EXPLOSION THEORY

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31520, 7 November 1967, Page 17

EXPLOSION THEORY

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) LONDON, Nov. 6. The wreck of the Spanish airliner which crashed in southern England on Saturday night with the loss of 37 lives may be taken back to Spain, an Iberian Airlines official said. The airline wants to piece the wreckage together to try

to discover the cause of the crash. The Caravelle jet was on a scheduled run from Malaga, southern Spain, to London’s Heathrow Airport. A spokesman for the Iberian Airlines in Madrid said that there appeared to have been an explosion aboard the Caravelle. He said “preliminary observations at the place of the accident suggest an explosion in flight—the origin of which is still unknown—given the wide radius over which frag-

ments of the aircraft were found scattered." Spanish aviation officials flew to the scene of the crash on Blackdown Hill, nearly 50 miles south-west of London, yesterday to help in the investigation. The crash was the sixth major disaster involving a Caravelle aircraft since the plane entered scheduled airline service in 1959. Among the dead were 25 Britons, nine Spaniards, two Americans, and one Australian. Actress Killed The actress, June Thorburn, was among those killed. Miss Thorburn, aged 36, had appeared in numerous films and television shows. The films included “The Pickwick Papers,” “The Cruel Sea,” and “The Battle of the Sexes.” Yesterday at their London home her husband, Mr Morten Smith-Petersen, disclosed that his wife had been five months pregnant. As she sat watching a ghost film on television in her home Mrs Eleanor Coles had a premonition of disaster. Then the wreckage from the crashed Caravelle plane hit the house. “I had a feeling something was coming, but I didn’t know where from,” Mrs Coles, a

former nurse, from Hawera, New Zealand, said yesterday. The fuselage of the Caravelle missed the home of Mr and Mrs Coles by about 10 yards. But a section of It was flung over the roof, dislodging slates, and bits of wreckage crashed through the French windows of the living room. Passengers yesterday praised the Australian pilot of the Cathay Pacific Airways Convair 880 for his coolness in freeing himself and helping passengers get out of the still-floating fuselage when the plane failed to take off from Hong Kong Airport and plunged into the harbour on Saturday. Only one person, a South Vietnamese woman, was killed. Mr Sushanto Ghosh, an Indian-born German from Dusseldorf, said the pilot appeared trapped in the cockpit but released himself to help passengers. “I’ve never seen such a cool-headed person,” he said. Passengers said the worst moment was waiting kneedeep in seawater to be rescued. Almost everyone thought the plane would sink before they could get off.