Mike Hart

Nev

I was the ATS officer on the Sydney Sector (FIS 5) who had the misfortune
to be on duty when these events occurred. It was one of the worst
nights of my life. I later resigned from Air Services or the CAA as it
was then, to pursue a career elsewhere. I later became a QFI with 1 BFTS
RAAF Tamworth and an ATO and C&T Captain with Surveillance
Australia (Coastwatch). I spent the last few years of my working life as
the Industry Complaints Commissioner for CASA. I am now retired.

After nearly thirty years I have finally managed to bring myself to listen to
the audio tape of the night MDX went missing you provided on your blog
site. In my view the tape is out of sequence and the last bit should be
at  the front and the middle towards the end and therefore the tape is
not a reliable record of the events but merely pieces of the transcript.

FYI
I was never interviewed by anybody, either from the then  BASI or Air
Services Australia, nothing has changed my view in all this time that
the aircraft had had a vacuum pump failure and that subsequently the
pilot lost of control of the aircraft. I  have personally  had two such
incidents in my flying career which required full instrument approaches
on a limited panel, each time the loss of the pumps was insidious and
not easily detectable except for the fact that I was on instruments both
times and only a constant and proper IF scan alerted me early to the
fact that the AI did not agree with the rest of the instruments a
rigorous adherence to the basic adage Attitude Plus Power=Performance. I
do not blame the pilot in anyway, he was presented with a set of
circumstances which were beyond him at the time in an aeroplane that has
had more than its share of such failures which nobody really trained
for or took seriously. I can say that of the hundreds of pilots I
subsequently taught, trained and tested I made such all of them could
handle a limited panel and then some!

It was a very tragic accident and merely reinforced my professional view
that NGTVFR was merely a rating that allowed you to end up sometime in
an environment where you were going to come to grief.

Regards

Mike Hart

Nev

Thank you for responding. You may like to know that I was also rostered on
the same sector the next day when the search got underway in full with
daylight, from memory I think there were 22 aircraft including
helicopters involved, I remember afterwards being kept so busy as it
stopped one thinking about the events of the night before. They (the
search aircraft) found a few older wrecks but never MDX or any
indication of the crash site. My gut feeling at the time was that MDX
may have actually gone into Chichester Dam, I do recall that a small oil
slick was seen on the lake but this was discounted by searchers at the
time. It would be interesting if at some time somebody could do a sonar
run on the lake. There were it turned out quite a number of older wrecks
around the area north and east of Barrington Tops and these were
repeatedly found over and over again during the search. I always have
felt for the families and relatives involved as they have never had
satisfactory closure on this tragedy.

The search area problem from my perspective was that the winds and weather
on the night were quite mixed at or about 10,000 ft. they were very
strong westerlies of about 70 knots which would have produced quite
severe standing wave turbulence on the lee side or the coastal  ranges
there which I think was the final straw for the pilot as he tried to
climb out of the cloud he was in, the pilot reported to me that his ADF
and I think DG were spinning around, which is not related to the
pneumatic system issues but to me as an experienced pilot indicative
that the aircraft was probably actually in a spin at that point which
would have given him virtually a vertical trajectory from the position
at that time with only a little drift from wind.  Whilst we did get a
paint on radar at one stage it is very difficult to determine where the
aircraft may have tracked or been blown given the conditions on the
night.

As a matter of interest I had another Cessna 210 get lost on me when I was
transferred to WA in the Kimberly’s in almost identical circumstances
but I managed to get enough information from him to basically give him
directions and lessons on radio navigation and he eventually landed
safely at Fitzroy Crossing. I was later suspended and counselled for
doing this. I left Air Services shortly afterwards. Management at the
time were more interested in standing procedures and instructions than
safety in my view, you will get hints of that in the MDX tape where I
was instructed to ask the pilot inane or irrelevant questions about
endurance etc. That was the system at the time where there Operational
Control was exercised by a desk jockey (semi-retired or failed
controllers) in Sydney, the same people also ran the search, thankfully
that was later abolished and specialist SAR and Search Centres were
established and AMSAR is now the outcome.

I never liked the 210, it was originally a 4 seat aeroplane with wing
struts when it was first made by Cessna and then was later stretched to 6
seats and the struts removed. The aircraft would have been very heavy
with 6 adults and luggage on board and I really doubt that it was
properly within its centre of gravity limits. This would have made the
aircraft difficult to control in pitch and this meant the aircraft could
be easily overstressed and its turbulence penetration speed was also
very low compared to its cruise speed (about 100 knots versus 150 knots)
there had been numerous accidents where pilots had inadvertently
overstressed the aeroplane and pulled the wings off, so it may well be
that the wings are in one place or several places and the fuselage body
in another and it would be badly compacted either way, so really anybody
looking for the aircraft would probably only see perhaps a wing tip or
wing and a bit of tail.

Best of luck.

Mike Hart

Bendemeer NSW