Today we’re going to be talking about a very
tragic accident that Occurred over the Irish Sea, Aer Lingus Flight 712. If there is one country
we don’t get to talk about all too often on this channel, it’s Ireland. Ireland’s aviation safety
record is very admirable. The small country in North West Europe, in the last half century, has
only ever seen one fatal plane crash and it didn’t even involve an Irish Airline. Before this period
however, Ireland suffered its fair share of air accidents as with many nations adjusting
to the new age of passenger air travel.
Ireland’s deadliest air disaster
occurred on March 24th, 1968. Aer Lingus Flight 712 is certainly interesting
as the cause of the accident was never fully determined, and is a perfect case study of an
accident in that category and how a small country which had just suffered such a horrifying loss
deals with that. When discussing this disaster we naturally have to tread into the uneasy territory
of… theoretical possibilities and speculation. One theory even brings up uncomfortable questions
about what Ireland’s neighbor was doing that day. Let’s examine the possibilities and see if we can
shed some light on the mystery of flight 712.
Let’s breakdown some preliminary information.
Aer Lingus is the national air carrier of Ireland. Naturally their base of operations are in
Dublin but our deeper look at this accident takes us down to Cork. Flight 712 was and even still
is the flight between Cork and London Heathrow. It’s a popular route that Aer Lingus still
operates today with the same flight number. At the time, the Irish operator employed a four
engine propeller plane called a Vickers Viscount.
Built in the United Kingdom, the Vickers Viscount
was certainly a product of its time. It’s a very old plane, even in 1968 the Viscount was old.
Launched in 1948, 445 of them were built across a few different variants and Aer Lingus operated
multiple of them so they were an experienced operator of the type. By the time of the Aer
Lingus disaster, the Viscount had already been out of production for a number of years and the
Irish carrier was trending towards modernizing the fleet, in fact the older Viscounts had already
been retired by 1968. Given the time period the Viscount operated in, there were a lot of plane
crashes involving this plane. Get this, nearly a third of all Viscounts that were ever produced,
either crashed or were lost by other means.
A number of those accidents involved the
planes in question breaking apart in flight. Some of this could be put down to just the time
period the plane existed in, where the aviation industry knew less than it knows today about
flying. A lot of Viscounts ended up in the hands of small operators in developing countries with
less experienced and less stringent maintenance. Aer Lingus however was and really still is a
well-respected airline with a good safety record.
March 24th, 1968. It was a Sunday; in
fact it was Mother’s Day in Ireland. Two pilots turned up for work
to take this Viscount to London. 35-year-old Captain Bernard O’Beirne had
been flying with Aer Lingus for twelve years. With over six and a half thousand flight hours
to his name he not only flew Viscounts but was also known to fly on the new Boeing jet planes
of the time, but in the days preceeding the accident he had been making hops out of Cork,
flying between Ireland and the United Kingdom.
The Co-Pilot that day was First Officer
Paul Heffernan, he was just 22 years old. He did his flight Training in the UK but
moved over to Aer Lingus two years before the accident in 1966. His flight hours
amounted to just over 1,100 in total.
The First Officer wasn’t the only one to join
Aer Lingus in 1966, the accident plane itself had been sold to the Airline from the Dutch carrier
KLM that year. When it arrived in Ireland, Aer Lingus named the aircraft the Saint Phelim and it
already had over 10 years of flights behind it by that time. The Flight between Cork and London that
day would have been the plane’s 14,665th flight.
At 10:32 in the morning on March 24th, 1968,
Aer Lingus Flight 712 left Cork with 61 people on board. Shortly after take-off the pilots made
for an Easterly heading, flying along the southern coastal regions of Ireland to climb up to their
cruising altitude of 17,000 feet. At 10:38, the flight received clearance to fly to their waypoint
near the corner of County Wexford. Two minutes later at 10:40, Air traffic control came on the
radios again to ask if the pilots would like to take a slightly quicker route across the Irish Sea
by flying straight to their waypoint at Fishguard in Wales. The accident reports, suggest that the
pilots wouldn’t take this change to their flight plan but it’s likely that it was discussed.
