[citation needed] Educated at Leith Academy in Scotland, he emigrated to New Zealand early at the age of 16 and trained as a motor engineer.

Qualifying for his wings after the 1918 Armistice brought an end to the First World War, he resumed his former position as second in charge in a motor garage in Wellington.

[2] George Hood was born on 24 June 1891[citation needed] in Masterton, the principal town of the Wairarapa district in the south-eastern part on the North Island of New Zealand.

In 1925, the Southland Times newspaper announced that Moncrieff was to "attempt a flight from Australia to New Zealand in a four-seater, 450 hp open-sea reconnaissance machine made by William Beardmore and Company".

In May, Charles Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize by flying non-stop 3,600 miles (5,800 km) from New York to Paris in a single-engined Ryan monoplane;[4] in June, lieutenants Lester J. Maitland and Albert Hergenberger flew 2,400 miles (3,900 km) from Oakland, California to Honolulu, Hawaii in a three-engined Fokker C-2 named "Bird of Paradise".

[5] Then, in October, Captain Dieudonne Costes and Lieutenant Commander Joseph Le Brix flew 2,125 miles (3,420 km) across the South Atlantic from Senegal to Port Natal in Brazil in a single-engined Breguet XIX.

On gaining some financial backing from an uncle, Moncrieff secured the assistance of Captain Ivan Kight, a well-known barrister and solicitor from Dannevirke, a rural town in the Tararua District.

[2] Hood, who at the time made a living driving a taxi in Masterton,[8] came into the scheme at a later date, finding generous support from people in Wairarapa.

[2] As the subscription list grew, Kight cabled Ryan Airlines Inc. in California for quotations on an aircraft similar to that used by Lindbergh during his trans-Atlantic flight.

On 2 January, Aotearoa took off for Richmond, near Sydney, piloted by Moncrieff and with Hood, Kight and Aircraftman F. Ward from No 1 Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force on board.

The Australian federal authorities then went further when they announced that they "intended to prevent the carrying of passengers in any machine that was not either a seaplane, a flying boat, or an amphibian on any flight over the sea for a greater distance than 50 miles".

For simplicity, Moncrieff and Hood had planned to fly a rhumb line course, intending to make landfall at Farewell Spit at the western entrance to Cook Strait.

Arrangements for radio contact were for the aircraft to send out a continuous tone for five minutes every quarter of an hour, as the pilots had only a rudimentary knowledge of Morse code.

Excitement mounted in New Zealand during the day, and by early evening an estimated 10,000 people had arrived at Trentham to greet the airmen, including Dorothy Moncrieff and Laura Hood, the aviators' wives.

[10] At 17:22 NZ time, when the aircraft had been in the air for just over 12 hours, and should have been within about 200 mi (320 km) off New Zealand's coast, signals from the Aotearoa ceased abruptly.

Some of the most apparently reliable sightings could be interpreted as the Aotearoa making landfall north of the intended track near Cape Egmont, tracking along the Southern Taranaki coast, and then cutting across the South Taranaki Bight to the coast near Paekākāriki, intending to round Cape Terawhiti and fly up Wellington Harbour to the Hutt Valley.

A chance sighting of what may have been plane wreckage in dense bush near Tōtaranui in what is now Abel Tasman National Park by youths in the 1960s led to a full-scale search of the area in 2013.