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19 June 2013

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Evidence of a hard landing found: Hevilift

Friday, 13 July 2012

VILLAGERS in remote PNG have found pieces of a broken plastic container believed to have been on board the Hevilift helicopter which was carrying three crew members when it disappeared a week ago.

The Bell 206 of Hevilift's fleet. Image courtesy of Hevilift.

The search team, which includes experts from PNG, Australia and local industry players, was given a breakthrough lead on the possible location of the crash site on Wednesday courtesy of a villager who found pieces of plastic from a fly away kit.

Hevilift said the kit was a plastic container that typically held items like oil, rags and grease guns.

“It is obvious that it is part of the missing helicopter as it is consistent with the size and shape of the container we use for the kit and it has what we believe to be the outline of a ‘H’ in blue paint,” Hevilift PNG spokesperson Ian McBeath said.

“We paint the helicopter registration number, in this case HCY, on each container.”

Hevilift said the debris was found by the villager about eight miles from Umasi village on the Purari River where he was searching waterways.

The search team has travelled to that spot and begun investigating upstream.

A different villager later flagged down the search helicopter involved and provided a second piece of plastic from the same fly away kit.

“Regrettably these broken pieces of container would most likely indicate that there has been a hard landing and the aircraft has broken up,” McBeath said.

“Finding these pieces means the search area has narrowed significantly. However we still have a large section of countryside to cover.”

Heavy rain is expected to have flushed out debris from a possible bush-based crash site into rivulets which feed into Gipi Creek and the Purari River it is linked to.

“We now know that the area where we have been searching was the correct one and we can concentrate the ground search teams upstream of the location of where the debris was found, which is five miles from Bawata,” McBeath said.

The mayday call from the missing Bell 206 helicopter came about five minutes after it left InterOil’s Triceratops-2 wellsite in Gulf province at 3.25pm local time on Friday.

Hevilift believes the helicopter was heading to Hou Creek to refuel before returning to the main base at Mount Hagen in Western Highlands.

The missing personnel include Australian 36-year-old maintenance engineer Emmett Fynn and 42-year-old rotary wing pilot Captain Russell Aitken, along with New Zealand-born 49-year-old deputy chief pilot Captain Antony Annan.

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