Papa India Staines crash, 40th anniversary

[Sir Morley Steven]

I was 17 when this Trident came down in a field a couple of miles from where I lived and I had nightmares for years afterwards of planes crashing. In fact they didn't stop until I started training to fly!
There is a service starting at 10:00 this morning at the memorial near the site and at a nearby church which has a commemorative stained glass window.
The AAIB report and enquiry make interesting and disturbing reading.

[KNT754G]

SMS and I appear to be about the same age, I remember that very well.

[Timothy]

Me too.

That crash is what really kicked off CRM.

[Dave W]

The AAIB report and enquiry make interesting and disturbing reading.

A tragic event; as Steve says, the AAIB report is well worth reading, and amongst other things contains the seeds of what we know now as CRM. It made a great impression on me when I read it whilst doing my degree in the early 80s, and I've read it a couple of times since with the same effect.

It remains such an important report that the AAIB maintain it on their website to this day.

Edit: Having said that, the PDFs appear to be corrupted. I've emailed the AAIB to that effect.

Edit2: It's a known issue with Chrome, they say.

[Pete S]

Ah the legendary Captain Key:

There's an interesting comment on the BBC website by his daughter Julie Key who was 13 at the time about the long term effects this crash had on her family.

[Vince C]

Wasn't it that crash that led to mandatory CVRs, as they couldn't discover why the droops had been retracted, or which pilot did it?

[Pete S]

CRM was top of the list: I remember reading about all sorts of derogatory comments about Captain Key scrawled on locker doors and (the airline equivalent of ) kneeboards.

I was working at a hospital in London at the time : the local hospital was put on major alert.

For a short time..............

Peter

[Plane spotted]

Hi All,

I have registered to make a bit of information public and for discussion.

This is perhaps the only place where this information might be read or acknowledged

Here is what I sent to the BBC website today.

Hi,

My father known as Bill was one of the first people at the site of the crash. As a trained BOAC - not BEA - aircraft engineer and also on the Ashford Hospital emergency response team he was uniquely qualified to assess what had happened. Also he was the person who removed the pilots from the cockpit - before the firemen against his wishes started to use cutters - hence the fire which destroyed/damaged a lot of the bodies. To his dying day he insisted that the pilot flying the aircraft WAS NOT the captain! He was never called to give evidence (as far as I know) and in fact on the TV discussion subsequently (was that a BBC programme?) he was pulled from the panel and made to sit in the audience.

Ok, it is a long time ago, but I do think there needs to be at least one record that the accident did not happen as commonly reported.

Yours Faithfully

PS. I would love Julia Key to know that it wasn't here father flying that day and I do believe that the moratorium on the with-holding of data for 50 years for this incident rather than 30 years be overturned.

[stevelup]

Edit: Having said that, the PDFs appear to be corrupted. I've emailed the AAIB to that effect.

Edit2: It's a known issue with Chrome, they say.

They worked fine for me (Safari on Mac). It was an interesting read.

In particular, it is interesting how AAIB reports have changed over the years. There was a lot of 'opinion' in that one - something which is completely absent these days where they only report hard facts.

[JoeC]

In particular, it is interesting how AAIB reports have changed over the years. There was a lot of 'opinion' in that one - something which is completely absent these days where they only report hard facts.

It was interesting that the report dealt with the lack of wire-locking on a certain piece of equipment (noted as irrelevant to the accident) with the phrase "we trust it won't happen again". All very chummy and apparently old fashioned, yet they also commented on the lack of official welcome for new pilots when joining the line which seemed very perceptive and progressive. Sad and thought-provoking read.

[peterh337]

AAIB reports have often contained silly obviously prejudiced opinions when the subject aircraft was N-reg.

They also seem to occassionally leave out what should have been really obvious lines of investigation from which people might learn something, like e.g. an accident in which the camshaft had been severely stripped of metal, and no mention of whether the oil filters had been cut open during preceeding servicing. I would not be suprised if a lawyer of behalf of the maintenance co. warned them off, because cutting open oil filters is not exactly mandatory so if they implied a criticism...

[Dave W]

In particular, it is interesting how AAIB reports have changed over the years. There was a lot of 'opinion' in that one - something which is completely absent these days where they only report hard facts.

Be careful about drawing too many conclusions about contemporary AIB practice from that particular report, as it wasn't really one of theirs at all - it is a Report of a Public Enquiry, rather than an Accident Investigation Branch formal report per se.

This was most unusual, and was due to the acute public and political interest in the accident.

[UV]

as it wasn't really one of theirs at all - it is a Report of a Public Enquiry, rather than an Accident Investigation Branch formal report per se.

And, if I'm not mistaken, wansn't word at the time..."never again"?

[Cub]

AAIB reports have often contained silly obviously prejudiced opinions when the subject ...

Is it just me but is it not poor form and particularly disrespectful to all the people that died in the accident to hijack the thread with the grinding of ones own axe?

[Flyin'Dutch']

I thought it was a comment on the AAIB reporting style and its changes over the years; nothing more or less.

Reading the report it is without doubt that things have changed a lot over the past 40 years both in Airline SOPs, CRMs, Technical stuff, attitudes, awareness, medical certification etc and to have a window into how things were is very interesting; humbling to realise that it was only such a short while ago that we knew so little. I suspect that in our dotage we will realise once again how little we knew at this very moment.

One of the most remarkable changes in attitudes/knowledge has been that back then the search was very much for 'who or what particular issue' caused the crash. We now know that accidents happen when the holes in the Swiss cheese have stacked up wrongly.