On 20 August 1959 a prototype British bomber - a Handley Page Victor B.2 - disappeared during flight trials along with its five crew members. As weeks passed, hope of finding survivors faded and their bodies would never be found. But in the midst of the Cold War the British military needed to know why the plane had crashed. Was it a mechanical fault or some wider flaw with the aircraft’s design?
Some eyewitness accounts had the aircraft hitting the water at high speed off the coast of Wales. More than 40 ships and 4,000 people from the UK would be recruited to help in the salvage mission. Although not widely known at the time, among those taking part were nine fishing trawlers from the Mourne fleet in Northern Ireland - six from Kilkeel and three from Annalong. Their fishing nets would be used to dredge the seabed and recover parts of the plane and key clues around the cause of the crash. The crew toiled at sea for months, often in atrocious weather through a wild winter.
By the end of their mission the Mourne trawlers, backed by other salvage vessels, had carried out more than 12,000 hauls and nearly 600,000 pieces of the missing bomber had been recovered. One of the Kilkeel vessels, Green Pastures, set the record for a single day, netting more than 7,000 fragments of the aircraft. The total catch presented 70% of the plane, which had shattered into thousands of pieces upon impact.
It gave British authorities enough information to be reasonably satisfied about the cause of the accident. It was concluded that only minor changes were needed to resolve the problem that caused the crash, allowing the bomber to enter service in February 1962.
With the salvage mission complete, the Mourne trawler men went back to their day jobs.
That was an interesting article. Thanks for posting it.
I started wondering about what had caused the crash and if any remains of the crew had been found, so I looked for more info and found another article which goes into details of how the investigators pieced together the parts of the plane that the shipping vessels were dredging up in their nets.
I found the details of how investigators pinpointed the cause of the uncontrollable nosedive at high speed, which began with finding the inside of the tubular casing for the pitot tube had been given a too-liberal coat of protective paint.
Such a small thing to have caused such a tragedy.
It took only minor modifications to the way the casing was fixed and locked in place, to ensure that this situation could never occur again.
Sadly, none of the searches of the seabed found any remains of the crew, apart from the co-pilot’s wrist watch, which had stopped at the time the main part of the plane was estimated to have hit the water.
If you’re interested in the technical details of how it happened, I found the article on a subscription site but I was able to read this one article without subscribing.
Pitot tube “irregularities” have caused several plane crashes, including Air France 447 in 2009:
The aircraft suffered temporary inconsistencies between the airspeed measurements—likely resulting from ice crystals obstructing the aircraft’s pitot tubes—which caused the autopilot to disconnect. The crew reacted to the abnormality incorrectly, causing the aircraft to enter an aerodynamic stall from which it did not recover.
