The 1938 Jersey Airport disaster occurred at 10:50am on Friday 4 November 1938 when the
Jersey Airways
Jersey Airways was an airline that operated air services to and from the Channel Islands from 1933 until 1947, when it became part of British European Airways.
History
Jersey Airways Limited was formed by Walter Thurgood on 9 December 1933. ...
de Havilland D.H.86
The de Havilland Express, also known as the de Havilland D.H.86, was a four-engined passenger aircraft manufactured by the de Havilland Aircraft Company between 1934 and 1937.
Development
During 1933, talks between the governments of United ...
airliner
An airliner is a type of aircraft for transporting passengers and air cargo. Such aircraft are most often operated by airlines. Although the definition of an airliner can vary from country to country, an airliner is typically defined as an ...
''St Catherine's Bay'' (G-ACZN) crashed in the parish of
Saint Brelade
St. Brelade ( French: ''Saint Brélade'') is one of the twelve parishes of Jersey in the Channel Islands. It is around west of St Helier. Its population was 10,568 as of 2011.
The parish is the second-largest parish by surface area, covering ...
, 500 yards east of
Jersey Airport, killing the pilot and all twelve passengers on board as well as farm hand Edmund Le Cornu, who was working on the ground. In terms of loss of life, it was the worst crash of a rigid aircraft on
British territory to date and the second-worst overall crash of a British rigid aircraft after
the crash of an
Imperial Airways airliner in
Belgium in 1933 (in which 15 people died).
The airliner had just taken off from
Jersey en route to
Southampton. The sky was overcast, with a
cloud base of 120–150 feet. The aircraft had been fully inspected and was not carrying a full load.
The
Air Ministry investigation concluded that the accident was due to
pilot error. The pilot had made a climbing turn into the clouds and inadvertently allowed the aircraft to sideslip when he was still too close to the ground to avert disaster. The aircraft had exploded and several bodies had been thrown up to 40 feet away.
Among the dead were the daughter, son-in-law and baby granddaughter of
surveyor
Surveying or land surveying is the technique, profession, art, and science of determining the terrestrial two-dimensional or three-dimensional positions of points and the distances and angles between them. A land surveying professional is ca ...
and
aerial archaeology pioneer
G. A. Beazeley
George Adam Beazeley DSO (7 July 1870 – 8 May 1961) was a British Army officer, surveyor and one of the fathers of aerial photography in surveying, military reconnaissance and archaeology. He was probably the first person to identify aerial arc ...
.
[Obituary, '' The Times'', 9 November 1938]
Footnotes
References
*"Jersey Air Disaster Inquest", ''
The Times'', 7 November 1938
*"Crash that Caused 14 Deaths 'An Error of Airmanship'", ''
The Times'', 19 April 1939
*''From Sea Eagle to Flamingo: a history of Channel Island Airways'', Neville Doyle, 1991 (Self Publishing Association)
External links
Details on PlaneCrashInfo.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jersey
Jersey Airways accidents and incidents
Aviation accidents and incidents in 1938
Airliner accidents and incidents caused by pilot error
History of Jersey
Aviation in Jersey
Saint Brélade
1938 in Jersey
Aviation accidents and incidents in the Channel Islands
November 1938 events
Disasters in Jersey