It was around this time of the year in '69, I think it was mid-afternoon, and it was a very windy day indeed. Normally the JPs always used the main 16/34 (7500 ft) runway, but this south-westerly gale was too much and they moved onto the shorter (4200 ? ft) 04/22 subsidiary. IIRC, the first 200 ft or so was a wartime extension which projected beyond the present taxiway (you may recall a similar arrangement at Thornaby in '54) - but in that case the "stub" was wired-off; this was still available for use, and of course used for landing, but as a take-off involved "back-tracking" out to the end, it was not being used for take-offs that day.
Nevertheless, JP IIIs had been using it all morning without difficulty, taking-off with plenty to spare. Well off to the side, the marshalling point was hard to see from the Tower, so the detail now reported comes entirely from the Runway Controller. I was the Watch Supervisor that afternoon, but as I was in the Approach Room at the time, knew nothing of the accident until it had happened.
It seems that the (solo) pilot had started well enough, the Runway Controller heard nothing unusual in the engine note, and the JP was accelerating slowly, but as it was into the teeth of the gale that was hardly surprising; all the JPs that the R/C had seen taking off since coming on watch that lunchtime had behaved in a similar way.
Coming up to the point where the R/C expected the aircraft to lift-off, the noise suddenly ceased. "Engine Failure", he thought. No problem, the barrier net was up, even if the pilot couldn't stop in time, he would go safely into that.
Then, to his astonishment, full power came on again.
The pilot was trying to take-off after all ! But now the aircraft had slowed, there was not enough runway left. In a last, desperate attempt he managed to haul it off in a semi-stalled condition, wet-henned over the net, got it up to (perhaps) fifty feet. Then it stalled, the left wing dropped, it stall-turned and went straight into a field just beyond the airfield boundary. There was no fire.
At the cease of flying, Approach and I went over to the crash site to see if any clues could be gleaned, but it was all too plain. It had gone in vertically: the whole nose and cockpit area was destroyed back to the firewall. It was not survivable, death must have been instant.
A last, pathetic footnote: a small black-and-white cow, which had been grazing very close by, also lay dead. We could see no sign of injury and concluded that the poor beast had died of fright.
So now we knew
what had happened. But no one could explain
why. The most plausible partial suggestion was that, although his airspeed was building normally, the much slower groundspeed acceleration fooled him into believing that he was losing power. In which case, a decision to abandon take-off was correct (although mistaken).
But that he then made a second attempt to take-off is inexplicable, and must ever remain so (I do not think that the BoI could add much to what was already known).
AFAIK, it was the only "fatal" during my time there.
And speculation is always vain when applied to "inexplicable" flying accidents. The recent MH370 case has many points in common with the AF447 four years before: each happened on a long ocean transit, there was no distress call, the aircraft simply disappeared. But, in the AF447 case, the early find of floating wreckage which had certainly come from the aircraft, provided a 'fix' which enabled, by a miracle of undersea salvage, the recovery of both recorders.
The tale they told could
never have been guessed by even the wildest imagination. And, in the almost impossible event of the true story of MH370 coming to light, the same will probably be true.
Goodnight, everybody,
Danny42C.
Requiescant in Pace.