ASN Aircraft accident Handley Page Hastings NZ5804 Darwin RAAF Station, NT (DRW)
This states that power was lost on three of the four engines. The source for that is this page:
Hastings Bangs and Prangs and Splashes and Crashes
From that page:
09/09/1955 NZ5804 RNZAF written off on take off from RAAF Darwin Australia, all 25 on board survived.
Lin M Hall has sent this in from Queensland, Australia, my thanks to Lin for allowing me to add this piece on 11th August 2012:
The aircraft was taking off from Darwin on a regular flight to RAF Changi at the time. The pilot blamed a flock of birds for the accident in which at least one engine was said to have lost power. The aircraft broke through the Darwin city's water main, pushed the railway line off the causeway on which it lay and ended up straddling the main (only) road connecting the city to the rest of Australia.
I was a trainee engine mechanic at the time of the accident and did not get any more about the issues until I was on a fitters course in 1958. Air New Zealand was, then, the overhaul contractor for Herc 735 and 737 engines. The RNZAF was going through a long period of troubles with both of the engines. The AirNZ training staff engineer told us that the engines from this crash did not exhibit the expected intake-full of bird debris and they thought it may have been pilot-induced closed throttle. I have no idea what the SOR said about the accident.
Your article also mentions "gulping" and "coring". for those engines. In case you didn't know gulping is where the engine's scavenge-venting system (crankcase breathing system if you like) became pressurised - no reason was ever found - and the breather would spew the oil out into the atmosphere. Until it either fixed itself or ran out of oil. This happened on both Hastings and Bristol Freighter. Coring(1) is where the oil preheating box (a cylindrical device within the oil tank) malfunctioned in that it failed to preheat the rest of the tank's cold oil and the few gallons of oil in the preheater became overheated because it was too little an amount to cool properly. The proper purpose for the device is to allow quick start-up heating of (some) cold oil and a slow introduction of the remainder into the lubricating stream as the whole tankfull warmed up and could join the regular flow through the metering slots in the bottom of the preheater. Coring(2) is where the oil coolers get too cold (during cruise) and the flow through the coolers is disrupted by congealed oil. This can lead to overheating engine oil and engine failure if the aircraft is forced to climb to a higher altitude or on the application of power during descent and approach to landing.
In RNZAF service we used certain transit points to apply or remove shrouds from the front-centre of the oil coolers. For example Darwin was a remove shrouds going northward and install going south. Both Hastings and Freighters suffered from inadequate design of the oil cooling system and inability to operate in both tropics and temperate zones without auxiliary management devices. You can guess that the shrouds, four per aircraft, were carried in the engineer's box of goodies, for each aircraft, and there was no Sec/Ref numbers for them!
Thanks for your web site. It will be useful forever.
Regards
Lin
Hope this helps