Flight 712 continued flying along just south of the Irish Coast out over the water and they
reported their position at Bannow Bay at 10:57. In this message, they announced they had reached
17,000 feet. Irish Air Traffic Control handed the plane off to Controllers in London, with nothing
to suggest that anything was out of the ordinary.
The pilots acknowledged the handoff as normal
and tuned their radios into the London frequency. In that small gap of communication, was when
disaster struck, before they even had a moment to transmit their first message to London. At
10:58, less than one minute after conversing the Irish ATC for the final time, controllers in
London picked up what appeared to be a scrambled message on the radios, emanating from the Irish
Sea. This message was later confirmed to be Flight 712 transmitting the following message…
“Echo, India, Alpha, Oscar, Mike, with you” The plane’s callsign, followed 8 seconds later by this
unsettling message… “12 thousand feet, descending, spinning rapidly.” This was the final radio
communication from the plane. Those listening initially interpreted the “twelve” in this
message as “five”, but it was later revealed that the word “twelve” was more likely correct.
This was a radio message also heard by other aircraft in the area, an Aer Lingus flight
flying between Dublin and Bristol had heard the message and relayed information
pertaining to the distressed aircraft back to the ground in Ireland.
What ever happened to the aircraft, it occurred suddenly, without warning, left
the plane seemingly uncontrollable and caused a significant drop in altitude of about 5,000 feet
in a timespan of seconds. Multiple attempts to contact the stricken aircraft proved fruitless.
That Bristol bound flight would soon receive instructions to perform a search operation to
look for the plane. What is perhaps incredible, is that by this point the plane actually hadn’t
crashed yet. In fact if we rewind to when this message was transmitted, the plane continued
to fly albeit in a heavily wounded state.
The pilots would regain some control of the plane
and would remain in the air for some time. One source stating around 10 minutes whereas others
suggesting the plane was in the air for up to 30 minutes. In that time the Viscount would make
a turn to a northerly heading before crashing into the Irish Sea, a few kilometers away from
Tuskar Rock, a tiny Island home to a lighthouse. All 61 people on board Flight 712, were killed.
A number of people claimed to spot the plane going into the water. Irish and British vessels
would begin a search and rescue operation only to discover there were no survivors.
Although some wreckage was spotted and even washed onto the Irish coast, the main bulk of the
wreckage would remain undiscovered for weeks. The British Royal Navy was criticized for poor search
efforts, because as the weeks turned to months, after nearly 70 days there was no main wreckage
found. Despite locals pointing in the direction where the plane crashed, the Royal Navy
failed to adequately search these areas. An Irish fisherman went looking himself and
found the wreckage on his first outing.
So now we’ve reached the point where we must
rewind and see if we can shed some light on what had actually happened to the plane. As the
deadliest air disaster to have ever occurred in Ireland, news of the Tuskar Rock Disaster quickly
spread and consumed the entire nation of Ireland. Everyone wanted to know what happened to this
plane. The plane’s sudden disappearance coupled with the lack of wreckage, or any evidence led
to people piecing together their own theories. It didn’t help matters that the plane was not
equipped with any kind of flight recorder, so that’s no flight data recorder or a cockpit
voice recorder, not even the older tape and foil devices, naturally this only fueled the
mystery element of this disaster. There were even reports of that the relatives of the deceased
pilots were harassed in public as people began pointing fingers, some blaming the flight crew.
To begin with, let’s just quickly go over the conclusion of the first investigative report as
a sort of, jumping off point. It was released two years after the accident and was at the
forefront of much controversy. To skip to the conclusion and findings of that report, quote…
“There is not enough evidence available on which to reach a conclusion of reasonable probability
as to the initial cause of this accident. The probable cause of the final impact with the
sea was impairment of the controllability of the aircraft in the fore and aft (pitching) plane.”
