Qualla: 1937 Airlines of Australia Stinson crash

1937 Airlines of Australia Stinson crash: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit thinboyfatter, CC BY 2.0. Nine days after the airliner vanished, everyone had given up - everyone but a bushman who could not stop looking at the mountains. On 19 February 1937, a Stinson airliner named Brisbane disappeared somewhere between Brisbane and Sydney with seven people aboard. The search planes hunted far to the south, near Newcastle, on the strength of false sightings. But Bernard O'Reilly, who ran a rainforest guesthouse on the Lamington Plateau, kept turning over a simpler idea: that the plane had never crossed the ranges at all, that it lay broken in the green wall of the McPherson Range he could see from his own front door. On 27 February, alone and on foot, he set out to prove it.

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1937 Airlines of Australia Stinson crash: Into Cyclonic Weather

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit thinboyfatter, CC BY 2.0. The Stinson Model A was, in 1936, about as modern as flying got - a three-engined airliner advertised as among the most luxurious operating in America, capable of 165 miles per hour, with retractable undercarriage and variable-pitch propellers. None of it mattered against the wea...

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1937 Airlines of Australia Stinson crash: A Hunch and a Long Walk

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit thinboyfatter, CC BY 2.0. While the official search looked the wrong way, O'Reilly reasoned it out. His own brother had seen the plane heading toward the cloud-shrouded range. If the reported sightings further south were false - and O'Reilly believed they were - then the aircraft must have lacked the heig...

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1937 Airlines of Australia Stinson crash: The Men by the Wreck

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit thinboyfatter, CC BY 2.0. Two survivors had waited nine days by the broken aircraft. Joseph Binstead was unhurt; John Proud had a broken leg. They had kept themselves alive on water carried from a creek a mile off, and they had had nothing to eat. When O'Reilly appeared out of the forest, they asked first...

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1937 Airlines of Australia Stinson crash: Green Mountains

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit thinboyfatter, CC BY 2.0. O'Reilly's walk back to raise the alarm, and the rescue party that carried the survivors out, turned a guesthouse on the Lamington Plateau into a place of national legend. He became a household name almost overnight, and in 1940 he set the whole story down in his book Green Mount...

Image: thinboyfatter | CC BY 2.0