Two passengers who survived the 1953 crash-landing of an Aer Lingus flight wrote to the pilot blamed for the incident to thank him for saving their lives.
Their letters were revealed for the first time at a review of the original inquiry into the New Year's Day accident in which a Dakota DC3 aircraft, the St Kieran, came down in a farmer's field at Spurnell near Birmingham while en route from Dublin.
One passenger, a Miss Leticia Bowlby, praised the pilot, the late Captain T.J. Hanley, for his "marvellous skill".
"That we all of us are alive and none the worse except for bruises and some slight shock is, I feel, all due to that skill," she wrote.
Another, Miss Eleanor Morris, wrote: "I hope the next time I board an Aer Lingus flight for Dublin that it will be piloted by Capt Hanley."
The 1953 inquiry later acknowledged Capt Hanley's skills but blamed him for the incident, saying his engines cut out because he mistakenly powered both of them from a single fuel tank which ran empty mid-air.
Capt Hanley's daughters are trying to show that the inquiry, which ended their father's flying career, wrongly discounted or ignored evidence which would have backed his theory that water in the fuel made the engines stop.
The second day of the review heard further discussion about one item of evidence, the report of an investigation into another incident involving an Aer Lingus DC3 which cut out at Liverpool's Speke Airport a month after the St Kieran. Water in the fuel was found to be the cause in this case.
Mr Paul Fogarty SC, for Irish Shell which fuelled both aircraft, argued that the two incidents were different as a large quantity of water, nine pints, had been found in the tanks at Speke and none at Spurnell.
Mr John Allen, a Dakota engineer, said other incidents showed the location of the water counted rather than the quantity.
Mr Allen referred to a case at Le Bourget Airport in Paris where staff drained several milk or lemonade bottles of water - reports varied - from an Aer Lingus aircraft that had flown without incident.
"Engines have stopped with less than a spoonful of water," he said.
Mr Allen also referred to the evidence of the original investigators who found fuel in all pipes and orifices in the engine when they examined it.
This was not consistent with the tank running dry and the engine being starved of fuel, he said.
Mr Allen said the water could have existed in the form of ice as suggested by distortions in the mesh of the carburettor.
He accepted there was no hard evidence of water in the St Kieran's fuel but said this was because appropriate tests were not carried out at the time.
Some 200 gallons of fuel had been allowed to flow out of the aircraft at the crash scene without being inspected, and the tests carried out on the limited quantities saved were not adequate to detect water absorbed in the fuel.
Mr Allen was highly critical of the way examinations at the crash scene were carried out. The scene was not preserved and potential evidence was lost as a result, he said.
He accepted the investigators were not intentionally careless but said procedures at the time were much more lax than today.