I’d be very careful about assuming a direction of travel for Copping based off a known track. To my chagrin, I made that very mistake on here a few years ago helping Mark 12 with eyewitness accounts of the Spitfire that forced landed on a cricket pitch and which my ex father in law witnessed as a young boy. My FIL’s story fit perfectly with the photos Mark had to show, except the aircraft appeared to have traveled 180 degrees in the opposite direction to what my FIL described. It didn’t add up and I wasted a lot of my own and Mark’s time trying to reconcile the two points, eventually chalking the disparity up to faulty memory after over 40 years. It never entered my head at any point that the reason it didn’t add up was because I’d assumed based on the fact the aircraft was flying south it had approached the old OXO cricket ground from the north. The second we found another eyewitness account that said it had circled several times before landing, it all fell into place.
Ok that was more of a tangent than I intended but the point remains, there’s no real evidence for what way Copping might have gone. We’ve no real idea how he flew around or how changes of direction he made inbetween where he disappeared over the desert and where his aircraft was eventually found. He could easily have walked south thinking he was heading north.
Sign In
