A MAPLETON man will lead a trek through the dense rainforest of Papua New Guinea in June to find a World War Two plane crash site which has not been visited for at least 30 years.

Peter Gamgee hopes the Flying Dutchman wreck will be a point of interest for trekkers and help isolated and disadvantaged PNG villages become more sustainable.

Mr Gamgee believes he made it to within a kilometre of the crash site during a reconnaissance mission in January with some of the local villagers.

“It was the first time some of them had been into that part of their own country,” he said.

The C-47 DL Flying Dutchman was a US military transport aircraft which crashed while flying over the Owen Stanley Range on the way from Port Moresby to Pongani on November 10, 1942.

Six of 23 people on board died in the crash but the only eventual survivors were six of eight men who trekked for help.

Villagers found the crash site two months later, a recovery party visited in early 1943, and the wreckage was again located in 1961 during the search for another aircraft crash.

Mr Gamgee, a business consultant and part-time trek leader in PNG, will take a group of up to 20 people back in June for an eight-day trek to try and locate the site, followed by another eight- day trek on the Kapa Kapa trail.

“Both of these are fundraising trips to buy medical supplies and schoolbooks and we’ll be taking them into these remote areas,” he said, Mr Gamgee’s January trek was made with the aim of verifying the crash site but he discovered that village knowledge had become distorted over generations.

He resorted to piecing together information such latitude and longitude, photographs, and descriptions to try and find the wreck during a trek into remote countryside where local guides cut tracks with machetes through the dense rainforest.

“It would take at least 10 minutes to do 50 metres, sometimes longer,” he said.

Mr Gamgee described one day as “the equivalent of two or three days on Kokoda” and recalled a weather change on a mountain top where the temperature dropped from 36 degrees and 98% humidity to a cold and wet 5 degrees

Mr Gamgee believes his party found the approximate position before time dictated they turn back to camp and start walking out the next day.

“On the way back, in one day, we walked what had taken three days on the way in,” Mr Gamgee said.

Before Mr Gamgee left the villagers, he was asked to help two women, one with
a wound which had eaten to the bone of her big toe and the other with a leg infection where dead skin had turned black.

“If I’d been concerned about not finding the wreck, I was called up to treat people in the village and it convinced me of the need to get medical services into the area,” he said

Villagers are attempting to cut an easier track to the crash site area than the route taken in January.

“They may well find it before we get here but if they don’t, we will be getting into a position with more people to look at a wider area,” Mr Gamgee said.

He said the crash site would help draw visitors but believes the difficult terrain and the popularity of other treks, such as Kokoda and the Kapa Kapa, will prevent it from becoming over- commercialised.

“They fellows that are cutting the track know they have the opportunity to open things up for their village. If they were just doing it for the money, this wouldn’t work,” he said.

“They can see the benefits that this will bring.”