WRECKAGE OF PLANE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 December 1938, Page 7

WRECKAGE OF PLANE

DISCOVERED BV DIVER NORTH-WEST OF HONOLULU. MAY BE ULM’S MACHINE. . By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright. HONOLULU. December 18. A Filipino fisherman diving to recover his nets found the wreckage of an aeroplane today partly buried in ocean sand 20 feet below the surface 38 miles north-west of Honolulu. It has been identified by the navy as a commercial machine of an old type and will be salvaged tomorrow. The machine is believed possibly to be that of Charles Ulm or one of the three planes which disappeared in the 1927 Dole race. The Australian airman Charles Ulm, with a co-pilot and navigator, Littlejohn and Skilling, left Oakland, California, in an aeroplane Star of Australia on December 3, 1934, for Honolulu on the first stage of a projected flight to Australia via Auckland. The same day it was reported that the flyers had been forced down at an “undetermined spot” in the Pacific Ocean as a result of running out of petrol. An immediate and extended search was instituted by |he United States Navy but the plane was never located. In the Dole Race between San Francisco and Honolulu five lives were lost, including that of one woman, and two more were lost in the search that followed. Four machines set out, the Woolaroo, piloted by Colonel A. Goebel, and navigated by Mr W. V. Davis, winning the prize of 25,000 dollars offered by Mr Jones Dole, “pineapple king” of Honolulu, and the Aloha, with Mr M. Jensen and Mr Paul Schluter aboard, collecting the 10,000-dollar second prize. Neither of the other machines, in one of which was Miss M, Doran, was ever heard of again.