New Barrington Tops search site brings renewed hope in the search for missing plane VH-MDX

On the other end of the line was Ken Beck, the Gloucester police sergeant, with news that a Cessna 210 had gone down somewhere over the Barrington Tops.

“I said, where are we going?” Terry recalled.

“Ken said, ‘I don’t know’.”

A 10 day aerial search and an initial ground search by the VRA in the immediate aftermath of the crash failed to find any trace of the plane.

Thirty five years later it’s still unknown where the plane came to rest.

On board the flight that night were five men - pilot Michael Hutchins, 52; Noel Wildash, 42; Rhett Bosler, 33; Philip Pembroke, 43, and senior Sydney Water Police chief Ken Price, 54.

Four of the men had sailed on a yacht to Queensland before enlisting the services of Hutchins to fly them back to Bankstown airport, starting in Proserpine with a fuel stop in Coolangatta.

The flight was going according to plan when events hurriedly began to unravel near Taree.

Numerous searches of varying scale have taken place in the three decades since the plane went missing, focusing on the vast, wild expanses of the Barrington Tops. 

However, Terry is hopeful that a new three-day search, undertaken by the Bushwalkers Wilderness Rescue Squad and kicking off on September 16, will offer a new hope of discovering the missing flight.

Terry’s optimism stems from a report he and a team of consultants put together over six months in 2013, based on national archive records, police reports, radar points flight records and radio transcripts.

Terry worked closely with the NSW Police Rescue and Bomb Squad, who subsequently labelled his report “The Scone Theory”. 

The report identified a number of issues that Terry’s team believe have contributed to the identification of unsuccessful search sites over the last three decades.

These inconsistencies include the conversion to kilometres from statute miles and not nautical miles (which are used in aviation).

Terry’s theory also proposes that, following a delay in clearance to divert via Williamtown and depart from the plane’s original flight plan via Singleton, that pilot Mike Hutchins had gotten confused with the directive frequencies of Singleton (290) and Scone (209), tuning into Scone in error.

Supporting Terry is Sydney Flight Centre’s radar which placed the aircraft on the western side of the Great Dividing Range, north-east of Scone.

Terry believes that, upon making it to the western side of the Barrington Tops, Hutchins had realised his mistake, before attempting to backtrack towards Taree to confirm his location. 

With tailwinds up to 138km/h, crucial navigation tools like the automatic horizon and the direction indicator failing and ice building up on the small single-engine plane’s wings, Terry believes it is on this return trip to the coast that the Cessna went down in the Barrington Tops, west of Gloucester. 

Terry acknowledges his theory is just the latest of a three-decade long list of potential scenarios. 

“My position is only based on the information available,” Terry reasoned. 

“He could have done anything in the air.”

But Terry said that significant issues, such as why the Sydney Flight Centre turned on airport lights east of Singleton when the radar identified VH-MDX’s location near Scone, were unable to be rationalised, and highlighted a lack of understanding by the SFC of the flight’s location and predicament. 

He’s sure about one thing though.

“There would have been chaos in the cabin.”

The September search will take place in the Gloucester Tops, 97km north-north-west of Newcastle in the Barrington Wilderness Area, a significant departure from previous search sites which were further south-east. 

Terry thinks the new site offers the best chance yet of solving the mystery and providing closure to the families of those missing. 

“There’s been a lot of time wasted on past searches. For all the families concerned I hope this search is successful,” he said.