The Calcutta crash of the BOAC Comet 1 G ALYV Saturday 2^rd May 1953.                                Prof. Prodyut Das

To prevent any Cainy Ball at the fair of Far from the Madding Crowd type anticlimax I state that it is quite possible that I and my playmates saw the ill- fated aircraft perhaps a minute before it crashed, I later saw the wrecked parts at the Kadamtala Railway Station when it was brought there by the Martin’s Light Railway. There is an excellent and detailed report that was published by the Indian authorities and is available along with other reports on the web as The Comet crash at Calcutta etc. That is the basis I have used in this piece and added my own comments and what I remember seeing from that event almost seventy years ago.

My home town Howrah was a district town and perhaps like all district towns of that time it was very provincial and peaceful. Outside of the main roads where six bullock carts laden with hay and two war surplus Chevrolet trucks in fifteen minutes would be termed as heavy traffic Howrah was quiet and rustic. There were vacant lots where children could play, straggling houses, ponds whose waters were clear and green as bottle glass and which mirrored the massive trees that crowded the edges and overhung the waters. The place had, even in activity, the tranquil charm of Constable’s “The Hay Wain”- albeit somewhat dusty! The tallest things around were the scattered coconut palm trees, the houses mainly low single storied ones. I mention all this to emphasise that unlike modern towns where one feels one is living at the bottom of a brick well, in Howrah of the early fifties the sky came down to the top of that boundary wall or the crown of the Palash trees. One could see the sky and a lot of it.

I was of pre school age and my interest was torn between cars, steam locomotives -the BNR (Bengal Nagpur Railway ) railway embankment on the marshes was a pilgrimage to see the great monsters grunt up the gradient spewing smoke and roaring defiance- and of course aeroplanes. The House at Kadamtala Howrah we stayed in was located such that most aeroplane from Dum Dum flew over the house. Aircraft climbed much slower then and sometimes they flew so low that one could see the registration written in big letters under their wings. I was then illiterate so I could not read the registration.

After my first year at school my Uncle Tara who was the Secretary of the Local Library (The Bantra Public Library estd 1838) broke the rule about minimum age and made me a member of the Boys section of the Library for two annas a month and a loan of one book at a time. That was a force multiplier because the Boys Section had an excellently curated (Thank You! Someone!) selection of books in English. Apart from the usual “Ideal Book for Boys” and “John Wently wins through” genre  my particular favourites was a series of books by Ward Lock, the publishers, known as the Wonder Book of …. . Motors, Railways, Ships, Aircraft, the RAF, Army How it’s done, Daring Deeds Why and What, Hobbies and so on. The volume on the Navy was unavailable. There were about 26 such titles and all were well written with a friendly style, many interesting photographs and pithy captions and comments. Suddenly I became very “knowledgeable” and could put a reference and “dimension” and a keener joy to my enquiries and my “seeing”.

The aeroplanes I saw were mainly Dakotas but on Friday afternoons, after school, I would stand in our courtyard to see the Calcutta- London Air India silver and red Constellation fly high over our Mango tree. A rara avis was the IIISCO’s green and white Aero 45 with its Siebel inspired glass “bug house” cockpit. The Queens flight Britannia whispering in over the coconut palms in '61was memorable. There was a fair sprinkling of Tiger Moths. It was a wonder to see a Tiger, engine throttled back,  floating rather than flying through the air-rising and falling like a raft in the ocean of air. One morning I saw a Tiger do aerobatics overhead mainly dives and loops and so forth. The next day it crashed whilst displaying the same routine at a Cadets parade. The poor cadets were both killed. The picture showed the aircraft on fire tipped up on its nose, the wing fabrics bulging. My cousins and I thought that perhaps the wings were stuffed with cotton wool to give it shape!

But all this was still in the future! In 1953 I was a just a four-year-old heathen, admittedly precocious, but nevertheless an infant savage. The afternoon was gusty and the weather stormy but it was not a ”Kalboishaki” those lovely jet black low hung clouds so dear to Sanskrit Poets. It was squally. The clouds were white, tinted with the red of the lowering sun but the cloud base was high , the weather stormy to the extent it made the palm trees sway wildly. It was then we saw this silver aeroplane- not a Dakota- quite high and as we watched it flew on until – I cannot now “see” it – it must have disappeared into the clouds. “Bata crash Korbey!” (The fellow will crash”) shouted our leader my Cousin Shonti and we whooped like Comanches and resumed our play of running against the gale and thought no more about it.

