Episode
FEATURE: The Disappearance of Flight VH-MDX | Barrington Tops
- Podcast
- Conspiracy Cabal
- Published
- Aug 27, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1197
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://shows.acast.com/conspiracy-cabal/episodes/feature-the-disappearance-of-flight-vh-mdx-barrington-tops
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Summary
Five souls. A sailing trip in the Whitsundays. A charter flight home. And then, nothing. On the evening of 9 August 1981, a Cessna 210 carrying four Sydney workmates and their pilot who were on their way back back from a holiday in the Whitsunday Passage lost contact after flying into adverse weather, with the last known contact placing it over the Barrington Tops. More than four decades on, no trace of the aircraft or its occupants has ever been found, despite extensive searches. This week we go through the last known minutes of VH-MDX. The flight had already refuelled at the Gold Coast and was tracking down the coast toward Sydney when things started going wrong. Just after passing the CRAVN waypoint, the pilot reported severe turbulence and downdrafts, and that his artificial horizon and gyroscopic direction indicator had both failed, the two instruments a pilot needs most when the ground disappears into cloud. Radar had the aircraft roughly 40 kilometres northwest of its planned track, near the Barrington Tops. The pilot then reported ice building on the airframe and difficulty holding altitude. His last transmission, at 7:39pm, put him at 5,000 feet. The instrument failure: why both the artificial horizon and heading indicator dying at once, in cloud, over mountains, at night, is about the worst combination a pilot can face The track that doesn't add up: how a plane on a coastal flight plan ended up dozens of kilometres inland and off course before anyone on the ground knew something was wrong Forty years of searching: satellite imagery, aerial photography, magnetometer sweeps, and even chemical sampling of streams running out of the search area — and still nothing The wreck that refuses to be found: competing theories on where MDX actually went down, why the terr…