Disappearance of the Star Tiger
| Disappearance of the Star Tiger | |
|---|---|
 A similar Avro Tudor Mark IV B of the BSAA ( Star Olivia ) |
|
| Accident summary | |
| Accident type | uncertain |
| place | Atlantic Ocean |
| date | January 30, 1948 |
| Fatalities | 31 |
| Survivors | 0 |
| Aircraft | |
| Aircraft type |
 Avro 688 Tudor Mark IV
|
| operator |
British South American Airways
|
| Mark |
G-AHNP
|
| Surname | Star tiger |
| Departure airport |
Lisbon Airport , Portugal
|
| Stopover |
Santa Maria Airport , Azores , Portugal
|
| Destination airport |
Kindley Field , Bermuda
|
| Passengers | 25th |
| crew | 6th |
| Lists of aviation accidents | |
The Star Tiger disappeared on January 30, 1948. On that day, a 31-person Avro 688 Tudor Mark IV aircraft of British South American Airways (BSAA) disappeared on a flight from Santa Maria Airport in the Azores to Kindley Field in Bermuda . Since the accident occurred in the area of the so-called Bermuda Triangle, proponents of a related mystery hypothesis describe it as an associated riddle.
plane
The aircraft was an Avro 688 Tudor Mark IV, a version of the Avro Tudor stretched by Avro at the request of British South American Airways and according to the requirements of the airline . The cabin was designed for up to 32 passengers, the cockpit for a five-person crew, consisting of the captain, first officer, flight engineer, navigator and radio operator. The four-engine long - haul aircraft was equipped with four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines.
The pilots of the BSAA were divided about the Avro Tudor. Some, like Captain Geoffrey Womersley, loved it and called it "the best civil airliner in the air". Others said it had an unsound design, such as chief pilot and operations manager Gordon Store, who said the Tudor was “built like a battleship. It was loud, I had no faith in its engines and its flight systems were desperate. The Americans were 50 years ahead of us when it came to developing flight systems. "
The machine, named Star Tiger with the aircraft registration G-AHNP , had the serial number 1349 and had completed its first test flight on November 4, 1947. She was therefore less than three months old at the time of the accident. Since its delivery to British South American Airways, it had completed 11 transatlantic flights and an accumulated operating performance of 575 hours.
Flight history
On the morning of January 28, 1948, the crew and passengers in Lisbon took their seats in the Star Tiger for a flight to the Caribbean. Before the flight started, however, Captain Brian W. McMillan informed all those present that the port-side inner engine needed to be checked again. As a result, all occupants had to leave the plane and took their seats again in the waiting room at the airport.
After another 2½ hours the machine took off. At the airport Santa Maria a scheduled refueling stop was inserted, the 75 minutes will take could. In view of the bad weather, Captain McMillan decided to wait until the next day before continuing the flight.
On the following day, January 29th, the Star Tiger took off despite strong winds to fly the next flight segment to Bermuda. In order to avoid the strongest winds, Captain McMillan decided to climb no higher than 2000 feet (about 610 meters). An Avro Lancastrian piloted by BSAA pilot Frank Griffin had started an hour before the Star Tiger and Griffin had agreed to transmit the weather data to the Star Tiger .
The Star Tiger took off at 3:34 p.m. and got caught in heavy rain and strong winds shortly after takeoff. McMillan slowly caught up with the Lancastrian, which was initially about 200 miles ahead of him. Both machines remained in radio contact with each other and with air traffic control in Bermuda. The first officer aboard the Star Tiger was David Colby, who, like McMillan, had been a highly skilled pilot and once the leader of a Pathfinder Force squadron in the Royal Air Force .
At 1:26 a.m. on January 30, after 10 hours in the air, the Star Tiger was only 150 miles behind the Lancastrian. The navigator of the Lancastrian was able to determine its position using astronavigation . He found that the machine had been displaced 60 miles (approx. 97 kilometers) from its course by the winches . At the same time, the Star Tiger reached her point of no return at this point , from which a return to Santa Maria was no longer possible in view of the remaining flight route and fuel supplies.
