In 1967, a rather shocking plane
crash occurred in the United Kingdom that claimed the lives of 72 people. The term
Fuel Starvation is attached to this accident. It’s a term that is pretty self-explanatory and
Fuel Starvation could occur for many reasons and it’s not always as straight forward as a
plane simply running out of fuel though that has happened. It can also refer to a scenario
where the engines are not receiving the fuel they demand. The case of British midland Flight
542, the Stockport Air Disaster I would say falls into that sub category. This was case of
fuel being present on the plane, yet engine flameout still occurred. So what happened here?
Well to unpack this we need to back to 1967.
It was the very early hours
of Sunday, June 4th, 1967. A group of holiday makers were in the airport on
the Spanish Balearic Island of Palma de Mallorca. A flight had been chartered to return them from
home to England following their vacation on the popular island. British Midland Airways had been
contracted for this charter flight and the plane they employed was a Canadair North Star Argonaut.
This is certainly an interesting plane. It was developed from the Douglas DC-4, an
aircraft that dates back to the early 1940s. Canadian Manufacturer Canadair took on the
manufacturing of the plane and gave it a bit of an upgrade by replacing the engines and swapping
parts of the DC-4 with those from the newer DC-6. Canadair called this the North Star.
The North Star was just one of multiple revamps the DC-4 would receive perhaps the most
extravagant of which being the ATL Carvair.
Most North Stars flew for Canadian
airlines and the Canadian Air Force. A number of them though were picked up
by the British State Owned Air Carrier of the day BOAC. BOAC rebranded these
planes again and called them Argonauts, they flew the Argonaut between the years of
1949 and 1960. Once retired, British Midland acquired 5 Argonauts in 1961, which brings
us back to the morning of June 4th, 1967, and the accident plane registered as G-ALHG which
had been flying for British Midland since then.
At 6:06 in the morning, Flying as British
Midland Flight 542, this Argonaut carrying 84 passengers and crew took to the skies in Palma.
There were three people on the flight deck of the aircraft. 41-year-old Captain Harry Marlow was
commanding the flight. Having previously served in the Royal Air Force he was certainly an
experienced pilot with over 10,000 hours logged and had actually been acquainted with
the DC4 and its derivatives since the 1950s.
His tenure as an airplane captain had been
turbulent. He was actually demoted down to a First Officer position in 1964 following a
heavy landing, according to the accident report. His Captain status was
reportedly reinstated in 1965.
He was joined on the flight deck that morning
by the much younger First Officer, 21-year-old Christopher Pollard. Originally from Cornwall he
had only been flying commercially for just a few years by that point with just over 1000 flight
hours to his name, literally he logged 1,001 to be exact, he achieved is 1000th flight hours
the journey out to Palma earlier that morning.
The third person on the flight deck was a Ground
Engineer a man by the name of Gerald Lloyd, curiously we couldn’t find an age for this
individual, but the accident report does indicate that Mr. Lloyd had no responsibilities
when it came to flying or operating the plane in any way but would step in if asked
to do so by the Captain or First officer. His main role was to fulfil duties related to the
maintenance of the aircraft whilst on the ground.
Flight 542 continued in its flight that morning
heading north back to the United Kingdom, their destination, Manchester in Northern England.
For this leg, First Officer Christopher Pollard was handling the flight controls, Captain
Marlow was handling radio communications. The flight was largely uneventful as the
sun rose into the sky at dawn. These days, modern planes can make this flight in 2 hours. In
a much slower Propliner from the 1940s the same journey took twice as long. We should now for a
moment turn our attention away from the plane and take a little look at their destination.
Manchester Airport at the time was a lot smaller than it is today. In 1967 it was actually
known as Ringway airport and had just one runway. The runway runs from North East to Southwest.
Due to prevailing winds in the region, it is often the case the planes land
in from the North onto runway 24.
This involves flying overhead many populated
areas that surround the city of Manchester. And the residents underneath the flight path
have certainly been no strange to tragedy. In 1957, a Vickers Viscount crashed into the homes
of residents on Shadow Moss road nearby to the airport resulting in 22 fatalities. But backing
up further we’ll find the town of Stockport. Stockport Town Center lays directly underneath
the flight path of the airport, even in 1967.
Flight 542, the accident plane would need
to be lined up with the runway extended centerline overhead Stockport. At 09:56 local
time, approaching Manchester from the south, the flight intercepted a waypoint
over the town of Congleton.
