Recovery Team Uses Sonar To Find Pilot Remains

It's a sad search of the northern coast of New Zealand. There won't be any survivors found. Still, recovery teams are using a boat equipped with sonar to locate the wreckage of an Airfreight New Zealand Convair 580 (file photo, below) flying from Christchurch to Palmerston North.

The aircraft disappeared from radar Friday night near the mouth of the Waikanae River. Pilots Barry Cowley, 57, of Kaiapoi, near Christchurch, and Paul Miller, 50, of Thames, are believed to have been killed in the crash. Residents along the coast reported hearing a plane circling, then a bang, and later the smell of aviation fuel.

Several pieces of the sea-wrecked aircraft washed up on the New Zealand coast Friday night and Saturday. A large piece of fuselage was found in garden at Peka Peka, near Waikanae.

The spokesman said the crew had switched over to the Ohakea air traffic controller at 9.30pm and whatever caused the crash happened soon after that.

A report on the cause of the crash would be six to eight months away.

The missing men's employer said they would not have flown if they had felt conditions were unsafe. "Our pilots know that if they don't feel safe then they don't go up," Freightways Group managing director Dean Bracewell said. He told reporters Cowley was one of Airfreight's most experienced and capable pilots who would have no hesitation in not flying if he was concerned about safety.

Airfreight New Zealand is a subsidiary of Fieldair Holdings, a business in the Freightways Group. It flies five Convair 580 planes to connect overnight airfreight between the North and South Islands.

It's not the first time one of ANZ's has been involved in a fatal accident. A Convair CV-580 cargo plane owned by the company crashed at Auckland airport in 1989, killing all three on board, after it hit an embankment during take-off.

FMI: www.caa.govt.nz