Aer Lingus Flight 712 falls into the unfortunate category of air disasters where the cause was
never fully determined and remains so to this day. From this report and the reports that came
thereafter, investigators had established that there was some kind of catastrophic
failure in terms of controllability, specifying the plane’s pitching controls,
more precisely the left side Stabilizer. Irish reports would use the term “tail plane”
in reference to the failure of this component, this is not to be confused with the
tail fin, the vertical stabilizer. “Tailplane” is just another word used
to describe the Horizontal Stabilizer.
Just so we’re all on the same page, the Horizontal
Stabilizer or “Tailplane” whatever you want to call it, refers to those smaller wings often seen
at the aft end of airplanes. On the viscount, tabs called “elevators” deflect up and down and this
controls the pitch, much like most other planes.
The problem with the investigation into
the Aer Lingus disaster, is that though a problem occurred with the left side Horizontal
Stabilizer, which no one appeared to be dispute, there was little exploration into how that
failure actually occurred, or which part of the stabilizer assembly was the problem, which
were the answers that people really wanted. To reiterate, the official cause of the crash
has remained undetermined with the vague assertion that structural failure was at play.
Criticism was leveled at the investigation as the lead investigator had actually certified
the accident plane’s air worthiness leading to a potential conflict of interest to many. Not
to mention that Aer Lingus at the time was a state-owned air carrier and the Irish Government
therefore had a vested interest in the success of the company, leading some to believe that the
investigation was in some way influenced and swayed by the Irish government. So for a lot of
people, a lot of questions were left unanswered.
So to go back a bit, what are the
theories, and what is the evidence?
From what we’ve discussed so far, we can
ascertain that the starting point of the disaster struck in this region off the coast of South
Eastern Ireland. When the plane crashed here, it was completely obliterated. Some of the plane’s
wreckage was recovered and partly reconstructed to assist investigators. Despite the destruction of
the aircraft a significant section of the fuselage did exist and was found in the weeks after.
There was however major difficulties in retrieve this large piece of wreckage. Following one
failed attempt to lift it out the water, this section of fuselage which included the nose
and cockpit was left at the bottom of the sea, where it still lays to this day. According to one
source it apparently broke apart during salvaging. The potentially important evidence
and numerous bodies of the deceased stayed in the sea along with most of the wreckage.
In fact, most of the bodies were never recovered, only 14 of 61 were ever brought to surface.
Let’s have a quick chat about the airline Aer Lingus. Despite Aer Lingus’ positive perceived
safety record, the truth about the airline at the time was somewhat plastered over. Two other hull
losses of Aer Lingus Viscounts had occurred in the previous year. Including a fatal accident on
a training flight that killed 3 people and another non-fatal accident that occurred in Bristol. So to
highlight, that is three losses of Viscounts from a single airline in a 365 day period.
As mentioned earlier in this video, the Viscount was an old plane, even in 1968,
the aircraft was already out of production. Could fatigue of the airframe have played
a role in the disaster? If something broke off it in flight, it could explain how the
pilots lost control of their plane. The loss of part or all of the Horizontal Stabilizer for
example, could have resulted in the sudden drop of altitude that is believed to have occurred.
Let’s go back to the map, because this is where things start to get interesting. Shortly after
the accident, people started to come forward, Witnesses. These people around 15 miles away
from Tuskar Rock on the Southern coast of County Wexford, came forward with the curious
observation that that some other object came down near the Saltee Islands, nowhere near where
the plane ended up. This does line up with where the problem may have first began before leaving
the plane uncontrollable until it crashed.
The accounts from those eye witnesses couldn’t
specify exactly what that object was. Some suggested it was a piece of debris, others
saying it was another airplane. Regardless dozens of people came forward with the same
story, an object fell out of the sky and splashed into the water nearby to the Saltee Islands.
To this day, no one knows what this mystery object was, and it was never found. As you’d
might expect, a mysterious object falling out of the sky was prone to some speculation,
and given how investigators came to a dead end and the similarity in dozens of accounts that
day, these needed to be considered. Obviously, some have suggested that it could have been
a critical part of the Aer Lingus plane.
