[imagesource: Casper Schölly / Facebook]

On June 1, 2002, former South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje left Johannesburg to return home to George.

His original flight had been grounded, and he was the only passenger aboard a Hawker Siddeley HS 748 turboprop aircraft, which crashed into the Outeniqua Mountains northeast of the airport after losing visibility.

It has been reported that the final words audible on the cockpit recording “were those of a pilot presumably swearing, and then an automated instrument warning ‘Pull up, pull up, pull up’ before it lapsed into silence”.

32-year-old Hansie and the two pilots were killed instantly, with the former captain “still strapped into his seat when rescue teams found the wreckage scattered across the frozen mountainside”.

Now, more than 18 years later, George resident Casper Schölly has hiked to the crash scene, detailing the experience in a Facebook post this past Sunday.

You can scroll through all of the 40-plus photos here, but let’s see a few that stand out:

Casper also spoke with CapeTalk’s Refilwe Moloto about the find, saying that he’s an avid explorer who is always looking for caves or other points of interest.

He eventually found GPS coordinates of the crash site online, and set off exploring:

I went up to one of the mountains that overlook the site and tried to see if there was anything I could visibly see, but there is nothing left to see…

As I was leaving and I looked down to take a final picture of the site for reference, and that’s when I saw something that didn’t look like a rock. And I went down…and I saw some of the landing gear. It was unmistakable.

All the artefacts Casper found at the site will be donated to the George museum.

You can listen to his interview in full below:

[sources:facebook&capetalk]