Chapter 7

Headlines

Following his inspection of the scene of the accident Sir Giles Guthrie was interviewed by reporters. The shaken BOAC chairman issued a statement¹ in which he said:

It is a matter of great credit to everyone concerned that there have been so many survivors.

This was the plane’s first flight out – except for a test flight – following a major overhaul.

I shall be conducting my own investigation, apart from that of the Board of Trade. I shall be trying to find out why the fire extinguishers were not working, why the fire warning system was not working, and why the engine caught fire.

The next day the huge task of clearing up the wreckage of the aircraft and the investigations into the reason for the tragedy got underway.

Sir Giles Guthrie’s first priority was to send a personal, handwritten message to Jane Harrison’s father, Alan. In it he said:

It is with a heavy heart I write to offer you my deep sympathy in the tragic loss of your daughter, Barbara, in our 707 accident yesterday. A complete report is not available yet but it would appear that she died trying to save the lives of others. May I add that you are very much in the thoughts of all of us in BOAC, for we believe Barbara was happy in our airline and we know she made many friends here. She will be sadly missed.

While Sir Giles was writing his letter to Alan Harrison, the Queen’s Private Secretary, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Michael Adeane, was sending one to the BOAC chairman in which he said:

The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh were so relieved that a major disaster was averted at Heathrow yesterday. Clearly this was due to the skill and coolness of the pilot and I should be grateful if you would express to Captain Taylor the admiration of Her Majesty and His Royal Highness for an outstanding achievement.

Sir Giles replied:

It will give me much pleasure to make known to Captain Taylor the expression of admiration of Her Majesty and His Royal Highness.

When the cockpit crew had eventually returned to their homes on the evening of 8 April they did so in the knowledge that they would have to return to Heathrow the following day for the enquiries to begin and for the press conference that BOAC had organized. John Hutchinson remembers being embarrassed when he arrived at Heathrow, wearing a red polo necked sweater, and found many of the BOAC staff wearing black ties as a mark of respect to Jane Harrison and the passengers who had died. Because the cockpit and cabin crews had been separated after their escape from the aircraft, John had no idea that anyone had died in the accident until he returned to the airport the following day.

The newspapers on Tuesday 9 April were full of the story of the last flight of Whisky Echo. All other news was relegated to inside pages while the front pages carried dramatic photos of the crippled aircraft and heart rending stories from some of the survivors. The Daily Express headline was ‘121 Alive!’ while the Daily Mirror led with ‘THE MIRACLE From this fiery hell, 121 people got out alive’. The Guardian’s headline was a slightly more subdued, but inaccurate, ‘121 scramble from burning Boeing after crash landing’. After Cliff Taylor’s perfect landing it was an insult to describe it as a ‘crash’.

The evening papers were not to be outdone either. Since the accident had occurred in the late afternoon of 8 April the story was too late for that day but, on 9 April, they had the benefit of being able to quote from the press conference held that afternoon. The Evening Standard had a photo of Cliff Taylor with his dog, Dinah, under the legend ‘Pilot of the blazing Boeing tells what happened in the mid-air drama… “The cookie crumbled in our favour!” ‘ The front page of The Evening News was devoted almost entirely to the story, with photos of the burnt out wreckage of Whisky Echo, stewardess Rosalind Unwin, the entire cockpit crew – Captain Cliff Taylor, with his dog, Dinah, incorrectly identified as ‘Blackie’, pilots Geoff Moss, Francis Kirkland, John Hutchinson and engineer Thomas Hicks – and Mark Wynter’s fiancée, Janeece Corlass, under the headline ‘THE CRASH, BY THE PILOT’. The article quoted Captain Taylor as having said:

Bringing this plane down was a team job. There were five [sic] other people on the flight deck and I just happened to be in command.

I have nothing dramatic to tell. We simply went through all those procedures necessary in just such an emergency.

There was no sudden panic. Everyone kept cool and did all that was required of them to the best of their ability.

That is what averted a disaster – the efficiency of my colleagues and the calmness of the passengers.

All praise in the world is due to the cabin staff. The crew were superb. Great men to be associated with. I am proud of them.

