VH-MDX was flying five men home to Sydney after they had spent a week sailing a yacht north to Queensland. It left Proserpine in the Whitsundays, stopped to refuel at Coolangatta, and turned inland north of Newcastle to avoid restricted airspace around Williamtown air force base, a course that took it toward the Barrington Tops National Park, a wilderness of Gondwana rainforest and subalpine woodland that some call the Devil's Triangle for its dangers to light planes.
The plane's final minutes survive in radio calls. At 7:18pm pilot Michael Hutchins, 52, reported considerable turbulence and downdraft. Two flight instruments failed by 7:24pm, a third a minute later, and radar showed the plane well off course by 7:28pm. At 7:34pm Hutchins reported ice freezing onto the plane and dragging it down, and less than a minute later said they thought they had had a cockpit fire but seemed to have resolved it. At 7:38pm came the last exchange: "Mike Delta X-ray. We're losing a hell of a lot … we're down to six and a half." Told the lowest safe altitude in the area was 6,000, Hutchins answered "Five thousand!" and went silent. The flight services officer who took the call left the control room and vomited, in shock.
On the ground, nine-year-old Renae Wilkinson sat on the verandah of the family farmhouse with her father and heard the plane labouring in the darkness. "It was just like that real labouring of the plane," she says. "We only saw it for a minute, if that, and then we lost sight of it."
Also on board were Ken Price, 54, Rhett Bosler, 33, Noel Wildash, 40, and Philip Pembroke, 43, who was newly engaged to Yvonne Pembroke and had just learned she was pregnant. His parting words stayed with her: "He came over and said, 'Don't you have that baby without me'."
For nine days searchers fought through tangled vines, wet rocks and treacherous gullies in the Barrington Tops, which spans about 125,000 hectares. About a dozen aircraft traversed the search area each day. Searchers faced dozens of contradictory eyewitness accounts and had only two final radar fixes to go off. Police suspended the search at dusk on August 18, deciding to return a month later for a body recovery mission in better weather; the next search also found nothing. An inquest in Sydney a year after the crash recorded the coroner’s finding that the occupants “died each or separately on or about August 9, 1981 when the aircraft in which they were travelling crashed into the mountains in the Barrington Tops area”, and that the cause would probably not be known until the wreckage was found.
Theories filled the vacuum: that the men faked their deaths and flew overseas, that they were part of a drug or gold-smuggling operation covered up by corrupt NSW police, that the flight was a secret Cold War mission, or that the plane was abducted by aliens. A belief circulated at the time that the RAAF forced the plane to detour over the Barringtons, which was not the case.
The loss shaped the rest of Yvonne Pembroke's life. Andrew Pembroke, Philip's eldest son, was 18 when the plane vanished and joined the search. Looking down at the canopy, he thought you could hide an aircraft carrier up there, and left believing they were not going to find it. He would like answers but no longer needs them: “It's horrible and tragic, but you have to move on.” Yvonne Pembroke says she has thought about Philip every day. “I describe my life as bittersweet, happy, sad, lucky, unlucky. It's all of those things, with a love child.”
Glenn Horrocks and Glenn Strkalj have spent decades searching targeted sections of the Barrington Tops, most recently in June, and are watching for new technologies that might help. After computer modelling they have narrowed an outermost boundary beyond which they believe it is highly unlikely VH-MDX could have flown, but it covers 9,000 square kilometres of dense jungle. New Zealand pilot Gavin Grimmer also devotes a website to finding lost aircraft. Nine planes have crashed in or around the region since 1945, and 30 people have not survived those flights. “The chance of finding VH-MDX on any one day is not very high,” Horrocks says. “But the only way you're ever going to find it is if you look, and some day someone, somewhere is going to come across it.”