Ambulance Stories of the 70s

The Channel Airways Plane Crashes

On 15th August 1967, there were two aircraft crashes on the same day in Portsmouth, (I believe they were Dakota's but I am not an expert). Portsmouth did have its own Airport many years ago and one very wet day an aircraft had just arrived from Jersey and was landing on the grass runway, the ground was so wet that it could not stop and crashed into an embankment over the back of the Airport and as far as I can remember there were no injuries. Later on that day I was on "blood" and we got a call to the city Airport where a plane was reported as just crashed. The general feeling amongst the staff was that it was the same plane that had crashed earlier and someone had only just spotted it and reported it, after all there could not be two crashes on one day, could there, Wrong.

Any way it was a 999 call and we had to respond. As we drove up the Eastern Road towards the Airport the traffic seemed to be at a standstill, that was very strange being so far away from the Airport, but with bells (yes bells) & sirens blearing we overtook them all and then found out the reason for the hold-up. Another aircraft had crashed, but this time it was on the main road completely blocking it, and the only injury was a woman that had a leg injury, it was amazing that it did not collide with any cars, as this was a very busy main road. All the other passengers were understandably somewhat shocked. The crash had caused absolute chaos to the city's traffic, as there were only two ways off Portsea Island, that was the Eastern road, that the plane had blocked, and Portsbridge (The main A3). It was interesting to note that when they tried to remove the plane from the road, they put a steel hawser through both the rear doors of the plane, connected it to a tractor unit and tried to pull the plane back on to the airfield, but all they succeeded in doing was to badly damage the tail section of the plane. It was removed by other means after many hours.