The tail Vertical Stabilizer was recovered
and was found along with the main section of wreckage at Tuskar Rock. Eliminating the idea of
the tail section breaking away. However according to reports, including a revised report released in
2000, whilst sections of the Elevator Spring tab, that is these outer parts of the stabilizer
structure highlighted here were found, the elevators and the fixed Horizontal
Stabilizer sections weren’t found at all.
Some have attributed the find of one fragment
of the elevator spring tab being found, washed up on the beach near to the town of
Rosslare, to be evidence that a failure or breaking of the elevators had occurred in flight.
Damage analysis of the recovered wreckage they did have could only reveal that the damage done to
the plane, was done on impact with the water. there is no evidence or indication that such
breaking happened, not enough wreckage could be found, and of all the wreckage that was found,
no conclusive evidence could be obtained. which didn’t really help much with the investigation.
What all of this was able to tell investigators, was the probable way the plane crashed. It
is believed to have went into the sea at a shallow angle with moderate speed and
considerable downward vertical speed. The plane didn’t plummet straight down into the
sea and the fuselage did not break in flight.
But what can cause such thing to occur, part of
the plane just breaking off? If the accident was a result of say a poorly maintained plane this,
then certainly was not an isolated incident.
Similarities were drawn between this accident
and multiple others. One investigator pointing towards an accident involving a Viscount
that would occur in 1980 in Indonesia. 37 people were killed in an accident that
Indonesian investigators attributed to a failure of the elevator spring tab specifically.
The same piece that washed ashore in Ireland.
Although, bits falling off an aircraft was not
something exclusive to just the Vickers Viscount. Perhaps indicative of a larger problem within
aviation when these planes were constructed. Take, for example, the accident of Partnair
Flight 394, where more parallels can be drawn.
This was a plane crash involving an aircraft
of similar age to the Aer Lingus Viscount and built in the same era, albeit from a different
manufacturer. Off the coast of Denmark at cruise altitude, the pilots suddenly lost control
of their plane before crashing into the sea killing 55 people. This accident which occurred,
much later in 1989, was found to have been caused by a structural failure of the rudder this
time, induced by poor maintenance and use of inadequate and counterfeit aircraft parts. So
it is not unheard of, even in the years since the Irish Disaster for such accidents to occur.
And if maintenance is an area to analyze when looking at flight 712, we should highlight
the fact that some of Aer Lingus’ own records regarding maintenance works of the accident
plane seemed to disappear or were found to be missing from their offices and were absent
from the investigation. Those maintenance records of the plane, have not been seen since.
There are other theories about what that rogue object was, that was observed falling into the
sea. Speculations began to grow that there was a collision of some kind in the air, and perhaps the
object that people saw was another aircraft. On the surface though this wouldn’t make much sense,
no other plane was reported missing that day. Support for this theory though did grow following
an intriguing find a number of years later.
In 1974, a trawler vessel stumbled across a large
red metallic object in this region of the sea. When it was examined further, it bared the
resemblance of an aircraft but upon closer inspection, also looked nothing like what one
would think of when you picture an airplane. It resembled a plane, but had no cockpit,
no windows and was painted Bright Red. What this object actually was, was a UAV, an
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle called a Jindivik. This obviously presents more questions
than answers. What is this thing? Where did it come from? And did it have anything
to do with the disaster at Tuskar Rock?
So let’s answer these three questions. A Jindivik,
is effectively a remote controlled target drone. They originated half a world away in Australia and
were used by the Australian Air Force and Navy as target practice. They can fly fast and even climb
to altitudes exceeding 50,000 feet. Mimicking a fighter jet, these dummy planes were designed
to be shot down, they were target drones.
A number of these target drones found their way
to the United Kingdom to be used for the same purposes by the British Royal Air Force. Okay,
so you may be able to see what narrative began to emerge and where this perhaps might
be going and it does go a bit deeper.
The Irish Sea shared with both Britain and Ireland
has been used for a number of military exercises, even around that time in 1968 when the Aer Lingus
accident occurred. Both the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy had been using the waters out here
for training and of course, target practice. When the British acquired these Jindivik
planes, they launched them from a base in Llanbedr on the West coast of Wales.
