PLANE CRASHES

Southland Times, Issue 21772, 29 July 1932, Page 5

PLANE CRASHES

THREE PERSONS KILLED EXPLOSION OCCURS IN MID-AIR MACHINE IN FRAGMENTS (United Press Assn.—Telegraph Copyright.) London, July 28. Bruce, the 21-year-old son of Mr Alfred Bossom, Conservative member for Maidstone, who recently decided that he could not sacrifice his recordbreaking for marriage to a Knightsbridge girl, tragically ended his career yesterday. When piloting an aeroplane which crashed near Farnham, he and two passengers, one being Prince Otto Erbach Fuerstenau, were ail killed. , They were taking Prince Otto, who was their guest, on a pleasure flight from Heston to Southampton and encountered bad weather. An eyewitness saw the plane emerge suddenly from the clouds and then a terrific explosion occurred, the machine being badly twisted. A later message states that the crash occurred near Churt, not far from the houses of Mr Lloyd George and Viscount Snowden. The bodies were widely separated when found several hundred feet from the wreckage. They were so mutilated that they were only identifiable by articles in the pockets. Only a few soldiers and pedestrians witnessed the accident. An officer of the Border Regiment saw the plane emerge from the clouds wingless, like a flying bedstead. He was horrified to see the fuselage break up and the bodies fall, followed by the petrol tank. The News-Chronicle calls attention to the extraordinary similarity between the Bossom crash and the Meopham disaster in July, 1931, when following an explosion fragments fell from a thick cloud. Mrs Bossom often went for flights with her son. Prince Otto, who was aged 23, was making his first visit to England. It is believed that the crash was due to lightning striking the plane. Bossom’s ambition was to break the records to South Africa and Australia and cross the Atlantic. He narrowly escaped death in May last when he crashed in Cheshire and the machine took fire.