Manchester Ringway Air Crash,
March 1957.
At 1.46 p,m. on Sunday 17th March 1957, Flight 411, a British European Airways Viscount Discovery aircraft was nearing Ringway Airport, Manchester having flown from Amsterdam. When the plane was about a mile from landing, it made a sudden right turn, at a steep downward angle and the right wing tip hit the ground. The plane disintegrated and smashed in flames into a house on Shadowmoss Road, Wythenshawe.
There were fifteen passengers and five crew on board the aircraft who were killed instantly along with a mother and her baby son who were in the house it has collided with. Three other houses in street were badly damaged and several people inside them were injured.
The Manchester Civil Defence Rescue section was on the scene, eight miles from their headquarters, just twenty minutes after receiving the call for help from the Police. Further CD volunteers arrived throughout the afternoon.
The CD section worked closely with the local Fire Brigade at the scene. The Rescue section’s skills and equipment was particularly useful in moving heavy pieces of the aircraft wreckage and stabilising the damaged buildings so the grim work of recovering all the victims could continue.
A detachment from the Welfare section, a team of four members of the Manchester Women’s Voluntary Service set up a mobile canteen and provided food and refreshment to the workers on the crash site.
During the week that followed the crash, CD Rescue section men assisted in searching the site for buried fragments of the plane, at the request of the Ministry of Civil Aviation. Ten days after the disaster, Rescue teams helped the occupant of one of the adjacent wrecked houses to retrieve furniture and belongings.
Mechanical failure was suspected as the cause of the crash, and in the days following the disaster British European Airways withdrew up to 25 of its fleet of Viscount 701 aircraft "as a precautionary measure", to carry out checks on its flap-operating mechanism. Investigations after the crash discovered that the probable cause of the crash was "metal fatigue in the bottom bolt securing the starboard wing number 2 flap unit. The aileron locked when number 2 flap unit became detached from the wing trailing edge".
For further information, see this BBC "On This Day" Article about this event and the Aviation Safety Network reort on the crash.
Sources:
Wkipedia article on flight 411
This article on the 60th annivesary of the crash in the Manchester Evening News.
"Civil Defence - The Fourth Arm" magazine Vol. 9 No. 6 June 1957.
