A combination of TELIKOM’s totally worthless copper wire phone network, a full day of diving on Saturday and a fairly grueling bush walk on Sunday has put me three days behind. I won’t bother to mention that I’ve also got a bad cold. Yes, I’m feeling pretty sorry for myslef. I intended to do a post on Saturday morning but could not, of course, get any connection. We had a full day of diving, so I was too knackered to go into the office where resides my only connection to the world from here on Planet X. Early Sunday morning we headed for Nob Nob to visit the site of a downed P-28 Lightning aircraft. It’s now Monday afternoon and I’m just getting started writing Saturday’s post. I will  catch up. I must  catch up. It’s becoming compulsive, but in a good way.

Anyway, here is Monty Armstrong leading part of the pack of rag-tag hikers up the trail to the crash site:

The highest elevation that we reached was about 400 metres. The crash site is in deep jungle on the side if a precipitous slope at 125 metres. That means that we walked mostly downhill from the highest point, near the spot in the photo above, to the wreckage. The footpath, if that’s what you could call it, was ankle-deep in mud much of the way. I started out the walk barefoot, because I know that I would do better that way. The five hikers were myself, Monty, Greg, Jo, and Tag Tap. I fell a half-dozen times, Monty nearly went down a couple of times, Greg crashed one time spectacularly, but Jo never fell once.

Need I mention that the walk back was about 275 metres uphill, very uphill,  on the same muddy path? I never really got badly winded, but I walk very  slowly.

At the site the jungle is so dense that you can hardly see the sky:

That was the biggest hole that I could find. It can be a spooky place. If you get lost, you could walk right across a trail and not even notice it. Local folk, of course, know every square metre.

So, what’s the big fuss about? Well, it’s about this beautiful but deadly machine:

The image above is from Mark Karvon’s web site where he offers a stunning array of fine art prints.

Here’s Monty surveying the site with his expert Mark I Eyeballs. Monty has torn apart and reassembled more that a few old war birds, including P-38s:

We had a cheap metal detector with us which allowed us to find many more bits and pieces that I have managed to uncover on previous visits to the site.

Here’s Jo providing a bit of eye candy to an otherwise grungy shot of one of the Allison engines:

The far left side of the engine is missing, as is the whole crankcase. You can see the crankshaft, connecting rods, a few of the pistons and the intake flanges.

Here is a shot of the turbocharger:

We searched in vain for anything that had a number on it. Our hope was to find the area where the cockpit smashed in. Without a more sophisticated metal detector and a digging crew, there is not much point in visiting the site again.

There are slightly varying stories of the fate of the pilot. All versions have him bailing out and landing safely, so we’ve never worried about disturbing human remains. Sadly, we can find no evidence that would indicate the serial number of the aircraft. This means that the people of the area will never know the name of the man who they tried to protect from the Japanese soldiers.

A crashed war plane is not the only unsettling thing we found. This millipede was at least 10cm long. They exude a highly toxic fluid which burns skin like acid:

Jo saw a snake cross the path directly in front of her. She didn’t even scream. Light on her feet, doesn’t scream when startled, single – hey guys, are you listening? Oh, did I mention that she’s a yachtie?

Here’s a shot of my GPS resting on the engine:

You’ll probably note that I’ve blurred out the coordinates. Serious investigators are welcome to contact me for more information.

My old buddy, Tag Tap has been with me to this site several times on our bush walks. I doubt if we’ll go back. We’ve shown it to probably every person who has an interest in working so hard to get to a place where all you can see is twisted metal:

However, every time I go here, I think a little bit about my dad. He had nothing to do with airplanes, but he did fight the war here in the place where I now enjoy the fine life. I think about the man who flew this plane. How, with an engine on fire, he popped the canopy and jumped out, hoping that his chute would save him, not daring to think of what faced him if he survived the fall.

And then, he died at the hands of the enemy.

It is a sad place.

A few weeks ago, after a dive, Monty Armstrong (Swami Monty) and I went over to Siar Island  to have a look at a crashed P-38 Lighting on the beach at the west side of the island. If you saw these bits an pieces sticking up out of the ground you might not suspect that they were once part of a mighty warplane:You can read what is known about the wreck at PacificWrecks.com I’ll be sending the URL of this post to them so that they can have some better images of the site.

