Ar Ferry DC4 Accident.
With the help of Pprune, I am glad I was able to help you two guys and your friends just a little.
Very sad times when they happened. I rolled into the Operations office door not knowing that there had been an accident, and my humor was not appropriate. I remember the dirty looks very well.
Just to spread the thread a little.
I was also involved in the Stockport accident by default. I left on the above trip to Palma, Majorca where we had a slight problem with a distributor on #4 engine. The seal had allowed oil to get in, and oil and electric don't mix!! We took it off, washed it out with gas and departed for an uneventful flight and it was written up when we got to Manston where they changed the distributor.
Many months later I came in for a flight to be ushered into the Chief pilots office to meet some men from the Accident Investigation Board (AAIB). I was given a very thorough grilling by these guys as they insisted that I had had engine trouble all the way back from Palma. They did not say what they were looking for, and I assumed that they were getting at me for not writing up the distributor wash that we did in Palma?? In the end I got pissed and said "if you tell me what you are looking for I may be able to help, until then", etc. They changed their tone and told me that they had put the Stockport accident down to contaminated fuel. I had then emptied the same fuel truck that the Argonaut had used, so I must have had fuel contamination!! They were deadly serious!!
My replies had destroyed their theory and they had to go back, and start all over. In the end they found that the fuel and crossfeed levers were not all the way in the correct positions, and the fuel had been flowing from the fullest tanks to empty tanks, and not all going to the engines. A factor was the stretch for the F/O to operate the levers, and they never carried a proper Flight Engineer on the Argonaut. Any self respecting Flight Engineer on any of the big Douglas machines knew how to do this as you could balance the fuel quickly after a refueler had screwed up, or you had miscalculated??
Speedbird 48.