Remembering lives lost for air safety

The Aerospace Bristol museum recently unveiled a memorial to those associated with the Filton aircraft industry who lost their lives and who each played a part in making flying so safe nowadays.

- Eugene Byrne

WHILE some of us might have a fear of flying, you’re generally very safe jetting off for your week in the sun.

If you look at the numbers, you can see that getting into a car is infinitely more dangerous than getting into an aeroplane.

It wasn’t always like this. The high levels of aviation safety that we enjoy today have been achieved at an enormous cost in research and development, and an even bigger cost in human lives.

Those with connections to Fil-ton’s aircraft industry were remembered at a ceremony on November 6 when a memorial was unveiled at Aerospace Bristol remembering pilots, engineers and other staff and seconded staff of the British & Colonial Aeroplane Company and the Bristol Aeroplane Company who lost their lives in test flights and training accidents.

The ceremony took place on the anniversary of the Downend disaster of 1957 in which 15 people died.

The memorial was the culmination of research by Bill Morgan, a former Filton worker who sought out information on those who were killed and tried to trace their family members, several of whom were at the event.

"I found these 42 men - they were all men - who died. They were not all our employees, one was RAF and some were seconded, but they were all in effect working for us at the time of the crash.

“I looked from 1910 all the way forward until 1960 when we became the British Aircraft Corporation - it was still ‘B.A.C’ but it wasn't quite the same. It wasn’t the family company anymore.”

The first death - though by no means the first crash - was in September 1912 when E Hotchkiss, flying a Bristol Coanda monoplane, crashed when approaching Oxford.