Raf Sanchez

Originally published in The Times

For nearly a century one of Britain’s earliest aircraft had lain abandoned in the Antarctic ice-scape.

The monoplane — the first aircraft off the Vickers factory production line in 1911, eight years after the first flight by the Wright brothers — was ditched by the Antarctic explorer Sir Douglas Mawson in 1914 and last seen in 1975 almost completely buried in ice.

On New Year’s Day record low tides caused by a blue moon led to its rediscovery.

Mawson took the aircraft from Britain to Australia in the hope of staging the first flight over the Antarctic but the dream, and the Vickers, were shattered when the pilot who accompanied the craft from London crashed during a demonstration flight.

“He’d had a rather long night at the local club in Adelaide the night before and apparently was not in the best of shape when he first flew it,” David Jensen, a conservationist, said.

The Vickers was damaged so badly that its wings had to be removed but Sir Douglas decided to take what was left of the aircraft to the Antarctic anyway. He converted it into an “air tractor” — keeping the propeller and guiding it by using a specially made tail rudder and skis — to pull his sledges while he was exploring.

The engine struggled in the subzero temperature and Sir Douglas was forced to abandon the Vickers in Cape Denison in 1914. He visited it in 1929 before finally giving it up for good in 1931.

The Mawson’s Huts Foundation, a charity backed by the Australian Government, is devoted to maintaining the buildings constructed in the Antarctic by Mawson’s expeditions but has also searched for the air tractor.

Since 1996 three teams of conservationists and scientists have used magnetic imaging equipment, without success, to try to find the fuselage.

On January 1 low tides, prompted by a blue moon, the second full moon in a calendar month, and melting ice led to its discovery.

Mr Jensen, the chairman of the Mawson’s Huts Foundation, said: “It was probably one chance in a million that these conditions just allowed us to spot it.

“One of our heritage carpenters was actually just wandering along the edge of the harbour … and he just by chance spotted the piece of the metal among the rocks. You talk about once in a blue moon. Well, it was so true.”

If the carpenter had failed to spot the relic, which was under “just a couple of centimetres of water” in rising tide conditions it would have likely been lost forever, Mr Jensen said.

The fragments of the fuselage will be taken to Australia at the end of the month.

“The pieces we found are definitely of the air tractor and they can’t be anything else. That’s the last [of a] little part of aviation history,” he said.

Back on the radar

In September 1942 an American P-38 Lightning made an emergency landing on a Welsh beach. The wartime ban on visiting the beach meant no one noticed it disappear in the sand. It was discovered in 2007

An RAF fighter pilot, Ray Holmes, became convinced that a bomber was heading towards Buckingham Palace on September 15, 1940. Because he was out of ammunition he flew his Hawker Hurricane into the aircraft. Both crashed and his aircraft was buried under Buckingham Palace Road until 2004

A “lost squadron” of eight US Air Force aircraft crash landed in Greenland on their way to Britain in July 1942. One of the P-38s, nicknamed Glacier Girl, was dug out of the ice in 1992 and restored

Sources: International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery; Times database