My role was to bring the plane down safely. In that I was lucky. Everything was in my favour. The weather conditions were perfect and everything was done to assist me by the air control staff at London Airport.

The others had the job of organising the evacuation of the passengers from the aircraft. That was the most difficult job of all and where the other members of the crew were at their best.

It is to them, for the way in which they did this, that the real praise should go.

Cliff Taylor had also spoken very briefly about Jane during the press conference, when, close to tears, he said:

The cabin staff were superb. One girl sacrificed her life. What more can I say than that? My colleagues were wonderful in clearing the approach. The control tower was magnificent.

In Melbourne, Australia – Janeece Corlass’s home town – the story was splashed across the front page of The Herald newspaper, with the headline ‘JET PILOT SAVES 121 – Grandfather brings in a blazing 707’. Further down the page was a photo of Mark Wynter and an article entitled ‘Mark vows to be at the church on time’.

The story of Whisky Echo continued to dominate the national and local press for some days. On Wednesday 10 April, The Daily Telegraph featured a story telling how Royal Navy divers had found the missing No. 2 engine. Alongside the article was a photo of Mrs Coretta King in Atlanta, Georgia, at the funeral of her husband, assassinated American civil rights leader, Martin Luther King. Although Dr King had been murdered on 4 April and the reports had been headline news up until 8 April, the tragedy of Whisky Echo relegated even that story to the inside pages of many newspapers until the day of his funeral.

While the nation was learning every detail it could about the accident, many different arrangements were being made as a result of the tragedy.

The Australian migration department, sensitive to the fact that some of the survivors would not want to travel by air again, announced that they would be happy to make alternative arrangements for the families who were going to Australia to live, so that if they preferred they could travel by boat. The Hay family from Warsash near Southampton decided that they would prefer a sea voyage. They were booked on the Oriana but before it was ready to leave the vessel suffered a broken propeller which, they were told, would delay their departure for at least another month. Anxious to put their ordeal behind them and get on with their new lives, they decided that they would not wait for the ship to be repaired and instead opted to fly. Trevor Hay recalled the nervousness they all felt about boarding an aircraft again after what had happened but says that the flight they took had its first transit stop in Amsterdam and, having survived this short flight with no mishaps, they were able to continue their journey in a relatively relaxed manner.

Fourteen year old Trevor had lost his prized collection of Southampton footballers’ autographs in the fire and, when the club heard about it, manager Ted Bates promised: ‘We will see that Trevor gets a new set quickly.’ It was planned that he would go to the football club to fetch the autographs himself but, when the Oriana’s broken propeller meant that the family would have to go by air after all, there was no time for Trevor to get to the club and so he never got his replacement collection.

Fred and Vera Pragnell took no time at all to decide that if they didn’t get on an aircraft very soon they would probably never have the nerve to do so again. They collected their young son Steven, from Ashford hospital where he had spent the night following the accident and, on 9 April boarded another BOAC Boeing 707 flight to Perth with Steven and his sister, Dawn, who was clutching a doll given to her by one of the nursing sisters. With them were several other passengers from Whisky Echo and a reporter, Andrew Fyall, from the Daily Express. He flew with the family as far as their first transit stop, Zurich, from where he filed his story, describing how:

The giant jet, its four Rolls-Royce engines now merely whispering, trundled past the scene of Monday’s crash. Only a blackened, twisted skeleton of an engine remained to mark the spot of heroism and death.

I looked the length of the aircraft. Not a single head had turned to look out of the windows. Some people were staring fixedly ahead, others instinctively turned their bodies away from the view of the wreckage.

…The engines roared into violent life and the plane surged forward. …Suddenly I was aware that something was different about this flight; something was out of place; NEARLY EVERYONE WAS TALKING.

…It was 4.25. Foxtrot Golf lifted off halfway along the runway, surged powerfully, almost lazily, into the air.

It banked to port over the gravel pits where the engine of the B.O.A.C. jetliner plummeted to the ground in flames. Only a few passengers looked out.

