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Old 17th Jun 2008, 20:48
  #29 (permalink)  
philbky
 
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Kerry Eire
Age: 76
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I was in the area of Mt Canigou last August and wondered exactly where the crash site was. The accident has strong resonances for me, not because of any personal involvement but because, at about the time the aircraft crashed, I was at Manchester Airport watching the Argonaut that crashed the next day at Stockport being loaded for its outward journey.

Next morning I woke to news of the crash in France not realising I was about to escape being involved in the Stockport crash by a matter of less than five minutes.

I ran a hiking club and that Sunday we had booked a coach to take a group of us from Stockport to Edale. We picked up at various locations, the final pick up being at Hopes Carr where the last of our party, joining from Bredbury, were dropped off by the father of one of the girls. We then set off again, turned left at Hillgate and then joined the A6. Approaching Stepping Hill Hospital we were surprised to see no less than six ambulances, sirens blaring, rushing towards Stockport. We thought nothing of it until we reached Edale and someone with a transistor radio heard the news on the Light Programme.

The exact location of the crash was unknown to us until we tried to leave the girls for the father to pick up.

Hopes Carr was full of literally hundreds of spectators, at least two ice cream vans and a hot dog vendor, not to mention TV crews and the press - by this time it was around 19.30 hrs.

When we found out the time of the crash, linked it to the ambulances we had seen and the time we were at Hopes Carr, we worked out that our coach had stopped no more than 12 feet from where the tail of the Argonaut landed and we had departed about three minutes before the crash.

The press made much of the precision of the Captain in putting the aircraft down "on the only patch of greenery in a built up area", totally overlooking the fact that Hopes Carr is a very small ravine, only about as long as the Argonaut, and that the aircraft had just flown over the copious greenery of Vernon Park and the fields below the park.

Unlike in France, there is a memorial at Hopes Carr which goes in someway to make up for the ghoulishness of the local populace who remained in their hundreds until late in the evening.

The two crashes happened a month before my 20th birthday and though I had witnessed the Viscount (G-ALWE) disappear from view followed by a column of smoke at Manchester in 1957 and have unfortunately seen a few accidents since, those two events, with very similar aircraft so close together in time, prompted my interest in airliners to to widen to include a detailed interest in air safety and flight deck procedures - what is now called crew resource management - long before NASA became interested and invented the term.
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