Shackleton training - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

RAF Kinloss was home to the Coastal Command Maritime Operational Training Unit (MOTU). Most of the signallers who had trained with me on course AS39 at Swanton Morley had congregated at Kinloss from stations all over the UK so we had plenty to talk about. Sadly one of our course members at Swanton Morley, Roger Turner, had been killed in an aircraft crash on 20 September 1957 whilst he was on temporary duty at No 2 Air Navigation School, RAF Thorney Island. The aircraft was a Varsity WL 640. (Click here to pop up a short extract from my mini-diary. The flying hours listed were on Vampires at Shawbury where I was temporarily based.)

For most of January and early February 1958 the taxiways and runways at RAF Kinloss were snow and ice covered but it didn’t stop us flying. The RAF knew more about the dangers of ice and snow accumulations on aircraft wings than did the operators of the aircraft carrying the Manchester United football team that crashed on take off at Munich on 06 February 1958 with the loss of 21 lives.

Kinloss was a sad place early in the New Year because two pilots on our course were killed when their Shackleton flew into high ground just south of Kinloss whilst flying night circuits and landings on 10 January 1958.

(Click on either image to pop up a larger version.) It seems amazing now but very early the following morning, a Saturday, I was able to go with a fellow signaller up to the crash site in the hills south of Kinloss to view the scene. We had to leave the car and walk the last mile or so through deep snow in the forest – but we had an unmistakable pointer to the crash site: the sight of the wide gash carved through the forest. We could see that had the aircraft been flying just a few feet higher, it would have missed the trees altogether and the disaster would have never occurred. We struggled on down the slope, through the dense undergrowth, and found what was left of the aircraft, Shackleton T4 VP259. Amazingly, it was completely unguarded and parts of the fuselage were still smouldering. The port wing and everything forward of the wings had been completely destroyed. Engine and airframe parts were scattered all around. Aviation fuel smells still, hours after the crash, permeated the atmosphere and neither of us approached closer to the wreckage than the point where I took my two photographs.

There was an eerie silence in the forest; even the birds were silent. My fellow signaller and I were the only people we saw and I made a couple of exposures on Kodak colour negative film on my cheap 35mm camera. The two photographs were taken from the same spot - I simply turned through 180 degrees. I felt guilty about having taken the photographs; somehow it seemed as though I had intruded. The negatives have not survived but I filed these two prints away in a box that remained unopened in my belongings for almost 50 years.

One of the signallers on board the aircraft, Sergeant Len Birnie, was later awarded the George Cross for gallantly rescuing the Flight Engineer who had been trapped under one of the Shackleton's blazing engines.

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