On the 13th of June 1953 there was to be an exercise involving Meteors from 264 Sqdn and
aircraft from other squadrons over the Tees area. The weather however put paid to this and the exercise was
cancelled. The Meteors from 264 Sqdn were ordered to fly at 2000 feet and exercise the defences
at Thornaby and Oulston. The pilot of this aircraft was the Squadron Commander, he ordered all
other aircraft to descend through the cloud and dummy attack the targets at their descretion.
The Commanders aircraft would be the one to crash however, at about 18.45hrs it flew into high ground on the
Eston Hills, to the south of Eston Nab sadly killing both crew. The wreckage was spread over a wide area, the aircraft
was written off with Cat 5/FA Burnt damage.
The aircraft was built to contract 6/ACFT/6141 by Armstrong Whitworth Ltd at Coventry and delivered to the RAF in February 1953
and issued to 264 Sqdn shortly after.
Pilot - S/Ldr James (Jim) Lomas DFC, AFC and Bar RAF (47118), aged 34, of Elmton, Mansfield, Doncaster. Buried Thornaby Cemetery, Yorkshire (H I 1).
Nav - F/Lt Bernard Noel Hanratty RAF (1903506), aged 30, Born Dublin, Ireland. Buried York Cemetery (grave 5870).
Sqdn Ldr Jim Lomas (pictured above in a Yorkshire Post photograph) was a very experienced pilot if not one of the RAF's best fighter pilots of his day.
He was born on 15th February 1919 and had joined
the RAF in 1935 as a fifteen year old and worked his way up through the ranks. He was Commissioned in 1941 and had survived a number of
war-time accidents and incidents. He flew Mosquito's towards the latter part of the war and was widely known as a crack night-fighter
pilot. In November 1947 he was the pilot of a Meteor which flew from Turnhouse, Edinburgh to Bovingdon in Hertfordshire at a record
speed of 617.6 MPH. In 2008 I was contacted by his son and daughter and it has been a pleasure to have been able to share this
research with them.
Noel Hanratty's grave in York Cemetery, he was born in Dublin on 14th December 1922.
I visited the crash site in July 2006 with Ian Donnison, a number of small fragments of the Meteor are still to be found at the site.
A peice of the aircraft picked up at the site soon after the crash by a local young man. I would like to thank Mr John Danks
for sending me this photograph of the peice of aircraft he found when he was a boy and for recounting his memories of the crash to me.
The following is taken from "Wings over Linton" by Peter D Mason 1994, ISBN 0 9513645 2 9.
""Jimmy Lomas was a most experienced and skilful pilot and a highly respected Station Commander. On this day the Station were involved in a major air exercise and in the late afternoon low cloud blew in off the North Sea which shrouded the North York Moors and Cleveland Hills down to 200 feet.
264 Sqdn amongst other tasks had been detailed to deliver an attack on a battery of guns located somewhere on low ground in the Thornaby area, but because of the sudden deterioration in the weather, Sqdn Ldr Lomas called up the sector to say that such an attack was no longer practicable. However after a discussion of the matter on the R/T with the Sector Commander, Lomas agreed to try and deliver
the briefed attack himself so as not to disappoint the Army. On that day he was not flying with his own regular navigator. Due to a slight error in descending through the 8/8ths cloud cover the aircraft just clipped the lip of the steep escarpment at the Northern edge of the Moors and both crew were killed in the resulting crash.
Group Captain M Pedley DSO OBE DFC was airborne at the time of the crash, after landing he went to the scene, it was stated that if Lomas's aircraft had been only a few feet higher it would have cleared the high ground in safety.""