Manchester Crash “Misadventure”

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28258, 22 April 1957, Page 16

Manchester Crash “Misadventure”

(N.Z. Press Association Copyright) (Rec. 7 p.m.) MANCHESTER, April 19 Verdicts of death by misadventure were recorded on all 22 victims of a British European Airways airliner crash last month at Manchester. The dead included a mother and her two-year-old son in one of the houses hit. They were killed when the Viscount turbo-prop airliner, coming in to land at the end of a flight from Amsterdam, crashed into houses near the runway. The Coroner told the jury before they announced their verdict today that he could not see “any evidence of neglect or want of care by anybody.” He said that, on the evidence they had heard, they could safely assume that something did go wrong with the airliner’s starboard wing flaps or flap mechanism. Referring to the subsequent temporary grounding of Viscount 701’s and the suggestion that a bolt might have been responsible for the defect, he said: “It may very well be that that had something to do with it, but that is only a matter of speculation as far as we are concerned.” The airliner seemed to have been very thoroughly checked, he said.