The Stinson Model A was, in 1936, about as modern as flying got - a three-engined airliner advertised as among the most luxurious operating in America, capable of 165 miles per hour, with retractable undercarriage and variable-pitch propellers. None of it mattered against the weather it met. The report out of Sydney had looked merely "a little sticky," but almost at once the aircraft, call sign HH, ran into the edge of a cyclone. South-easterly winds slammed into the southern face of the McPherson Range and rose in violent gusts, building extreme turbulence high into the air - a rare and savage local event. The radios of the era were little help; the pilots had only basic Morse, slow enough that a weather report might crawl out at five words a minute. By 7.30 that Friday evening, the Brisbane was reported missing.

While the official search looked the wrong way, O'Reilly reasoned it out. His own brother had seen the plane heading toward the cloud-shrouded range. If the reported sightings further south were false - and O'Reilly believed they were - then the aircraft must have lacked the height to clear the mountains and gone down somewhere in that tangle of ridges and rainforest. So he walked into it. He hiked into country with no tracks, camping a night on the range, pushing through some of the densest subtropical forest in Australia, navigating by little more than conviction and bushcraft. On the afternoon of 28 February, at about 4:30, he found it: the wreckage, and beside it two men still alive.

Two survivors had waited nine days by the broken aircraft. Joseph Binstead was unhurt; John Proud had a broken leg. They had kept themselves alive on water carried from a creek a mile off, and they had had nothing to eat. When O'Reilly appeared out of the forest, they asked first to shake his hand - and then, with the dazed humour of men who had been to the edge, they wanted to know the cricket scores. But the wreck held grief as well. Both pilots, chief pilot Rex Boyden, forty, and first pilot Beverley Shepherd, twenty-six, had been killed instantly, along with two passengers. And there was a fifth man unaccounted for. James Westray, twenty-five and newly arrived from London, had survived the crash with burns and set off alone the morning after to find help. O'Reilly found his body on the way back down: Westray had fallen on slippery rocks and died of his injuries, within reach of the help he was seeking.

O'Reilly's walk back to raise the alarm, and the rescue party that carried the survivors out, turned a guesthouse on the Lamington Plateau into a place of national legend. He became a household name almost overnight, and in 1940 he set the whole story down in his book Green Mountains, which Australians have read ever since. The crash also forced uncomfortable questions: a coroner pressed for better ground organisation, proper weather reporting along air routes, and full use of radio aids - the unglamorous infrastructure that would, in time, make flying safe. Today a plaque marks the crash site deep in the ranges, a monument to Westray stands at Collins Gap on the border, and a replica Stinson sits outside O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat - reminders of five who died, two who lived, and one man who would not stop looking at the mountains.