A who made a public appeal for help in a 10 year search for a missing plane in the Canterbury High Country has received hundreds of messages.
Brian Chadwick s Dragonfly-type plane went missing between Christchurch and Milford Sound on 12 February, 1962.
Photo: Edna Bates / SUPPLIED Richard Waugh
In 1962, a Dragonfly-type plane took off on a scenic flight from Christchurch to Milford Sound with five people on board, including a newlywed couple.
Filmmaker Bobby Reeve and his family have been looking for the Dragonfly since 2008, and made the appeal for help in January.
They have received 400 emails, and had the help of a pair of mountaineers who ve photographed the glaciers where the plane is thought to have crashed.
He was, police have now admitted, physically abused by officers once inside the Prince George detachment. That abuse, the RCMP now acknowledges, went unaddressed due to problems with internal investigations and co-operation with external investigations over the years.
However, none of the reports into the incident - the most recent being last week s Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP probe of the incident - ties Willey s death to the conduct of police.
The civil law suit now underway by the Willey family seeks to connect the two.
The RCMP s legal position denies all of the allegations suggesting Willey s death was: a result of their use of conducted energy weapons (CEWs or Tasers) on him; the pulling and dragging of his restrained body through parts of the detachment, including a fall out of the arrest vehicle; the use of a hog-tie leg restraint device; or any other action on their part.
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The Reeve family make their way to the Hopkins Valley. Talking to witnesses and friends of the pilot, Brian Chadwick, they believe they re in the right spot. He would have known roughly whereabouts he was and properly entered the cloud thinking he was high enough to get through the pass and he s been off to one side or the other. When you look at the area up there, it s an area where nobody would go, no-one would just stumble across it. Reeve said the discovery of a woman s boot in the remote location has led them to believe the plane was about 8000 feet up, deep in the permanent snow.