Piece of missing plane now in PE

BY a strange quirk of fate a piece of aircraft wreckage trawled off the bottom of the Indian Ocean at a depth of more than 450m has brought closure to the family of two pilots lost 46 years ago.

Late afternoon on October 16 1969 four South African Air Force (SAAF) Blackburn Buccaneer S 50 supersonic low-level strike aircraft from 24 Squadron took off from Waterkloof Air Base near Pretoria on a routine training flight. Only three returned to base. At 6.45pm, air traffic control at Durban airport made the last contact, a routine radio communication, with the fourth aircraft, Buccaneer 415. On board the Buccaneer were the pilot, Major Stephanus Sebastiaan Odendaal, 31, and the navigator, Major Peter Webb, 28. Odendaal was married with two sons, aged seven and two, while Webb had a wife and three daughters, aged four, two and nine months. “They came at night and told me he was doing night flying and that he was missing – the Air Force looked for him for two weeks. It was a terrible time for me, it was shocking,” Webb’s wife, now Maureen Thompson, said this week from her home in Cape Town. According to police reports, a supersonic aircraft was seen out at sea shortly before 7pm heading in the direction of Amanzimtoti. At the time visibility was bad, with low-lying thunder clouds. Residents at the south coast resort reported seeing an aircraft flying low over the sea and suddenly disappearing into the water, the last sighting. Farmers and holiday-makers who joined in the search said they had seen a ball of fire in the sea off Mtunzini, 40 nautical miles north of Durban, shortly before 7 pm, but they were not believed by the board of inquiry, which speculated that the aircraft could not have been where they said it was. As a result of the perceived threat from the Soviet Union’s fast and effectively armed light cruisers operating in the Atlantic, South Africa decided in 1965 to introduce the R2.25-million Buccaneers, specialised strike aircraft capable of deploying conventional or nuclear weapons. Despite a 12-day search, no trace was found of Buccaneer 415 until February 1973, when a fishing trawler, the Frederick, netted skin plates of the aircraft with the serial number painted on them. “In the 70s, a piece of the plane was found [but] when I phoned the SAAF said no, it wasn’t part of the Buccaneer,” Thompson said. At the end of 2006, the SAAF Museum in PE acquired a Buccaneer simulator which was finally restored to “flying” condition 18 months ago.

“We decided to dedicate the simulator to 415, which went missing on October 16 1969,” SAAF Museum curator Mark Kelbrick said. Quite by coincidence, Kelbrick received a phone call two months later from Rudi Botha, the owner of Viking Fishing in Durban, who said he had the exact location of the Buccaneer wreck. “We were just doing our normal operations outside Durban when the trawler went over an area they don’t normally work,” Botha said. When the nets were hauled up they saw they had pulled up a mud-covered object which they later discovered was the main undercarriage from Buccaneer 415.” The object was pulled aboard the trawler and brought ashore. “The part was then cleansed of the mud and they were able to locate a handengraving on the rim of the wheel which said ‘415 STBD’, which denotes the starboard from Buccaneer 415. “I contacted members of 24 Squadron, showed the photograph and they confirmed it was the main undercarriage,” Kelbrick said. Because the wheel was recovered from very deep water, it was still in a fairly good condition with regard to corrosion, but being made from a magnesium alloy it is very susceptible to corrosion when exposed to air after having being immersed in seawater for so long. The wreckage is now in the process of being rehabilitated so it can be placed on permanent display alongside the simulator. “We’ve coated it in a product called Tectyl, which is wax-based, to preserve it until it goes into the desalination process, which will then clean it out completely. “Then it will be clear-coated to protect it even further,” Kelbrick said. “My sister Shirley, who lives in PE, told me about the wheel – that’s how I knew it was in the museum,” said Thompson, who visited the museum when she was in PE over Christmas. “It’s 46 years. I was just so glad that I had closure. I think it is a good memory for my husband,” she said. Thompson said she had Peter’s uniform and some photographs of Buccaneer 415, which she would donate to the museum.