When the British military conducted their exercises in the Irish Sea, they did so within
an exclusion zone that was mostly contained to Cardigan Bay. This zone however is still only
a few minutes flying time away from the Irish Coast. So for those who believed in the theory
of a possible collision with a foreign object, the possibility Aer Lingus Flight 712 could have
collided with a Jindivik looked plausible. In fact, investigators throughout the years
have had to consider this possibility, and it has been explored in official reports. A
midair collision resulting in either impairment or separation of the flight control
surfaces, that would explain it.
Because the purpose of these Jindivik planes
was for target practice, many also put forward the consideration that the Aer Lingus plane that
day was mistaken for a Jindivik, which of course brings up a rather uncomfortable possibility. It
is believed by some that Aer Lingus Flight 712, was inadvertently shot down by the British.
You see, though the British Military obtained these target drones from Australia for use with
the Royal Air Force and Navy, what a lot of people really latched onto was who else was using them
as well. Because what you’ll also find on the Western Coast of Wales is a military base at the
town of Aberporth. Jindivik planes were flown over the water and missiles were launched here
to shoot them down in training missions. So of course another narrative had formed that perhaps
a stray missile could have hit the Viscount.
Just like every other theory put forward in the
investigations, the Missile Theory lacked the necessary conclusive evidence. This also goes
for the Jindivik Theory, because there is a problem with British Involvement in this story.
A discrepancy in time that doesn’t line up and clouds the plausibility of these theories.
The Tuskar Rock Disaster occurred on a Sunday, no Jindiviks were ever launched on Sundays. It
was confirmed that none of these planes were in the air that day and no one was firing
missiles into the sky that day either.
If there was military activity in the region,
the relevant aviation authorities would have been notified as they had been on other occasions,
and what is called a “Notice to Airmen” or NOTAM would have been issued. When Captain Bernard
O’Beirne and First Officer Paul Heffernan turned up for work that day, they would have reviewed
their flight plan and looked over any relevant NOTAMS. It would have been rather explicit too,
“Don’t fly here, they’re setting off rockets”.
Analysis of the wreckage of the Jindivik found
off the Irish Coast in 1974 dated the UAV to have been in the sea for no more than one year,
quashing speculations that it had anything to do with Flight 712. For many in Ireland, including
the relatives of the deceased and investigators, this was enough for many people to say that
it was unlikely that flight 712 collided with a foreign object or was downed by a missile.
The theory still persists as apparently there are inconsistencies as one source puts it, in
the logbooks of some of the British Warships that had been in the region. The British
Ministry of Defense also had to admit that some documentation of the whereabout of
their ships had seemed to have gone missing.
Though many different theories have sprung up
about what exactly happened to the plane, after multiple reports and independent investigations,
as the years have gone by, people have tended to gravitate towards maintenance defects and poor
airworthiness of the plane being at fault. A lot of criticism being directed towards Aer
Lingus’ poor record keeping of maintenance.
Aer Lingus for many years had wanted to upgrade
its fleet and the Viscounts were finally retired in 1973. Over the decades, Aer Lingus became a
highly reputable airline and one of the safest in the entire world. There has never been a hull
loss of an Aer Lingus aircraft since. Aviation safety in Ireland has improved substantially,
the deadliest air accident to occur since was the crash of Manx 2 Flight 7100 which also happened
to involve Cork. That accident killed 6 people.
Tuskar Rock has never been
forgotten in the country. A memorial has been set up and services still
take place for those who perished that day. It is usually the standard convention that an
airline would change the flight number where there has been a high profile accident. Aer Lingus
however still operates the Cork to London route, albeit with an Airbus A320 these days and still
retains the Flight Number 712, it never changed.
Naturally though and it is important
to understand, that a lot of people have been left disappointed that this
case has been left unsolved for so long. Successive Irish governments and even the little
assistance from the United Kingdom have failed to retrieve more wreckage and conclusive answers.
Perhaps the clues as to what really happened still lie at the bottom of the Irish Sea.
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