It was very fortunate to have Monty along. He is an aircraft expert and has actually worked on several P-38s and many other war birds. He explained to me that what we’re looking at here are parts of the fuel bladders which held the high-octane aviation gasoline which powered the P-38′s engines:When exploring, it’s always helpful to have along someone who actually knows what they are looking at.

Here you can see that a tree on the beach has grown around parts of the aircraft:I don’t think that anybody is going to be recovering that bit.

Here is Monty examining the underside of the wreck. According to local reports, the P-38 crashed just off-shore and was dragged up onto the beach by the Japanese soldiers:Monty is apparently digging for gold.

Here’s a wider shot of the wreckage:The holes that you see in the ground are land crab dwellings. Do NOT handle!

Here’s another shot with my manly, manly foot for scale:Isn’t it magnificent?

This is actually my favourite shot of the day:Real people, men and women at war, assembled this machine bolt-by-bolt and sent it off with a real man flying it into battle. So many people, so many, many people  died in the horror of WWII and the spasm of madness that gripped mankind at that time.

If you are a regular reader, you know that images are my thing. This one really grabs me.

I’m planning an expedition soon up to Nob Nob Mountain  to revisit the site of another P-38 crash which nobody seems to claim. Though I’ve reported it several times to several agencies, nobody admits to knowing anything about it. I have a propeller from it in my front yard. With the images that I’ll show you, I hope to establish that it is real and, hopefully, identify the aircraft and pilot.

Stay tuned.

I’ll start today with a couple of images that I got a few nights ago when I was trying to capture lightning in a thunderstorm. Here is an amusing image of a boat tied up at the south side of the compound near the airport. You can see the lights of the airport glowing in the distance and off of the bottoms of the nearby low clouds. The lighting on the boat and the fence and trees is from the main wharf which is at least a half-kilometre away:

The shot took fifteen seconds to expose. You can see a bit of motion blur on the boat, as it was bobbing around in the gentle waves.

This is the only shot of the thunderstorm that showed any lightning. My Canon G9 only allows up to fifteen second exposures. I wish I could get a full minute out of it. There wasn’t enough lightning in this cloud to make more than one or two flashes in fifteen seconds. This was the best shot that I got. I’m going to try again soon:

Strangely, this year has been almost absent of thunderstorms.

Here is a shot of Coconut point in the morning sun. I got this one on the drive into town a couple of days ago:

It’s not a bad sunrise shot, but not as spectacular as some. What is interesting is that I accidentally caught a mob of Flying Foxes returning to town after there night-time raid on the gardens. You might have to click to enlarge to see them.

I got some nice images last Sunday on the way back from Blueblood on Mike Cassell’s boat, Felmara.  Here is a shot into the lowering sun with the Canon G9 set with the Night Snapshot scene setting and the flash forced on: I really enjoy having specific settings on the camera in the form of Scenes. It takes care of most of the adjustments that you need for particular shooting conditions. I could have recreated this shot using manual settings, but I would have to think a lot more. With the G9 I simply had to set the camera on Scenes, choose the Night Snapshot by spinning the wheel until it appeared on the screen, push the flash control until I could see that it was on demand and fire away.

This strange apparition is a lenticular cap on a Cumulonimbus cloud:

The cloud (called a pileus [Latin for cap] – thanks, Steve Goodheart) is rising up so quickly into the upper atmosphere that it is pushing warmer, moister air above it in a sort of shock wave. The warm, moist air can’t get out of the way, so it gets moved up to colder regions and the water in the air condenses into a small lens-shaped cloud that sits on top of the thunderstorm. There was much more of a rainbow effect visible to the naked eye. I couldn’t capture those nuances with the camera.

Though a US$4,000 camera and lens could do a much better job on this very technically demanding shot, for US$400, I’m quite happy with what my Canon G9 gave me:

The problem here is what is called dynamic range. I don’t know what the real numbers are, but I’d guess that there is at least 100,000 times as much light in the sun glowing through the thin cloud layer than there is in the trees in the foreground. The little sensors in point and shoot camera simply cannot handle this difference. So, everything gets compressed into a smaller range.

However, the technical aspects of this shot are not what I’m thinking of now. What I am thinking of is the gift that I got when the opportunity arose. There was a good deal of luck involved. Felmara  was moving at a rapid pace. I was shooting a medium telephoto shot from a bouncing boat. I had maybe a one-tenth of a second window for the shot.

Luck was with me.