Plane Crash

A Memory of Boston.

In 1951 a friend and I were keen on taking photos with our cheap cameras. We decided to go to the Air Show, at the Aero Club down the Board Sides. It was a lovely afternoon, but was on the breezy side. A large crowd was enjoying a plane doing manoeuvres. It came into a dive, slightly coming out of the dive, but went straight into the ground, people gasped. I thought it had gone into the Forty Foot River. We ran across the road, stood on some wooden rail beside the railway, it had crashed onto the bank top on the other side. People ran to the level crossing, which was a fair way up the road, to get through a gate to get down the other side of the river. When I got to the crash site, they had pulled two clear of the plane, and were trying to cover them up with fabric of the plane, but the strong breeze kept blowing it off. A large crowd was watching, when the third man was lifted out by the firemen, he had a leg missing and there was a cry of horror - they quickly drifted away. The next day me and my mate went with our cameras to take photos, but a policeman said "You can't get close, there's a leg in it". The next day we went again, most of it had been put on lorry, we helped to put the rest on. There was some dentures in half, on the grass. A few months later I flew to Egypt in a Hastings, I was thinking about that crash most of the way.

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