My father, Desmond Walls, was one of them.
Among an Irish generation of a certain age the Tuskar Rock plane crash is a bit like JFK's assassination - in the sense that people remember where they were and what they were doing that Sunday. I remember standing beside my mother and some of my siblings on the balcony at Cork Airport, watching with great excitement as my father crossed the tarmac and climbed the steps onto the aircraft. I remember a small white shape moving in one of the windows. Apparently that was him waving his handkerchief at us.
When you're five, you notice the floor more than you do in later life. I can still see the zig-zag pattern in the parquet wooden floor in our hallway in Cork. My mother was holding the phone and I could hear the words, "The plane is missing". It was my uncle speaking. A senior executive in Aer Lingus at the time, he had been called to Dublin airport when news of the crash came in. He was handed a passenger list and saw his brother's name on it.
Thirteen-and-a-half bodies were recovered. His was not among them, though he could theoretically have been the half, I suppose. It was a male torso and its identity was never established. I grew up with many stories surrounding the Tuskar Rock crash, but that particularly gruesome detail was one I heard only recently.
No official cause for the crash was ever established. The most popular theory, and certainly the most dramatic, blamed the disaster on an RAF missile. It supposed that an RAF base in Wales was conducting exercises involving unmanned drones that day, that one of them hit the Viscount or caused it to swerve violently, go out of control and nose-dive into the sea. The RAF always maintained that the base in question was closed on the day, but in the political culture of the time, it was generally assumed this was a cover-up. And anyway, even if the base was closed, the story went, the missile probably came from a British naval ship.
This theory first took root from one of the conclusions drawn by the first investigation, published in 1970. "There is evidence which could be construed as indicative of the possible presence of another aircraft or airborne object in the vicinity. . . resulting in the Viscount entering a spin or spiral dive."
In 1998 a group of relatives organised a 30th-anniversary memorial service in Cork. Afterwards some of them continued to meet and to discuss the unsatisfactory results of the first investigation. They contacted the British ambassador and successfully lobbied Mary O'Rourke, then Minister for Public Enterprise. As a result, the Air Accident Investigation Unit carried out a review of the files from the original investigation. That review ultimately led to a new and independent study of the accident circumstances.
To me the two noteworthy points of the new study, published in 2002, were the discovery that the actual flight path of the Viscount was quite different from the flight path assumed by the original investigation, and that the length of time the plane remained airborne after the initial incident, which had generally been thought to be about 10 minutes, was actually over 30 minutes.
It seems that many of the original witness accounts had been ignored due to contradictions with the assumed flight path. The new study concluded that "the flight reconstruction performed by the 1968 Investigation Commission was possibly misled by the transcript of the Shannon radio-communications". Regarding cause, this study categorically ruled out the involvement of another aircraft or missile. It said structural fatigue and bird strike were among the possible factors, but no actual cause was proven and no blame was apportioned.
I went along to the Government offices on Kildare Street for the presentation of the results of this study. I remember talking to one of the French aviation experts on the study team over coffee and biscuits afterwards. He was so excited by their findings, acting out the drama in a very Gallic and animated way.
He vividly described the heroic actions of the pilot and co-pilot as they struggled for more than half-an-hour to control the aircraft. He said that people outside Ballykelly church who saw the stricken aircraft flying past could to see the passengers gripping the seats in front of them, the plane was so close to the ground at that point. It was difficult to listen to that description and to realise that the plane was in trouble for so long, but it was also very, very good to have a clearer idea of what happened.
The 2002 study provided closure for many people, but others are still looking for answers. At a conference in Cobh last Saturday, retired RAF instructor Eric Evers outlined his claim that the Viscount collided with a French-built military aircraft being used by the Air Corps for training. He believes that the pilots of the trainer ejected and parachuted to safety while their plane, a Fouga Magister, dived into the sea.
This theory was rejected as "entirely unfounded" last Tuesday, in a letter to The Irish Times, by Jurgen Whyte, chief inspector of air accidents at the Department of Transport.
No doubt theories, claims and counter-claims will continue. For me, I'm not sure the actual cause of the crash ever really mattered. The effect the crash had on my life was much the same in any case.