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Flashback: Remembering Liverpool’s worst air crash, 50 years after tragedy struck Speke
On July 20, 1965, a plane landing at Speke Airport overshot the runway and crashed into a factory killing four people
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BY JAMIE BOWMAN
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Remembering Liverpool’s worst air crash at Thompson and Capper factory in Speke
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Today marks the 50th anniversary of one of the saddest moments in Liverpool Airport’s long history.
On July 20, 1965, at just after 6.17pm, a Cambrian Airways’ Vickers Viscount crashed into a mothball-making factory in Speke. There was slight drizzle, but otherwise good visibility.
The two pilots, Michael Warrington and Peter Kenny, were killed instantly, and two factory supervisors who had stayed late, June Simpson and Elizabeth Farrell, died of smoke inhalation.
If the Vickers Viscount airliner that plunged through the factory roof had been full of people, then 50 or more would have died on board – to say nothing of the 300 or so who had been working at Thompson and Capper’s factory only an hour earlier.
It hardly bears thinking about: it could so easily have been Britain’s worst-ever plane crash.
The aircrew were highly experienced, but overshot the runway, banked sharply and hit the factory. The resulting mushroom cloud and shock waves could be experienced for miles around. Several inquiries failed to establish the cause.
Exactly what happened is easy enough to work out. But why it happened, in the days before black boxes and digital recorders watched over every second of an airliner’s flight, remains, at least officially, a mystery.
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