Why has the name Douglas Mawson been in the news recently?
AN ANTARCTIC expedition has found what it believes to be the remains of the first aircraft brought to the continent, on an icy shore near where it was abandoned almost a century ago. Science Australia has searched for the single-propeller Vickers at Cape Denison, where explorer Douglas Mawson abandoned it. Rusted metal tubing found among rocks at Commonwealth Bay at an especially low tide match structural iron tubing from the single-winged plane’s fuselage. The plane crashed in a demonstration flight in October 1911, weeks before Mawson was due to set sail. He removed the wings and took the rest of the plane, aiming to use it as a flightless ”air tractor” to haul equipment across the ice. Even with its wheels replaced by sled-runners, the Vickers was a failure. Its engine seized up in the cold. Sources: http://www.smh.com.au/world/mawsons-plane-found-20100103-lmqh.
Antarctica plane remains ‘found’ A team of Australian conservationists say they have found what they believe to be the remains of the first aeroplane ever taken to Antarctica. Australian explorer Douglas Mawson had the single-propeller Vickers with him on a 1911-12 expedition but it was abandoned because of engine troubles. Brought to the frozen continent without its wings, the plane was used for a time as a kind of motorised sledge. The conservationists are working to restore Mawson’s original wooden huts. The plane had not been seen since the mid-1970s, when researchers photographed the steel fuselage nearly encompassed in ice. After searching for three summers, the Mawson’s Huts Foundation team stumbled upon metal pieces of it on New Year’s Day. “The biggest news of the day is that we’ve found the air tractor, or at least parts of it!” team member Tony Stewart wrote on the team’s blog from Cape Denison in Antarctica’s Commonwealth Bay. The “air tractor”, as the plane was described,
