He was bearded, covered in scratches and caked in mud, his clothes were ripped by brambles and his feet were bruised, cut and bleeding.

He had lived on grass, berries, thistle, wild lemons and a couple of cobs of corn in the amazing six-day trek.

Six RAAF planes and 20 light planes flew hundreds of kilometres between the Blue Mountains and western NSW and ground parties covered huge areas between Orange and Parkes looking for him but came up with nothing.

But Mr Hazelton and fellow aviator and businessman Dick Smith want to find where the plane had ploughed through the top of trees in low cloud before flipping on its back.

A search by them and a small party last October failed to find the crash site somewhere deep in Kanangra Walls National Park and a second attempt this week again failed.

Mr Hazelton, though, won’t give up and after meeting a former timber cutter in Bathurst yesterday reckoned they would find the site in a third attempt.

“He was there about two weeks after the wrecked plane was taken out and has marked on a map a trig station nearby which we can find,” Mr Hazelton said.

“So I’m confident we’ll find it next time.

“The biggest problem is the whole countryside has changed and all the roads and trees are different to what I remember.”

Mr Smith said he was disappointed nothing had been found but he intended to have another go.

“Max Hazelton is an Australian aviation icon, he’s the only man to survive a crash in the Blue Mountains and then go on to found an airline and I want to find where it happened,” he said.       

In the meantime the book The Hazelton Story has been a top seller in Orange and central west bookshops and has gone into a second print run.

 Launched in March last year by Dick Smith, the coffee table book tells the story of the Hazelton family and its amazing time in aviation that could be compared with our early explorers.