The next morning the news was out an English aeroplane had crashed beyond Domjur and Cousin Shonti had his fifteen minutes of fame within our group. By evening I had seen a piece of foam from a seat and part of a letter somewhat stained with mud and written on “airmail” paper. There was also talks of a young boy dead but as unharmed as if sleeping. The next day perhaps the local newspaper caried pictures of the wreckage. The pictures were surprisingly clear. I say this because the standing joke was that the newspaper used the same “block” to show “a tense moment in the Durand Cup Match” and “Our late founder….”. The pictures show a substantially intact aircraft forward fuselage less the wings resting slightly nose down- possibly the rear of the portion was on an “aal” the shallow plot enclosing mud dams made to hold the water during paddy growing.

I was too young to be taken to the crash site which was about ten miles away but when the wreckage was brought to Kadamtala Railway station of Martin’s Light Railway I got to se the wreckage. The Martin’s Light Railway was in two sections -The Howrah Amta railway and the Howrah Sheakhala Railways with a total route length of perhaps a hundred kilometers. It was a 2’-0” gauge railway with locally built wooden bogie carriages made by local carpenters with electric lights but no brakes. The locomotives were little terrier  brisk tank engines of an unknown British make but if you have seen pictures of Bagnall’s 0-4-2Ts you will know what they looked like. To me they looked charming- like Thomas the tank engine!

The Comet was not a very large aeroplane by modern standards- it was a forty-seater rather like the Avro 748 but only more potent! I can still remember the shiny bright aluminum sheets piled on the small narrow gauge 4- wheeler wagons. Of course, it was not possible for me to identify the parts – it all looked like a jumble of aluminum sheeting but I do remember a lot of black vulcanized rubber parts and things that looked like a giant’s rubber gloves but with many “fingers”. There were also several black cylinders about the size of very large Thermos Flasks which is what we took them to be but they may have been hydraulic jacks or the combustion chambers of the De Havilland Ghost engines though I am sure I do not recall any taper on them. I certainly did not realize that I was witnessing a significant event in Aviation History.

The crashed aircraft G-ALYV had started from Singapore and arrived at Calcutta via Bangkok and Rangoon landing at Dum Dum at 1510 hrs local time. Take off was at 1629 for Delhi Palam with 37 passengers and a crew of six and though Met forecast strong squalls the Pilot was more worried about the weather on arrival at Palam. Contact was lost six minutes after departure when the Pilot failed to report passing 7000 feet. It was around 2000 hrs that a station master on the Light Railway relayed the news of the crash as reported by the police to Calcutta. Due to stormy weather nothing much could be done but by next morning the crash site was reached and it was confirmed that there were no survivors. Only forty bodies could be recovered the remaining three being presumed to have been destroyed by the fire. The bodies were later interred in the Tollygunge Cemetery.

The Indian/UK accident investigation which was accepted by the UK and published by HMSO concluded that the aircraft suffered from structural failure due to flying into a thunder squall. The Wreckage trail was about five and a half mile long with the elevators coming off first followed by the wing skins and then the outer wing panels and finally the fuselage broke off at about mid cabin. The eye witnesses saw the aircraft on fire before it crashed. The parts showed no scratches indicating that forward speed was minimal and the sections just rained down. One is saddened by the loss of lives. May their soul rest in peace.

Metal fatigue in pressure cabins was relatively unknown then. The accident report naturally did not perhaps give it serious attention but I have wondered if THAT was also the cause here. The airframe had flown about 1629 hrs which is also near the figure where the other Comets crashed. The aircraft ECS controls and valves showed that the fuselage had started to pressurize. Could it be that instead of an explosive decompression as at high altitude there was a milder rupture and the subsequent disintegration of the airframe near the centre fuselage- near the RDF aerial hatch damaged the tailplane with consequent fatal consequences.

When the problem of metal fatigue was identified De Havilland did a very thorough investigation and Sir Geoffery very generously donated the results to the world so that commercial aviation could be safer.