AVIATION/ LOST ANTARCTIC VICKERS FOUND

Remains of the 1st aircraft ever taken to Antarctica, in 1912, have been found by Australian researchers. The Mawson's Huts Foundation had been searching for the plane for 3 summers before stumbling upon metal pieces of it on New Year's Day. "The biggest news of the day is that we've found the air tractor, or at least parts of it!" a team member wrote on the team's blog yesterday, from Cape Denison in Antarctica's Commonwealth Bay. Australian polar explorer and geologist Douglas Mawson led 2 expeditions to Antarctica in the early 1900s. He brought along a single-propeller Vickers plane on the 1st expedition. The wings of the plane, built in 1911, had been damaged in a crash before the expedition, but Mawson hoped to use it as a kind of motorized sled. The 1911-14 Australian Antarctic Expedition used the plane to tow gear onto the ice in preparation for their sledging journeys. But the plane's engine could not withstand the extreme temperatures and it was eventually abandoned. The plane, the 1st from France's Vickers factory, had not been seen since the mid-1970s, when researchers photographed the steel fuselage nearly encompassed in ice. The Mawson Huts Foundation is working to restore Mawson's original wooden huts