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aviation

Read more about the article The last flight of Mike Delta X-ray
A Cessna 210. Photo from Wikipedia.

The last flight of Mike Delta X-ray

THE only unsolved aviation mystery in Australia since World War 2, the crash of Cessna 210 Mike Delta X-ray on August 9, 1981, has attracted hordes of searchers and spawned a myriad strange conspiracy stories. In 2005 I joined one of the annual searches for the missing plane, stumbling around the steep gullies and ridges of the Barrington Tops with a group of volunteers and returning wearied but none the wiser. I joined the search because I wanted to write about the crash for The Newcastle Herald, and thought visiting the area where the plane was…

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Read more about the article Newcastle girls helped build bombers

Newcastle girls helped build bombers

Mollie Clewett  was 21 years old and had only been married a year on November 29, 1943 when she started working as a machinist at Newcastle’s Lysaghts plant. It was wartime, and ever since the Japanese submarine bombardment of Newcastle, people in the city were acutely conscious of how much was at stake. Thousands of Hunter men were away fighting, creating a shortage of labour for vital war industries and opening opportunities for young women like Mollie to work in jobs that would have been closed to them just a few years before. Mollie's husband, Dick,…

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Read more about the article Some wartime plane crashes in Newcastle, NSW

Some wartime plane crashes in Newcastle, NSW

When a US Army Douglas C-47A Skytrain aircraft crashed into a stormwater drain at Broadmeadow in World War 2, plenty of people crowded around for a look. Quite a few took photos, despite efforts by authorities to prevent this. The plane had been forced to make an emergency landing at Broadmeadow airstrip because of a severe storm, but it skidded on the wet runway, crashed through a fence and ended up in the drain. Of the 25 men aboard, two were slightly injured. According to newspaper reports, the plane was the seventh in two years to…

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