Vintage plane missing over Australian bushland The plane's pilot, Des Porter, 68, reportedly built it from parts of a De Havilland plane that crashed almost 60 years ago. Mr Porter, an experienced pilot with more than 3000 landings, was flying with his wife and four other passengers, all of whom are understood to be from Queensland. A de Havilland DH84 Dragon (EPA) "The country is difficult country so we will be looking at the capabilities of the people that we are going to put in there," said a police superintendent, Terry Borland. We need to first establish a point and there's no point us rushing off until we can get ourselves some sort of location to deploy our ground staff. A helicopter rescue service pilot, Andrew Caton, said he was still hopeful those aboard the plane would be rescued. "There is still some hope," he said. [Our] crew spoke to the pilot yesterday afternoon when concerns were initially raised. They got him on the radio while he was still in the air - he was simply a guy working through his options to put the aircraft safely on the ground. When they lost communications with him there might have been a number of reasons for that. Mr Porter was the sole survivor of a plane crash - in the same vintage model - that killed his father and brother in 1954. Aged 11, he was dragged from the wreckage near Brisbane. He subsequently became an avid flying enthusiast and rebuilt the same model plane eight years ago.