Page 238 - Demo

234accident was that the aircrew had been tasked to bomb a bridge but missed it on the first pass so did a tight turn back to it. I think they missed again and so did another turn. Turning hard causes a lot of drag to an aircraft and so all this time they were slowing down so when they finally got lined up on the bridge they had insufficient energy to pull out of their dive. They realised their error too late to eject. The bridge must have been a popular target as there were bombs all around it. These were small practise ones but were a bit disconcerting nevertheless. In November that year we went to find a crashed Jaguar. No one actually knew where it had crashed but it was somewhere between Edinburgh and Yorkshire. An aircraft had flown the planned route looking for it but seen nothing. We set off northwards and then received an updated position. You might not know it but the North of England is wired up to detect earthquakes. The people who monitored this had recorded an event that they didn%u2019t understand, but I think they heard on the news that an aircraft had crashed and so they passed the information to the RAF. This gave us a datum point which was in the middle of a very dense wood and so we set off in groups along all the firebreaks and tracks. The corporal and I were walking along a track when I noticed large clumps of soil by the side of it. It just looked odd and so we pushed into the trees a bit. Suddenly, the trees stopped and there was a huge hole. You could see an indent of the tail plane of the Jaguar by the side of the hole and then a trail of wreckage going away from it. The troops were sent down the trail to recover body parts, which they did. There was no counselling for chaps in those days and so the grizzly task was accompanied with a lot of black humour and several beers later on. There was a rule about the weight of remains that had to be collected to certify that the person was dead and so it took some time. The pilot was an American on an exchange tour who was going through the conversion course. If you run into bad weather at low level you have to pull up