As suggested by A30yoyo.... I thought I would start a Heston wartime crashes thread, as there a few interesting ones coming out of the woodwork.
To kick off, here is an account found on th net
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 Fairy 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.
and a slightly different version of the same incident, also googled
Heston Airport was close by and always busy with Flying Fortresses taking off and landing. When Audrey was eight years old she was in her garden, watching a Flying Fortress come in to land. It missed the runway and crashed into the cornfield at the back of their house. Straightaway she dashed out of the garden gate and started to run toward the plane. She had decided to try to rescue the pilot! As she ran a policeman stopped her.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“I’m going to get the pilot out!” Audrey shouted.
“And how old are you?”
“Eight”
“Go on — you’d better get back home. There’s nothing you can do.”
Audrey was bitterly disappointed not to be able to do her brave and daring rescue, but also very worried about the pilot. She found out later that he had been killed in the crash.
Audrey and her friends used to like go to the Airport gate and hang around. The American airmen would often give them some chocolate and chat with them. She wondered then whether the dead pilot had once talked to her or given her some chocolate, and the thought that she might have met him still saddens her now.
Can anyone add anything? were there casualties or not? Where actually did it crash? There was always a local rumour that a B17 had crashed and damaged the house that still stands on the corner of Fern Lane and North Hyde Lane (th ehouse has a distinctive scar in the rendering on the side wall), but I had always dismissed this assuming people were confusing it with the Gaston Riggs Mustang that hit Grange Farm house and would have been a approach from the same direction but slightly to the south.
Can anyone add anything?
Do you know of any other incident in or around Heston??