Eighteen year old student Maryam Entekhavi had also decided to travel as soon as possible. As she said: ‘I’m all right and I’m not going to let this interfere with my Easter holiday.’

Another passenger not wanting to delay his departure for a minute longer than he had to was the man who had failed to turn up for his court case the day before. When he had clambered out of the wreckage his details had been taken by the BOAC staff who were trying to build up a list of the survivors. He also telephoned his sister, the only one of his family to have a telephone, and told her that he was all right and that he still intended to go to Australia.² Having now become a fugitive the police had been alerted to the fact and, when a policeman at Heathrow spotted his name on the list of survivors and an address in the same northern town from where he had come, he contacted the address and discovered that it was not his home but was that of the travel agent’s office from where he had bought his ticket.³ Becoming very suspicious the police also discovered that he had been booked to take a Qantas flight to Sydney⁴ on 9 April and, as a survivor from the previous day, had been invited to wait for his flight in the VIP lounge. Fifteen minutes before the departure of the flight he was arrested there. He was taken back to his home town by police where he appeared in court, pleading guilty to the charge of indecent assault. The prosecuting counsel, Alan Jacks, said:

His whereabouts became known as a result of the Boeing 707 which crashed while taking off for Australia. [He] was given some publicity in the Press.

Detective Constable Frederick Farley told the court:

There was no real intention of emigrating. He only bought the airline tickets as a direct result of these court proceedings. His wife and his family knew nothing about his desire to go abroad.

The chairwoman of the Bench, Miss E.S. Riley-Lord, told him that she thought he had been under a great strain and added:

You have had an experience that has left you in some degree of shock.⁵

At Heathrow work had begun to move the wreckage of the aircraft to a less visible location. The sight of it did not inspire confidence in any of the airlines using the airport and so the main part of Whisky Echo was lifted off the runway and taken back to the BOAC engineering base where it was placed behind the hangars. Although it could not be seen so easily from the ground it was still very visible to any passengers who looked out of the window whenever their flight took-off or landed over the eastern side of the airport.

Reg Findlay, who worked for BOAC and had witnessed the stricken jet landing on 8 April, took photos while it remained behind the hangars, some of which he has kindly allowed the author to use in this book.

Josephine Pole had just joined BOAC, working in the Number 1 Hangar – Stores Dispatch and had also seen the aircraft land. She recalled that, even from a distance, it was quite clear that the inside of the aircraft was a charred mess.

Robin Johnson, another airline employee who had witnessed the incident, remembered being very concerned about the length of time that the wreckage was left behind the hangar while Colin Smith, who had watched the aircraft land from the roof of BOAC’s Technical Block A, went to see the burnt remains and wished he hadn’t:

After inspecting the wreckage the next day I resolved never to visit another accident unless in the line of duty (and I haven’t).

The morning after the accident, Whisky Echo’s No. 2 engine was found by Royal Navy frogmen, diving in the muddy water of the gravel pit in Thorpe. It had sunk to the bottom of the pit and was stuck in the gravel. According to one of the divers it was ‘like diving into a bowl of custard’. It took the frogmen until late afternoon to free it and bring it to the bank but the ground was so soft around the edge of the pit that they weren’t able to get the engine onto dry land. It was reported in the local newspaper, the Staines and Egham News, that Army and Navy personnel planned to:

…float the engine on inflatable cushions and tow it across the water to more solid ground from where they would be able to winch it onto a lorry.

It eventually took two days to get the engine out of the water and it was then transferred to a BOAC hangar at Heathrow where the low pressure compressor was removed and sent to Rolls-Royce in Derby. The rest of the engine went to the Royal Aircraft Establishment, in Farnborough, Hampshire, where it was stripped by a team from Rolls-Royce.

As well as the Board of Trade enquiry, BOAC conducted a full investigation itself. The airline’s chief engineer, Charles Abell, suggested that perhaps the engine malfunction had been because of a bird strike. He thought it was a possibility if a mechanical breakdown was discounted and said that its recorded 13,000 flying hours meant it was one of the airline’s younger engines. Regarding the similarities with the accident to Whisky Echo the previous year in Honolulu he was also quoted as saying:

All four engines were changed after the previous incident and none of them were the same engines. Since then all the engines in that aircraft and all the other 707s have been modified as a result of that previous incident.

