crashed and was a write off. Vickers did not want this to be publicised, so they re-badged No2 as No1. Mawsons Aeroplane has been called Vickers No1 ever since.

The story of the monoplane before it went to Antarctica, and the story of our search, was presented at a conference called Antarctic Visions in Hobart in July 2010.

I intend to edit videos of these talks and put them online, along with all the information we have about Mawsons Air Tractor.

Mawsons Air Tractor

To expand on the above posts: my colleague, Dr Tony Stewart and I (both of us are doctors on the MHF expeditions), have been with the Mawsons Huts Foundation looking for Mawsons Air Tractor at Cape Denison Antarctica for the past two years (2009 and 2010 seasons). In 2010 we used a number of methods to locate the fuselage, but were unable to dig for it because of a blizzard.

We think we have found the location of the fuselage (there was a lot of media interest – above – in some fragments of the tail found in Jan 2010, but these were cut off the fuselage and are not what we are looking for, which is the main fuselage).

My account of the story so far, with some interesting diagrams of the data we obtained, was published online at the Australian Antarctic Division:

http://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-a…ns-air-tractor

There is another Mawsons Huts Foundation expedition going south this year 2011, which will dig for the fuselage – and hopefully find it!

Dr Chris Henderson

.

Relic of Antarctica’s first plane found on ice-edge
Pauline Askin
CAPE DENISON, Antarctica
Fri Jan 1, 2010 10:49pm ESTRelated NewsAntarctic expeditioners to have a truly white Christmas
Thu, Dec 24 2009
Antarctic researchers need solid sun block: study
Mon, Dec 21 2009CAPE DENISON, Antarctica (Reuters) – An Antarctic expedition has found what it believes to be remains of the first aeroplane brought to the frozen continent, on an icy shore near where it was abandoned almost a century ago.

Science

Australia has searched for many years for the old single-propeller Vickers plane at Cape Denison, where the nation’s most famous polar explorer, Douglas Mawson, abandoned it after it proved to be a failure during his 1911-14 expedition.

“Luck has been on our side and it’s been a great episode in the history of Antarctic aviation,” said Dr Tony Stewart, leader of the current expedition, after the chance discovery on New Year’s day.

Another member of the expedition, which is dedicated to restoring Mawson’s original wooden huts at Cape Denison, stumbled on pieces of rusted metal tubing among ice-encrusted rocks on the shore of Commonwealth Bay at an especially low tide. They match structural iron tubing from the single-winged plane’s fuselage.

Mawson’s dream of staging the first human flight over the Antarctic ice cap, less than a decade after the Wright brothers made the first powered flight, was shattered even before his expedition sailed for the Antarctic from Australia in late 1911.

The plane crashed in a demonstration flight in October that year, weeks before Mawson was due to set sail. No one was hurt, but the wings were damaged. With no time for repairs, Mawson removed the wings and took the rest of the plane, aiming to use it as a flightless “air tractor” to haul equipment across the ice.

Even as a tractor, with its wheels replaced by sled-runners, the Vickers was a failure. Its engine seized up in the cold.

The Mawson’s Huts Foundation, an officially backed charity that funds the conservation work on site, believes the plane became entombed in ice after it was abandoned and then inched its way toward the sea with the glacial ice over the last 100 years

“It’s been an exciting search. Friday was possibly the only day in several years when the rocks were sufficiently exposed and the tide was low enough and we were here to see it,” Stewart said.

(Writing by Mark Bendeich; Editing by Jerry Norton)

Here is the Vickers REP (probably in the UK), “complete”, before it crashed when flown by Watkins in South Australia.

1 R.E.P. 60 HP five-cylinder air-cooled semi-radial engine The very first airplane to be built by Vickers, this was a license-built French machine, designed by Robert Esnault-Pelterie. The fuselage was built in France while the wings were made in England. After being tested at Vickers’ new airfield at Joyce Green, Dartford, and then at Brooklands, it was crated and shipped to Australia for use by the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. However, the wings were damaged beyond repair on October 5, 1911, during a practice flight at Cheltenham Racecourse, Adelaide, Australia, before the expedition left for the Antarctic. Minus its wings, the machine was converted into an air-tractor, and taken south, but it did not fly in the Antarctic. The first tests of the machine as an air-tractor were made on November 15, 1912. After a short trial trip on November 20, 1912, the vehicle made a successful depot-laying trip with a load of 700 pounds on December 2, 1912. At 3 PM on December 3rd, three men and the air-tractor left the expedition’s base at Commonwealth Bay on a major trip. On December 4, 1912, while towing four sledges loaded with fuel and supplies, several of the pistons seized and the engine broke down. The air-tractor was left at this point, about ten miles from the base. Later another party of men recovered the air-tractor, which was taken back to Commonwealth Bay and abandoned there.

Here is the Vickers #1 being used as the tractor sledge in Antartica.

Its rudder was found intact encased in ice in the workshop of Mawson’s base, and apparantly was photographed near the huts in 1978, but it appears from the media report that the abandoned fuselage has shifted in the ice flow to the edge of the flow and sea, and now apparantly nothing more than a debris of tubes?.

Regards

Mark Pilkington

I believe it was abandoned by the Mawson Expedition before the Great War, it never flew in Antarctica but converted to tow sledges. Haven’t got the revelant book to hand today.

See here

Al