The loss of the Aotearoa

Lieutenant John Moncrieff and Captain George Hood got into their Ryan B-1 Brougham plane - called Aotearoa - in Sydney on January 10, 1928, and took off intending to make the first trans-tasman flight to New Zealand.
They were expected to do the 2335 km distance in around 14 hours.
Somewhere between there and here, they vanished.
They were late taking off, but 32 minutes later the officer of the watch on the ship Maunganui heard the engine, although he could not see the plane.
Moncrieff and Hood were planning to head to Farewell Spit.
They were supposed to send out a radio signal tone for five minutes every quarter hour but the schedule was not adhered to.
Twelve hours after they took off, and when they should have been about 320 km off the New Zealand coast, the signals from the plane stopped.
A crowd had gathered at Farewell Spit and as anxiety increased, spotlights were used to light the sky, to no avail.
In Wellington, at the Trentham racecourse where they were expected to land their wives, Laura Hood and Dorothy Moncrieff had waited for hours.
Sightings of the plane began to come in over the next two days. Many claimed to see the lights of the Aotearoa - but in fact it had no lights.
Many also thought it might have made landfall somewhere else. Searches were started with the hope of finding them on land or wreckage at sea. Nothing was found.
The Aotearoa was the first plane to go missing near New Zealand.
John Moncrieff had been born in Scotland in 1899 coming to New Zealand aged 16 training as a motor mechanic before joining the New Zealand Air Force in its early days.
He was rejected for active service flying in World War One on account of his youth, but joined an infantry unit and from there was transferred to the Royal Air Force, with which he served in France. On his return to New Zealand in 1919 he was posted to the Territorial Air Force Reserve, and here the two met.
George Hood was the son of a pioneer Wairarapa settler and was born in Masterton in 1893. He left the farm to serve in the First World War, and returned to New Zealand with only one leg. Despite this he was posted to the Territorial Air Force Reserve where he continued to be keenly interested in aviation.
They are presumed to be lost at sea.
In 1931, the Masterton aerodrome was renamed Hood Aerodrome and there are a number of streets around New Zealand named Moncrieff or Hood.
Photo from the provincial archive of Alberta.​