From here the plane was now to be directed north
of the airport, make a left turn and intercept the ILS. The flight was cleared to descend down
to 3500 feet, up till this point the flight had been uneventful. At 10:01 as the aircraft was
turning onto final over Stockport that the two right side engines failed, they cut out. So what
exactly happened here. Well the simply answer to that is that the two right side engines were
starved of fuel. It is a bit more complicated than that though, the plane had the fuel
so why wasn’t it getting to the engines?
To understand this we need to familiarize
ourselves with this aircraft’s fuel storage system. The Argonaut had a total of 8 fuel
tanks. Four pairs of two consisting of a main and auxiliary fuel tank, and each pair of
tanks feeds one of four engines. Now airplanes tend to have something called a cross-feed.
Cross-feed is a method whereby a pilot may want to feed an engine, fuel from another
tank. For example fuel can be brought over from tanks within an opposing wing if necessary.
There are a number of reasons as to why a pilot might want to do this... It could be for balance
distribution reasons, or maybe in an emergency situation involving a fuel leak, fuel can be
fed to a different engine to not waste it.
This was not the case here. The problem that came
about on the British Midland Flight was actually linked to something that pilots of the Argonaut
and North Star had actually picked up on over the years. Since Canadair launched the plane all the
way back in 1946, Pilot’s and Engineers on the plane noticed that certain instruments, gauges and
switches were not only difficult to read but some were also place in inconvenient places in the
cockpit. This included the cross-feed system, it was actually concealed almost entirely by
the throttle controls when a pilot is strapped into their seat, so they couldn’t really see it.
Pilots found It was often unclear which tanks had been selected for their cross-feeding processes.
So I think you’ll probably agree with me when I say that this design is objectively terrible.
This is important because it was known that the cross feed system on this plane could
be inadvertently selected into a false setting and begin a cross-ship cross feed,
that being where the fuel tanks in one wing are being transported to the engines on
the other side. That’s pretty much what happened here and given the unclear nature of
its design, the pilots weren’t aware of this.
The issue was reported by pilots both on the
Argonauts in the United Kingdom and the North Stars in Canada. However none of the small
handful of airlines that flew planes forwarded these concerns from pilots to the manufacturer.
Without this feedback, obviously they weren’t aware that changes should be made.
Pilots continued to fly the plane with a cross-feed system that was unintuitive and
prone to failure. This key design flaw in the fuel system compounded against pilot fatigue.
The captain for example was approaching the end of what was at that point a 13-hour shift.
Investigators found further evidence of fatigue from the Captain’s radio communications as
multiple errors were found in his transmissions.
Additionally, the failure on board the British
midland plane came at a very interesting point, the pilots had begun the approach checklist
which called for a check of the fuel systems. This included a step for the cross feed; it
should be in the off position. Investigators believed that the failure of the engines aligned
with when the pilots performed this step. A pilot may well have handled the cross feed valve
controls accidentally causing it to crack into an on position. This was why the failure occurred
during approach and not in the preceeding hours.
So to summarize, what this effectively led to,
was a configuration of the fuel system where the right side engines were inadvertently starved
of fuel, because the cross feed was hard to read, operate and the pilots were tired and
evidently didn’t realize what had happened.
At that moment of failure overhead Stockport
at 10:01 in the morning on June 4th, 1967, the number three and four engines on the
right side flamed out. First the number four engine, followed quickly by number three.
At this point they had been trying to line up
with the runway but following the failure they began experiencing flight control difficulties
that pulled them off of their approach path. The pilots may not have been aware of the double
failure as only the number four engine propellers were place into the feathered position,
the failed number 3 propellers continued to windmill That is to say, spinning in
the wind. Captain Marlow took over from First Officer Pollard when the problem was first
noticed and immediately experienced difficulty in controlling the plane. As all the thrust was
now being generated from the left side, this gave the plane a naturally tendency to roll right.
At just 6 miles from the runway, the Captain broke off of the approach path even though the airspeed
of the plane was believed to have been under 120 knots. What followed was a large right turn, this
was against the controller’s instruction to turn left as was normal in a missed approach scenario.
However as Captain Marlow had already begun a right turn, likely induced by the natural roll
brough on by the engine failure, the instruction was given to continue a right turn. First through
north, then North East. By this point the airspeed had decreased further and it was becoming
exceedingly difficult for the pilots to maintain their altitude, the plane began to descend.
