1954 Prestwick air disaster
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The 1954 Prestwick air disaster occurred in the early morning of Christmas Day, 1954. A
British Overseas Airways Corporation British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) was the British state-owned airline created in 1939 by the merger of Imperial Airways and British Airways Ltd. It continued operating overseas services throughout World War II. After the passi ...
Boeing 377 Stratocruiser The Boeing 377 Stratocruiser was a large long-range airliner developed from the C-97 Stratofreighter military transport, itself a derivative of the B-29 Superfortress. The Stratocruiser's first flight was on July 8, 1947. Its design was advanced ...
crashed on landing at
Prestwick Airport Glasgow Prestwick Airport () is an international airport serving the west of Scotland, situated northeast of the town of Prestwick in South Ayrshire and southwest of Glasgow. It is the less busy of the two airports serving the western part of ...
, Scotland; 28 of the 36 on board were killed.


Accident

The Stratocruiser was on a flight from
Heathrow Airport Heathrow Airport (), called ''London Airport'' until 1966 and now known as London Heathrow , is a major international airport in London, England. It is the largest of the six international airports in the London airport system (the others be ...
, England to New York, United States with scheduled stop-overs at
Manchester Airport Manchester Airport is an international airport in Ringway, Manchester, England, south-west of Manchester city centre. In 2019, it was the third busiest airport in the United Kingdom in terms of passenger numbers and the busiest of those n ...
, in Northern England and
Prestwick Airport Glasgow Prestwick Airport () is an international airport serving the west of Scotland, situated northeast of the town of Prestwick in South Ayrshire and southwest of Glasgow. It is the less busy of the two airports serving the western part of ...
in Scotland. Due to the bad weather it was decided to fly directly to Prestwick and the flight was delayed while it waited for a Manchester passenger to be brought to London. The aircraft originally scheduled to operate the flight left Heathrow at 21:43
GMT Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, counted from midnight. At different times in the past, it has been calculated in different ways, including being calculated from noon; as a cons ...
but it returned to London at 22:53 with a mechanical problem, the passengers and crew were moved to another aircraft (''Cathay'') which left for Prestwick at 01:05 on 25 December. Only four of twenty-five passengers were booked onward to New York; the rest were to leave the flight at Prestwick. The eleven crew members were also due to be relieved at Prestwick and be replaced with a new crew. It was 03:30 in driving rain when ''Cathay'' was about to land at Prestwick; it landed short of the runway forcing the port landing gear into the wing causing the aircraft to overturn and burst into flames.


Diamonds

Among the 250 bags of mail cargo was a £900,000 consignment of diamonds for a New York address, a police guard was placed on the crash site and diamonds were still being found at scene a week later. On 5 January it was reported that only 300 diamonds had been found and further searches were to be carried out which included digging up the soil around the crash site. Out of the 40 parcels of diamonds only 90% were recovered.


Aircraft

''RMA Cathay'' was a four-engined Boeing 377-10-28 Stratocruiser airliner, registered ''G-ALSA''. It had been delivered new to BOAC on 12 October 1949. The aircraft was depicted, very briefly, at the beginning of the 1951 film
Home to Danger ''Home to Danger'' is a 1951 British film noir crime film directed by Terence Fisher starring Guy Rolfe, Rona Anderson and Stanley Baker. It was made at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith as a supporting feature. The film's sets were design ...
.


Passengers and crew

Twenty-eight people died including ten women and two children. One of the men killed was the cricketer Kenneth Davidson. Of the eight survivors, seven were members of the flight crew who were thrown from the wreckage as it broke apart.


Investigation and inquiry

It was announced on 3 January 1955 by the Minister of Transport that a public enquiry would be held into the accident. The public inquiry opened at
Ayr Ayr (; sco, Ayr; gd, Inbhir Àir, "Mouth of the River Ayr") is a town situated on the southwest coast of Scotland. It is the administrative centre of the South Ayrshire Subdivisions of Scotland, council area and the historic Shires of Scotlan ...
on 28 March 1955 with questions about the operation of the air brake switch and any possible effect a failure may have caused. On the second day evidence was taken from air traffic controllers who agreed that the aircraft had descended on the runway more rapidly than usual, the inquiry also heard from a pilot of an aircraft that landed before the Stratocruiser about the condition of the airfield and approach lighting. The inquiry reported on 20 July that the accident was caused by an error of judgement by the pilot and contributed to by the First Officer not turning on the landing lights. It concluded that the accident ''was not caused or contributed to by any wrongful act or party and/or mechanical defect in the plane''. The inquiry also made three recommendations: *''While finding that there was nothing in the aircrew's tour of duty to cause undue fatigue, the report urges that BOAC should consider some limitations of hours of duty of an aircrew at an airport'' *It urged that internal communications within the Ministry of Civil Aviation should be investigated. *It also recommended that access points to the aircraft should be better marked and that the use of battery-operated lighting should be considered.


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