At 02:00, the navigator of the Star Tiger , Cyril Ellison, also determined the course deviation and gave Captain McMillan a new course, which however led the machine in the middle of a storm.
At 03:00, Captain Griffin of the Lancastrian reported that his arrival time would be postponed from 03:56 to 05:00. When he tried to contact the Star Tiger shortly afterwards to inform their crew that he was now calling air traffic control in Bermuda, he received no answer. Griffin later stated that he had not heard from the Star Tiger that would indicate the machine was in trouble. He landed his plane at 4:11 a.m. in Bermuda and did not encounter any turbulence, icing, fog or thunderstorms on the flight there.
The merchant ship Troubadour reported seeing a low-flying aircraft with flashing lights halfway between Bermuda and Delaware Bay . If the sighted machine was the Star Tiger , it would have deviated from its course to Bermuda very clearly. The alleged sighting happened around 2 a.m. local time.
Disappear
At 03:04 a.m. radio officer Robert Tuck requested a radio direction finding from Bermuda from the Star Tiger , but the signal was too weak to enable an exact position determination. Eleven minutes later, Tuck repeated the procedure and was able to determine a compass bearing of 72 degrees with a possible deviation of 2 degrees. The air traffic control operator in Bermuda transmitted this value and Tuck confirmed receipt of the radio message. This was the last contact with the Star Tiger. When the operator tried to contact the Star Tiger again at 3:50 a.m., there was no response. He initially suspected that the crew had made direct radio contact with approach control in Bermuda. Upon request, he learned that this was not the case. At 4:05 a.m. he tried to reach the machine again and later again before he called the DETRESFA (Distress Phase) emergency level for an air emergency at 4:40 a.m. Although numerous actors radioed the Star Tiger frequency that day , no one had received an emergency radio message from the machine.
In a press report dated January 30, 1948, it was stated that the machine disappeared 440 miles (approximately 710 kilometers) northeast of Bermuda.
Search operation
The US Air Force at Kindley Field organized a five-day search immediately after the disappearance. During this period, 26 aircraft flew through the search area for a total of 882 hours. Search ships were also involved in the operation. As the weather conditions continued to deteriorate, the search for the Star Tiger finally had to be halted without any results.
On February 1, 1948, the crew of a Boeing B-17 involved in the search sighted several transport boxes and an oil drum 325 miles (approx. 525 km) northwest of Bermuda. It could not be determined whether the flotsam belonged to the missing machine.
context
Proponents of a mystery hypothesis for the area of the so-called Bermuda Triangle describe the accident as an associated puzzle because it occurred there. Since the Star Tiger disappeared according to all findings in a north-westerly to north-easterly direction, a crash can be assumed far outside the Bermuda Triangle.
With the machines Star Tiger, Star Ariel and Star Dust , three machines of the airline British South American Airways, which was taken over by BOAC in 1949, were lost in 1947, 1948 and 1949 . Of the three machines, only the latter was rediscovered after more than 50 years in the Andes. A total of 62 people disappeared on the three flights.
Accident investigation
After the announcement of the disappearance of the Star Tigers , the British Minister for Civil Aviation issued an operating ban for all remaining aircraft of the type Avro Tudor of the BSAA. A few weeks later, the machines were again approved for cargo flights, but had to make another stop on Newfoundland on the route from Santa Maria to Bermuda, which shortened the longest flight section over the sea by 250 miles (approx. 400 km).
Although Sir Roy Dobson, the managing director of Avro and Don Bennett of the BSAA both publicly confirmed that there were no defects in the machine, the minister initiated a legal investigation into the incident. The chairman of the commission of inquiry, Lord Macmillan , was assigned two experts, one of which was an aviation professor from the University of London and an examining captain from British European Airways .
The investigation was held publicly at Church House, Westminster . It opened on April 12, 1948 and lasted 11 days. On August 21, the final report was presented to the Minister of Civil Aviation. The report stressed that the Star Tiger crew were highly experienced. No irregularities could be found in the flight plan that could have explained the accident.