At just half the engine power and a full plane, the pilots would attempt to extend their
glidepath as long as possible and began to re-attempt another landing at Manchester.
This brought the plane back towards Stockport.
10:07. Airspeed decreased further to below
100 knots. The altitude situation had grown to a critical level, they were just a few
hundred feet from the buildings below and they were nowhere near the airport. Flight 542 was
gliding straight toward the Stockport Town Center. As the situation had grown desperate the
Captain began looking out for anywhere, he could put the plane down.
In this urbanized landscape there existed just one, tiny sector of land in the
center of Stockport that was open. It’s an area called “Hopes Carr”. The small area of grass land
here was nowhere near big enough to land a plane, but it was there only option at this point.
Bystanders on the ground observed the plane making a large left turn in the final
seconds of the flight. This suggested to investigators that the pilots had some semblance
of control. As the final action before the crash, Captain Marlow shut down the remaining engines.
At just after 10:09 the plane impacted the ground with a slight right bank, the left wing
clipped an apartment building in the process. Captain Marlow had managed to crash his plane in
a tiny space surrounded by apartment buildings, hotels and retail space. Because of the Captain’s
quick thinking, there were no fatalities on the ground. Dozens however perished on board the
plane. Of the 84 total occupants on the flight, 72 were now dead. This left 12 survivors, among
them was actually Captain Harry Marlow. However in addition to the injuries he sustained in
the crash he also experienced amnesia and reportedly had trouble recalling the events of
the flight. However whilst in hospital he was able to tell investigators that following
the failure of the two right side engines, he found it difficult to control the plane.
It was concluded by investigators that given the circumstances, there wasn’t a whole lot the pilots
could have done in that short space of time to get the plane to safety. An inquiry after the accident
cleared Captain Marlow of any blame in the crash. His injuries however killed his piloting career,
he never flew again. Still he lived out the rest of his life before his eventual passing in 2009.
Investigators made just one recommendation in the aftermath, and that was to give a warning
to operators of the North Star Argonauts and all other planes with similar valve components
in the fuel system to ensure that pilots fully know the status of their fuel configuration.
Today the Canadair North Star Argonaut is pretty much a curious footnote in aviation history.
Though some DC4s have survived to this current day, its derivatives have long since been
retired. The Stock Port Air Disaster is still remembered in the Manchester region. A memorial
now stands at the scene of where disaster struck all those years ago.
Patreon Outro
Hello everyone, thank you
all so much for watching. I believe it might be time for me to have a
little chat with my viewers here about something. A couple weeks back I mentioned at the end of
the Lot video that I was thinking of changing the upload schedule, to one that would mean I’d
release a video as and when they are completed. I have decide that I will try this out.
Starting from the beginning of June.
This is primarily because I would like to
make bigger and better videos for you all. I would like 30, 35 or even 40 minute videos to
be the regular. Not including researching these videos which is almost always ongoing in the
background, the production of one video with just me doing all of the work, I was able
to spread over the course of one week for the last two and a half years. Because of that I
have never missed a weekend upload in that time, a level of consistency I have been very
happy with and sad to see potentially go.
However as the average length of a video has
increased, it’s become a lot more difficult to do and I’m just going to need more time if
I want to make those sorts of videos. It will also allow me to continue background work on other
videos, I still have a railway video to complete, I also want to make a chronological breakdown
of 9/11 for example. So we’ll try it, but it could be that next week might actually
be the end of regular Saturday uploads.
I feel it was important to share this update with
you as I know a number of you from the comments I receive, always seem to look forward to my
Saturday videos, so thank you all so much for sticking around with me all this time. Anyway with
that update noted I would like to take a moment to thank my amazing Patreon over on Patreon for
their amazing support to the channel. Their names are scrolling on the screen right now so if you
do see your name here a massive thanks to you.
Shoutout this week Bandaid Brigade who
pledged at the highest tier this week, thank you so very much. Truly a legend.
If you yourself would like to support the channel further, you can join the Disaster
Breakdown patreon from just £1 per month and the link to that will be in the pinned
comment below. All Patrons get early access to all new content two days before it goes
out publicly on YouTube, and that will stay the same in this new change to the uploads.
Anyway, I’m going to sign off on this video now, that you so very much for watching and
I shall see you next week. Goodbye!
