Hello A30yoyo... great to see and hear more Heston memories and correspondence!!
Another Heston thread I came across searching for 'Heston Airport Bar' was the presence of the USAF 3903 Radar Bomb Scoring Unit.... SAC the USN and the RAF did simulated runs in the area at altitude ....
How did you fair searching for Heston Airport bar?? I have a few very poor pictures and some contemporary descriptions which I am happy to share if you need them?.... likewise do you have any pictures (inside the building especially rare!!) ??
their is also a similar account by a young girl I think on one of the BBC's People at War web projects I think.... has anybody attempted to list all the crashes at Heston in WWII?
I too have read a similar article which referred to a B17. which although never based at Heston i am aware of at lest two that visited. whilst searching for th article (which I still cant find!!) i came across this...
have recently discovered that I started plane spotting at a younger age than I had remembered. About two years ago (2003) I saw an article in a local paper by an aviation artist who had retired from British Airways. He had painted a picture of a Boeing B.17 Flying Fortress bomber. I think it was given that name because it carried so many guns for self-defence. When he put some of his paintings in a Art Show someone asked him, “Did you see the B.17 that crashed at Heston during WWII”. He had not seen it but put a letter in the paper asking for anyone who had seen it to contact him.
I was plane spotting at Heston that day, aged almost twelve. It was 6th September 1943, two days before my twelfth birthday. Heston was the Fairey Aviation Company flight test airfield at that time. Most of the aircraft parts were made in a factory at Hayes and assembled at Heston. .The airfield was the largest in West London and it was from there that Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to talk to Adolf Hitler in 1939. Fighter aircraft for Royal Navy aircraft carriers were made at Heston and these had only one engine. On this particular day I heard a large aircraft with four engines sounding very rough approaching the airfield. I noticed that some of the engines had stopped and the other two did not sound very good and the aircraft was obviously in trouble. It was going to land whether it crashed or not as the engines did not sound as though they were going to run for much longer. The B.17 was just a little above the ground when it went out of sight behind the hangar and I heard a loud thud and just hoped that the crew had escaped. The aircraft was aiming for Heston but landed in a field just outside Heston airfield. An article by one of the crew members says, “During a raid on Stuttgart we were hit by flak (anti-aircraft shells) and attacked by FW 190 fighters after bombs away, losing both starboard engines.
Lt Kney (Captain) ordered “lighten the ship” and we ditched all removeable items. Reaching the English Channel we adopted crash positions in the radio room. The aircraft seemed to be doing OK so Lt Kney opted to attempt a forced landing at RAF Heston.
Upon our approach we lost the third engine, overshooting the runway we lost the fourth engine. We made a gear down landing on waste ground ( the rear gunner says a wheatfield) and came to an abrupt stop,when we hit an anti-glider stake, which embedded itself into our port wing root”.
Local householders came out with tea, sandwiches and cakes, saying , “Well done Yanks” I have since met only two people who saw the crash. One was a Foreman at British Airways and the other I met on a coach when members of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers visited RAF St Athan.
I wrote to Mr Peter Caines and he kindly sent me some most interesting information.
He was able to tell me that the crew had all survived the crash without any injuries. The aircraft had been salvaged and repaired and flew again but was shot down during a raid on Schweinfurt in Germany on 14th October 1943. The crew were very fortunate once again as they all survived as prisoners of war and returned to America when the war ended. Peter Caines also sent me a photo of the crew, two pictures of the aircraft, which was named “Big Moose”, and an article written by the rear gunner and published in a magazine. I was very pleased to know, after 60 years, that the crew had all survived.
Can anyone add anything??
rgds
Colin