Sorry Hampden, couldn’t let that one go. Are you suggesting Duxford is an unsafe place to fly aeroplanes because it has hangars?

At Blackbushe no-one on the ground was injured, as far as I recall?

Also, I think one of the points already raised is that the site of the accident was not on the display axis.

The Sun front page said “Why were vintage planes flying over the A27” like it was crusading.. odd they weren’t concerned about what was underneath these vintage planes: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/royals/6537871/Royal-salute-to-The-Few.html

I doubt that Eric Brown would wish to be cast as a one-man Court of Inquiry. His quoted words were ‘If I was forced to guess’.. which I am sure that he was.

Pistonrob said he was doing the research for a relative of Margrie’s

Apologies, I meant the ‘down the pub’ thing as an illustration of how such stories initially arise. I am sure your mother’s source was in good faith and closer to home.

However, no-one here can account for where it came from, ie where your mum heard that all those years ago.

There is a considerable body of knowledge on this forum around such incidents, and you have heard a lot of it already. Although I cannot speak for anyone else all I can personally say as someone who has researched quite a few incidents and casualties over the years is I am not aware of any mechanism whereby the story about burying sand would have come from the RAF.

As someone else has suggested, you can get all the official information about the crash itself from official sources. You might need people on here to interpret the records, but they are available to you, and normally these provide enough information to get a fair idea of the chain of events – especially when interpreted by some of the folk on here who know more than me what they are talking about. In fact, as a relative and in the case of a couple of record types you are more likely to be given access to certain information than anyone else here. As also suggested, if you really want to picture what happened that night then taking a look at an Anson might help you.

We could discuss the morbid details of where sandbags might have had to have been used, but I am sure you would agree it would be distasteful to do so on this public forum. As I say, there is no reason to suppose that this was done in this case.

What was the motive for loading a train up with valuables and then hiding it?

You want to move your valuables, fine, load them onto a train. But then you build secret tunnels and park said train in one, leaving the valuables on the train? Why would you wish to do that? There are perfectly good vaults in Switzerland – even if you were worried about the security of Berlin!