The young daughters of the late Capt Hanley sat late into the night copying documents and transcripts by hand during the internal Aer Lingus inquiry into their father's crash-landing of the St Kieran on New Year's Day, 1953.
Ms Patricia Hanley told yesterday's review hearing that Aer Lingus would not give her father the documents but allowed him to take them home each night after the day's hearing so he could comment on them.
"We sent him to bed to be fresh for the morning and we sat up writing. My sisters, my mother, our friends who called to the house - they all did a stint copying so that he would have a complete copy."
She said she still had the 49-year-old handwritten pages.
The internal inquiry was held in addition to the public inquiry of June 1953.
Capt Hanley had pushed for his case to be heard publicly but, according to documents referred to yesterday, Aer Lingus feared such a hearing would be "sensational" and undermine public confidence in the airline.
Ms Hanley and the family took up the case and she travelled to Britain in the 1970s to interview witnesses whose evidence had not been sought by the inquiry. They included Mr Samuel Pritchard, the farmer on whose land the St Kieran came down; Mr John Stephens, then a 14-year-old farm boy; and one of two brothers, Horace and Francis Weaver, who were among the fire crew at the scene.
All of them told Ms Hanley and subsequently a solicitor she engaged in Britain, that they were overwhelmed by the amount of fuel at the crash scene.
Mr Pritchard said he saw fuel spilling out of the right wing into the waters of a rain-swollen ditch. This was the wing which, according to the public inquiry, should have been carrying an empty tank.
Barrister Dr Michael Forde SC, representing the Hanley family, referred to the flight plan prepared for the St Kieran's flight to Birmingham, which estimated it would use 105 gallons of fuel on the journey.
The aircraft had a total of 300 gallons on board between its three tanks and the right tank contained 115 gallons, he said.
Even if the pilots had accidentally relied on this one tank for the whole trip, they would still have had at least 10 gallons left in it when they crash-landed.
The hearings continue today and shoul conclude this week.