The indications we have got so far are that this is an entirely different type of incident to the one at Honolulu.

The investigations, led by Principal Inspector Norman Head of the Board of Trade and John Boulding, BOAC Inspector of Accidents, would show that, contrary to Charles Abell’s assertion, the causes of both incidents were, in fact, quite similar.

Two days after the accident, on Wednesday 10 April, the number 1 shift of BEA engineering staff, amounting to forty-six men, wrote and signed the following letter. They addressed it to Mr Gordon-Burge, Head of the Air Safety Branch, their own manager Mr McLean, the secretary of the British Airline Pilots Association and Mr M. Barnes, the Member of Parliament for Brentford and Chiswick:

B.O.A.C. Boeing 707 Fire: 8th, April 1968.

As eye-witnesses of the B.O.A.C. 707 fire at London Airport, we the undersigned feel morally compelled to register in the strongest of terms the following complaints against the Airport Fire Fighting Service afforded to the above mentioned aircraft.

1). It seems incomprehensible that only two appliances were immediately available when the aircraft came to a halt, in view of the fact that the aircraft was positively on fire before landing.

2). Inadequacy of equipment available: The aforementioned appliances made minimal impression on the fire, the pressure of their hoses being farcical, and under less tragic circumstances would have been comical.

When C.O.2. was applied to the fire, results looked encouraging, then the appliance ran out of C.O.2. and the blaze took fresh-hold.

Negligible protective clothing. – NO asbestos suits.

3). Doubt as to the disposition and guidance of forces fighting the blaze, e.g. the initial attack was directed at an area near the ‘tail-fin’.

4). Why only one C.O.2. appliance at the blaze initially?

5). Suspect lack of adequate communication and liaison; the aircraft was on fire, not assumed to be.

If it did land on a different runway to the one initially envisaged, is this adequate reason for it to be attended to, by two appliances only?

We wish to state emphatically that we direct no criticism at the firemen, but consider that in 1968, at the busiest Airport in Europe, the equipment at their disposal is flagrantly inadequate to deal with a conflagration of the size encountered on 8.4.68., especially taking into account the fact that aircraft of the ‘Jumbo-Jet’ size are a possibility in the very near-future.

The 707 seems beyond the Airport Fire Service’s capabilities.

It is ironic that two days after the BEA engineers wrote and signed this damning document, another was being written about the same event but in completely different terms. Raymond M. Hill, Chief Engineer and General Manager, and Ethan N. Carter, Fire Prevention Engineer, both of the City of Los Angeles Department of Fire, sent the following letter to the Ministry of Aviation Chief Fire Service Officer in London:

The air crash and fire involving a BOAC Boeing 707, which occurred in your country last week, has aroused an unusual amount of interest among us in the fire service. The actions taken by the crew and your rescue people are indeed commendable.

May we sir, be furnished with a document or report of your findings which will more clearly tell us just what happened? We would like especially to have particulars as to actions taken after the plane came to rest; those effective actions which may be emulated by our crash-rescue crews if a similar incident should occur here.

When the results of the enquiry into the Whisky Echo tragedy were finally published the following year, the role of the emergency services was one of the areas that was covered extensively. The members of the investigation team were so disturbed by the shortcomings they uncovered, that a large section of the final report was devoted to the facilities provided at Heathrow and focused, primarily, on the airport fire service. There is no record of any further correspondence from the Los Angeles Fire Department.

***

Having left St George’s hospital, Mark Wynter spent a very busy few days at the home of his agent, Ian Bevan. Mark had decided that he would fly to Melbourne the following week and, in the meantime, had lots to do. Both his wedding suit and his musical arrangements had been destroyed in the fire and had to be replaced quickly. His tasks were made more difficult by having one of his legs in plaster and needing to use a walking stick to move around. He still intended to fulfil his cabaret engagement in Melbourne and had decided that his wedding would go ahead on 19 April even if he hadn’t managed to get rid of the plaster by then. Ian arranged for a tailor to come to his flat and measure Mark for a new suit, and new wedding rings had to be chosen as the box containing those originally picked had also been lost. This flurry of activity helped to take Mark’s mind off the horror of the accident and he realized how lucky he had been to get through it all relatively unscathed. He says that Ian Bevan was an absolutely wonderful host and he was very well looked after during the week he stayed with him.

