Evening Post Wed April 11^th 1973

By FRANK KELLY, who has had a lifetime’s experience in civil aviation and is a former deputy publicity manager of the British Aircraft Corporation. All the reports indicate that the appalling weather conditions were the basic cause of this crash and there is no suggestion of any technical fault. 

Vanguards were regularly operated by B.E.A, on the London-Belfast services in the early sixties, and as I was working in Northern Ireland at that time I was & regular passenger.

 I always found It a very docile aircraft with no alarming characteristics from the passengers’ point of view, but some people found it a little noisy and complained of vibration when sitting near the engines. For that reason, there was always a bit of a scramble for the back seats. These were also imagined to be safer in emergency than the forward seats, and this theory seems to have been proved regrettably the report that most survivors of yesterday’s crash were sitting in the rear end, which had broken off.