Dear Hugh,
Many thanks for your reply. I have been doing lots of rummaging since I made that first post. Whilst I don't yet have a copy of Graham Warner's book, I am told that it records V6192 crashing near Satima on 4th July 1942 resulting in the deaths of Rusk, Tzamatis & Geyer (all SAAF). The plane was only discovered on 9th Jan 1943. I think this is probably it... however many thanks for your thoughts and no worries about your geography of Kenya.
My guess is that they got caught with not enough lift/power, and ended up flying into the valley there, and it got tighter and they couldn't make it out the top of the valley and nor could they turn as there was no space. Whilst the valley is quite wide there (is 500m wide enough for a Blenheim to turn?), typically July in Kenya, the weather is fairly foul and thick low cloud is common so even if they could have turned. they may not even have been able to see it.
If this is the plane, then it was from 72 O.T.U. (RAF Nanyuki)
On Tuesday last week a group of us got down after a hard three-day trek on Mt. Kenya trying to relocate Z7763 with the plan of collecting the mortal remains which were gathered together by John Romain and the British Army team in 2002. This is so that they could be re-interred at Nanyuki War Cemetery. It was the second trip we had made to try and re-find the plane as it had crashed in thick bamboo and with several coordinates it made for a difficult quest to say the least. When we got to the most likely site, we searched the area for about an hour and failed. We concluded that that was that as we had a deadline to get off the mountain -all rather glum we set off on an elephant trail and 50m down it we literally tripped over some pieces of aluminium littered around the place, and there was our plane -so lucky, but a very good indication of how thick the bush is there and why it took 60 years to find the plane.
We re-found it 74 year 3 months and a day after it had crashed!
Hopefully the ceremony for the re-interrment will happen on 16th July 2017 with reprsentatives of all the deceased's families coming from Australia, New Zealand, USA and Botswana, however there are few hurdles to jump before this can happen -one of which is getting the headstones ready in time and through Kenyan customs.
SABC will be producing a documentary of the trip on a programme called Fokus in ten days or so and will be on Youtube... the commentary will be in Afrikaans, but all the interviews are in English, if you are interested.
The crew of Z7763 were very unlucky -the plane had flown full tilt into the side of a very steep valley -not that there was anything for us to see, but apparently one of the rudder pedals was moulded around the pilots foot, such was the level of impact. And the starboard engine was thrown about 30 meters. Had they been 30ft higher they would have skimmed into some thick bamboo and may have survived.
In terms of Blenheims in Kenya -what is interesting, is that thus far I have 155 Blenheims that I know of that came here of which 113 had accidents. And of those 101 were from 70 O.T.U. (RAF Nakuru). The balance were from RAF Nanyuki which was established for a shorter period, but still a significantly better record. Thier combined record was a plane accident every 5-6 days whilst they were in Kenya -which is one hell of a set of stats. My next task is to do an analysis and see what were the reasons (pilot error, mechanical etc) and see where the problem lay... and then when Warner's book arrives hopefully I can get some comparative stats for other O.T.U.s... and then hopefully it will become clearer why there was such a problem here.
The logic of the powers that be was that Kenya was an excellent place as there was no possibility of enemy aircraft to contend with during training.
What would be very interesting indeed is to see if I can find anything more on 70 & 72 O.T.U. -would anyone have any leads there or further information on either of these OTUs?
Returning to V6192 -the crew of this plane were left on the crash site. I am not sure why, and also I do not know what the RAF protocol was either and that might explain why they were not brought off the mountain. In the meanwhile the Ebo Trust (the South African equivalent of the CWGC and the driving force behind the Z7763 project led by Maj. Gen. Gert Opperman) are interested in this as well and there may be an opportunity to do the same for that crew in Nanyuki. I do not want to jump to conclusions at this stage, as Gen. Opperman will have to look into the case and make sure all the ducks are in a row there before we can move. And if so it will mean we have taken off 7 names out of the 3000 or so off the Alamein memorial.
Many thanks,
Tom