In the evening of the 13th of March 1951 this Lancaster set out from RAF Kinloss for a training flight. The aircraft was on the final leg of a night-time navigation exercise between the Faroes and Rockall and was heading home when it collided with the mountain, Beinn Eighe, at around 02.00hrs on the 14th of March. It was only thirty minutes from landing back at base.

The nav-ex had been flown in horrendous weather conditions, when they took off from Kinloss seven hours prior to the crash, a deep low pressure was developing further south, this effect caused a strong north easterly airflow north of this depression which the crew would have been battling with prior to the crash and which almost certainly caused them to have flown too far south of their intended course.

The last radio message reported “60 miles north of Cape Wrath”. Nothing more was heard. The aircraft had struck just 15 feet from the summit of that part of the mountain range and at the top of a very inaccessable gully known at Far West Gully at the western side of Triple Buttress, above Loch Coire Mhic Fhearchair.

The crew would have been flying in pitch darkness, poor visibility and freezing conditions, it was thought the crew pressumed they were descending over the relatively flat area of Caithness towards their let-down over the Moray Firth. In actual case they over the Torridon mountains, which are above 3000 feet. All eight airmen were almost certainly killed in the impact with the solid rock. They were:

Pilot - F/Lt Harry Smith Reid DFC RAF (159582), aged 29, of Aberdeen. Buried Groves Cemetery, Aberdeen. Born 20/4/1921.

Co-Pilot - Sgt Ralph Clucas RAF (3044661), aged 23, of Liverpool. Buried Kinloss Abbey, Morayshire. Born 28/5/1927.

Nav - F/O Robert Strong RAF (203610), aged 27, of Billesley, Warks. Buried Bramwood End Cemetery, Birmingham. Born 16/4/1923.

Air Sig - F/Lt Peter Tennison RAF (176527), aged 26, of Goole, Yorkshire. Buried Kinloss Abbey, Morayshire. Born 21/11/1924.

Air Sig - F/Sgt James Naismith RAF (575007), aged 28, of Glasgow. Buried Kinloss Abbey, Morayshire. Born 3/8/1922.

Air Sig - Sgt Wilfred Davie Beck RAF (3504773), aged 19, of Ealing, London. Buried Kinloss Abbey, Morayshire. Born 18/4/1931.

Air Sig - Sgt James Warren Bell RAF (1822719), aged 25, of Lockerbie, Dumphrieshire. Buried Kinloss Abbey, Morayshire. Born 24/10/1925.

F Eng - F/Sgt George Farquhar RAF (632957), aged 29, of Rathven, Banffshire. Buried Buckie Cemetery, Banffshire. Born 3/6/1921.

Five of the crew were buried at Kinloss Abbey Burial Ground.

After some period of time the crash site was located and the nearest RAF Mountain Rescue team were sent to the area, this team however would be from the same base as where the aircraft had come from, Kinloss. The Team would no doubt have known the aircrew involved in the operation. The problems began here, the site being in the Western Highlands in the depths of a severe winter caused problems before the site could even be accessed, this was also serious climbing country at the best of times. The recovery operation is well discussed on other websites on the internet, the following is taken from some other websites :

""The team members, keen and conscientious though they were, had neither the equipment nor the training for the job. Their leaders initially spurned offers of help from local mountaineers, and the upshot was that it was August before the last body was recovered. By then, the local criticism had risen to a clamour, and the RAF decided that mountaineering expertise should be injected into the service. Until then, the tendency of senior officers had been to believe that what was needed for mountain rescue was fit stretcher-bearers, not mountaineers.""

""The incident control point was Kinlochewe Old Village Hall which still exists as an Outdoor shop and information/resource centre, due to the adverse weather conditions at the time this was the closest access point to the crash site. Modern day equipment such as helicopters and all terrain vehicles were not available and as such all rescue gear had to be backpacked into the site, a distance of some nine miles over unforgiving terrain with the added problem of deep snow."" The consequence of this was that the RAF Mountain Rescue Teams as we know them today were formed.

Four bodies were recovered in a relatively short time, the other four would prove harder to find and take down the mountain. It would be four months after the crash, in August 1951, when the final body was removed. The wreckage was the dynamited to blow it out of where it had embedded itself high up on the mountain. During the rescue operation two RAF servicemen were given galantry awards for their efforts, F/Lt Peter Dawes was made an MBE and SenAC Malcolm Brown was awarded a BEM.

The RAF hold an annual memorial event at the Torridon hostel where the current Mountain Rescue Team is based.

Will and I visited the site in August 2005. Following the wreckage being blown up it was scattered for some distance down the mountainside. A memorial plaque has been placed at the site and is located on one of the propellers. All four engines are still at the site, in varying degrees of condition. Another prop is still high up on the mountain and I think I located one other propeller boss in scree in what is known as "Fuselage Gully" or Far West Gully. Will and myself climbed the gully, not alot of wreckage remains on the surface here although scree probably covers much of it. Higher up, a large peice of fuselage and the propeller are jammed which makes climbing past it hard without a rope. Both the aircrafts main wheels and a large wing section lie near the bottom of the scree.

Please be warned, climbing to the crash site in the way we did could prove hard and dangerous in bad weather - I am not responsible for any injury caused!