When he eventually arrived at Heathrow, complete with new suit and new wedding rings, he was surprised and pleased to find that BOAC had upgraded his ticket to first class. The flight was uneventful and Mark was reunited with his fiancée in Melbourne. His photo appeared on the front page of Melbourne newspaper, The Herald on 17 April showing him having his ‘London made wedding suit fitted by Melbourne tailor, Eugenio Nicolini’. The article continued:

He has been fighting against odds to get to the church on time for his marriage to Melbourne dancer, Janeece Corlass, 24, on Friday.

But now he says he’ll be standing at the altar when his fiancée walks down the aisle at 5 p.m.

‘Few people will know what I’ve been through to get to this wedding’ he said at his hotel today.

Mark, 25, still has a foot in plaster from injuries in the Boeing 707 airliner crash at London Airport 10 days ago.

That same day Mark was astonished to receive a phone call from London. It was from Daily Mirror journalist, Donald Zec, informing him that when the items salvaged from the wreckage of Whisky Echo had been examined and catalogued, it was discovered that two boxes belonging to Mark had been found. One contained his fountain pen, the birthday present from his fan club, while the other had the two wedding rings he had lost. Not only had all three items been found, they were all still intact. Although Mark no longer uses the pen now, he still has it and, when Ian Bevan flew out to Australia the day before Mark and Janeece’s wedding, to be Mark’s best man, he brought with him the two wedding rings which the couple used in their marriage ceremony.

For the Cooper family the nightmare was still not over. At a time when they should have been well on their way to Perth, Brian Cooper was given the task that every father prays he will never have to face; he had to formally identify the body of his little girl.

When Shirley was released from hospital the family went, not to Perth, but back to their family in Southampton to arrange Jacky’s funeral. She was buried in Millbrook cemetery next to her paternal grandmother, Eva, who had died the year before.

Brian and Shirley didn’t know what they should do about going to Australia. They had been looking forward to their new life for such a long time but couldn’t decide if it would be better to remain in England, now that Jacky was no longer with them, or if they should go ahead with the original plan. Eventually they turned to Brian’s father, Thomas, for his advice. He told them that they should stick to their original plan and emigrate, reasoning that they would not feel any better, and life would not be any easier, if they remained in England. They decided that he was right and, two weeks after their ordeal on Whisky Echo, boarded another flight bound for Australia. They managed to get as far as Zurich but had been so traumatized by the accident that they found they could not go any further by air and so left the flight in Switzerland and made their way back to Southampton by train and boat. A sea passage was then arranged for them and they sailed for the port of Fremantle via Las Palmas and Cape Town.

In York during the week following the tragedy, Jane Harrison’s funeral was arranged by her father and sister. It was held in St George’s Catholic Church close to Sue’s home and was attended, not only by Jane’s family and friends, but by representatives of BOAC as well, including the airline’s chairman, Sir Giles Guthrie, Flight Operations Director, Captain Frank Walton, Cabin Crew Manager, Stan Bruce and Jane’s Flight Stewardess, Penny Casson. Sir Giles spoke to Sue after the church service and she remembers that he was extremely upset and close to tears.

Margaret Jessop was still in Rome and was not aware that Jane had died until later so was not at her funeral but her other school friends, Kay Golightly and Sheila Walkington, met up at a nearby public house, along with one of Jane’s former boyfriends, Ian Cartlidge,⁶ and the three went to the church together but did not attend the burial in nearby Fulford cemetery. Kay recalled that, as it was the final week of Lent, according to Roman Catholic tradition, there were no flowers at the funeral. She was upset at not being able to take flowers for Jane and so returned to the cemetery after Easter to put some on her friend’s grave; something she still does to this day.