Great link and pictures Peter!

Agree about the river pageant, very well done and moving at times.

Clearly if GAPAN were involved it was important at the time – I wonder how many other recipients there were? Also, I wonder how many other ‘lost awards’ there has been over the years that seem to have been forgotten about?

Not lost or forgotten, last recipient of the Derry and Richards Memorial Medal being Edward Strongman for testing of the Airbus A400.

The memorial was raised and paid for by de Havilland after the terrible loss and public realisation of the test-pilots’ dangerous work after the DH110 crash in September 1952, at the Farnborough air show, killing John Derry and Anthony Richards.

I have these listed from 1953 until 1965,

1953 Wg Cdr Jim H. Heyworth, Rolls Royce
1954 Roland Beamont, English Electric
1955 Peter Twiss, Fairey Aviation
1956 Sqn Ldr J.S. Fifield, Martin Baker
1957 Mike Randrup, Napier
1958 Tom Brooke Smith, Shorts
1959 A.W.(Bill) Bedford, Hawker Aircraft
1960 Michael J. Lithgow, Vickers Supermarine
1961 Brian Trubshaw, Vickers Armstrongs
1962 Hugh C.H. Merewether, Hawker Siddeley
1963 Peter Bugge, Hawker Siddeley (de Havilland)
1964 E.B.(Brian) Trubshaw, British Aircraft Corporation (Vickers)
1965 John Cunnigham, Hawker Siddeley (de Havilland)

GAPANs’ website has the full list here, http://www.gapan.org/about-the-guild/trophies-and-awards/award-winners/the-derry-and-richards-memorial-medal/

There were at least two other GAPAN awards,
The Johnston Memorial Trophy – Most outstanding feat of performance in aerial navigation (donated by Sqn Ldr Johnston)
The Cumberbatch Trophy – Promotion of reliability in civil aviation (donated Miss Alice Cumberbatch 1931)

v6tek, I can’t help directly but the excellent Davidstow online crash log might help you, http://www.rafdavidstowmoor.org/pages/crash_log/crashlog40.html
Unfortunately you have very little information to go on, so you will probably have to scan through the whole log and identify an accident as most similar to the one you are looking into. Any ideas on dates etc?

D1566, sorry just seen your post. I regularly visited the Ventongimps site when I was a kid (it was a wildlife reserve then), my understanding was that large chunks of the Beaufighter (from Perranporth/Portreath?) were recovered by a group hoping to display the items. I did see small fragments of propeller and airframe in the clay type mud.
Would also be interested to hear what became of the dig.

I cant believe how keen many of you are to have her grounded after this incident! We’re supposed to be the ones in support of machines such as 558.

Hopefully that isn’t the case at all Dan, having reread the thread it is all pretty good natured.
To comment on what appears to us to be a woeful lack of a double checking system on the act of placing items (ie FOD) into a jet intake is going to be natural, especially given the way that the project is financed.
At the end of the day no injury to personel has occurred thankfully, but it could have been very much worse. I’m staggered the bags weren’t ingested earlier, but thank god it didn’t occurr while airborne.
As it is two brand new Olympus turbojets have been written off, something many thousands of people have contributed to, either by putting money in buckets or via national lottery.

I might be misunderstanding you Ian, but it should be a U/C ind. at bottom left, filler panel made to match when going from older large ind. to the newer smaller version.
The original remote direction ind fitted the hole where the G4 is currently, mod 1177 saw to that.
I have never seen two direction finders (compass etc) fitted to a T or F variant panel. For originality go with original photos, pilots notes, and the ammendments.

Edit, apologies I was misundertanding you, your panel is T.7 front pre G4 mod. (earlier art. horizon & turn/slip) ?

Your other panel could be post mod T.7, I have seen both straight and curved bottom edge panel types fitted.

Believe it. To err is human.

Not sure what you’re getting at there, yes to err is human, so is investigating new procedures for any changes that may have been made, and to check and double check things over.
I don’t for one minute believe in the blame culture, and that’s not what I’m trying to infer here, I just simply can’t believe that such a straightforward mistake can go unchecked or can happen at all.

Personally I think Cypherus is absolutely right, red tags hanging down or some other attached visual indicator would have been a good and simple idea here.
These days the flight saftey arena demands that if a change of standard operating procedures, or a new system is introduced, so also must be a balancing system to minimise any hazard or room for error that can be introduced as a result.
For a one off valuable and historic jet enterprise such as this not to have any visual method of checking something that is known could be left in the intakes just strikes me as very unusual. RBF tags, mirrors on poles, step ladders, man raisers etc could be used quite straightforwardly before start up, the aircraft is in no great rush to get anywhere.

Comparing this operation with that of the RAF Vulcan days is a bit unfair, the situations are very different where operational aircraft were kept on a line, some of which were ready to scramble, but even there I’m surprised to read that intake checks weren’t made, when at least the intake blanks would have had to have been removed anyway.

DavidB, I largely agree with you, but this is more than just a human making a mistake, a system should have devised by the group to counter the placing of items in an serviceable jet intake anyway – something I have never heard of before now.

My understanding is that silica bags work best in an enclosed or sealed situation, ie bagged/boxed parts, not an open intake where the bags would surely be trying to drag moisture from the most obvious source, the atmosphere.

From someone who works in flight safety, I was awaiting details of a possible bird of FOD ingestion, the cause of this problem is fairly unbelievable.

Isn’t G-PIGY still airworthy?