In the conclusion of the investigation report, it was found that, due to the lack of reliable evidence, no reliable statement could be made about the cause of the crash.
Among the victims was Arthur Coningham , a commanding officer of the RAF Second Tactical Air Force during World War II. The New York Times reported, along with the shooting of Mahatma Gandhi and the death of Orville Wright , of the death of Coningham on its front page.
Possible causes of the accident
If the radio on the Star Tiger had failed shortly after 3:15 a.m., the captain and navigator of the machine would have been faced with the task of heading for a small group of islands that stretched from the northeast to the southwest over a length of 22 miles (approx .35 kilometers) and had an area of 20 square miles (approximately 52 square kilometers). The lighting would have been visible from the presumed altitude of the aircraft from a distance of about 30 miles (approx. 48 kilometers). The machine was at this point about 340 miles (about 547 kilometers) away from the islands and had enough jet fuel (Avgas) on board for 3½ hours of flight time. After Captain McMillan had received an exact position, his task to reach the island chain was not difficult, but he was aware of the fact that no alternative airport could be reached - the closest point on the coast of the USA was Cape Hatteras , 580 miles west, which was out of range of the machine. There is no evidence that radio failure or navigational error contributed to the accident.
Since the predictions about the wind conditions were not very reliable, it is conceivable that the machine was hit by a gust and thrown into the sea. Another theory suggests that the pilots may have forgotten that they were flying at an altitude of only 2000 feet instead of the usual 20,000 feet and steered the machine into the sea .
In the event of an engine failure, the machine could have reached Bermuda with two engines without major problems. In this case, the low altitude would have made maneuvering more dangerous. The chosen altitude was much lower than usual; in fact, not a single other BSAA aircraft had flown so low for such a long period of time.
On two previous flights along the same route, crews of the Star Tiger had been forced to switch to Gander in Newfoundland . Just two months earlier, another Tudor IV had landed with less than 100 imp gal (approx. 455 l) of aviation fuel.
The fuel valves for the reserve tanks were located in the passenger compartment. If they weren't activated, a crew member would have to go back to turn them on. It could be that there wasn't enough time to get there due to the low altitude.
consequences
During the investigation into the accident, Bennett suspected that both the Star Tiger and the Star Ariel , which had crashed a year later , were attacked by a notorious WWII saboteur who was seen near the aircraft shortly before the Star Tiger's last take-off Would have crashed. He also alleged that Prime Minister Clement Attlee ordered that all investigations into the two incidents be stopped. According to a recent theory, a loss of gasoline could have contributed to the machine's disappearance.
swell
- Andrew Brookes: Disaster in the Air . Ian Allan Publishing, 1992, ISBN 978-0-7110-2037-5 .
- Vincent Orange: Coningham: a biography of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham . DIANE Publishing, 1992, ISBN 1-4289-9280-4 .
- Susan Ottaway, Ian Ottaway: Fly With the Stars: British South American Airways - The Rise and Controversial Fall of a Long-Haul Trailblazer . Sutton Publishing, 2007, ISBN 978-0-7509-4448-9 .
- The Star Tiger Mystery , Flight report about the disappearance.
- Report of the Court Investigation of the Accident to the Tudor IV Aircraft 'Star Tiger' G-AHNP on the 30th January, 1948 Official Accident Report (PDF)
- Aircraft accident report in the Aviation Safety Network
Individual evidence
- ↑ ABC News: Six Mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle . In: ABC News .
- ↑ Evening Star Washington DC January 30, 1948 Chronicling America Library of Congress
- ^ A Bermuda Dispatch gave the planes loss at 440 miles northeast of Bermuda. Evening Star Washington, DC. January 30, 1948, Chronicling America Library of Congress
- ↑ Glasgow Herald, February 2, 1948
- ^ "The Star Tiger Mystery" Flight October 7, 1948, p. 433
- ↑ Tom Mangold Inside the Bermuda Triangle: the Mysteries Solved Ladbroke Radio. BBC Radio 4/2009.
- ↑ BBC NEWS - UK - Bermuda Triangle plane mystery 'solved' . Retrieved March 19, 2016.