Search for Boeing One

BOEING ONE is a relic of aviation history.

Correctly called B&W1 or Bluebill, it is the first airplane designed and build by William Edward Boeing, founder of Seattle's Boeing Company, the world's largest aerospace manufacturer. Boeing and his colleague Conrad Westerfelt designed and built their first two aircraft in 1916 at Lake Union, Seattle, Washington State. They named the two airplanes "Bluebill" and "Mallard" after waterfowl that inhabited the lake and because the aircraft were 'floatplanes', designed to take off and land on water.

In 1918, after they were rejected by the US Navy, Bluebill and Mallard were sold to the New Zealand Flying School and shipped to New Zealand on the freighter Niagra.

In 1924 when the N.Z. Flying School closed, a compelling body of evidence, including a letter written to the Boeing Company in 1959 by pioneer aviator George Bolt, points to the two Boeings having been taken to a military base at North Head, Devonport and placed in a vacant storage tunnel. When the officer in charge decided that the doped fabric and spruce airframes were a fire risk, he ordered the tunnel walled off, and there, the evidence suggests, they remain till this day. The stories of the sealed off underground military complex have since been supported by hundreds of first hand witnesses.

In 1979, English cinematographer and documentary maker, John Earnshaw, decided to follow the stories to see where they led, possibly to the location of Boeing One, the trouble started. Various officials within the departments of Defence and Conservation, driven by their own agenda, scuttled the investigation to find Boeing One, stole Earnshaw's research, sold out his documentary to a rival film company which they aided and abetted in spite of agreements they had with Earnshaw and, so that they could claim any ’booty’ as their own, attempted to invalidate a salvage agreement that the Government has previously awarded Earnshaw in recognition of his work.

There have been a number of searches for the first Boeing. Each of these has been abandoned, scuttled or otherwise terminated in curious circumstances. The first search, prompted by an anniversary celebration of the first airmail flown in New Zealand (in Bluebill), was in 1959. It was left incomplete. A second search was mounted in the late 60s at the inspiration of the Museum of Transport and Technology. This petered out in the early 70s - incomplete. A third search was initiated in the late 1970s by George Bolt’s son, Richard Bolt, then retiring chief of the New Zealand Defence Force. This prompted a search by the NZ Army at Torpedo Bay, North Head in 1980. This search was abandoned incomplete in 1981.

The fourth search for Boeing One was commenced in the early 80s by John Earnshaw and Mallard Productions Ltd. In 1987 Earnshaw and Mallard signed contracts with the New Zealand Government to facilitate excavations to locate and open “hidden” tunnels at North Head. The Government began breaching the terms of these contracts almost immediately they were signed and the search was abandoned in 1989 after a fiasco of irrelevant reconnaissance reports, broken machinery, a lack of adequate support and logistics and the Army deliberately avoiding the search sites specified in the contracts.

The fifth search was supposed to take place in early 1991, but it didn't. In 1990 the contracts the Crown (NZ Government) had signed with Earnshaw and Mallard remained frustrated. The Department of Conservation then, having informed Earnshaw that they were going to renew his license to investigate at North Head, instead, using their statutory control of the search site, engaged a student archaeologist to conduct a new search on their behalf. A “heads of Agreement was drawn up that excluded Earnshaw and Mallard except for filming at the Department’s discretion. However this search never took place.

After meetings involving top level politicians and the intervention of Wells McCurdy, husband of the US Ambassador to NZ and personal friend of the Boeing family, a sixth search involving Earnshaw and Mallard was supposed to take place in 1992. The Department of Conservation drew up a new agreement with Earnshaw and, after bullying him into signing it by throwing him off North Head for “filming without permission” (he didn’t have a camera with him at the time), immediately breached the terms of their own agreement by conspiring with a rival film company that was busy plagiarizing Earnshaw’s work. This search was consequently grounded before it took off. What could loosely be termed a seventh search then meandered on for the next couple of years. However this appeared to be more of an attempt not to let the facts get in the way of a good story; none of the sites specified in the 1987 contracts were every properly investigated and remain uninvestigated to this day.

The original agreements that John Earnshaw signed in good faith with the New Zealand Government were clear and simple, locate and excavate four specified sites and find out what was there. If something was found, film it and produce a documentary; if nothing was found, go away, job well done. Why then did individuals within the New Zealand Government turn it into a farce of incompetence, corruption and egotism that spawned an expensive controversy lasting the thick end of two decades?