Brocklesby, 86 years after the collision
Spoken in my own voice. 62 seconds.
On 29 September 1940, over Brocklesby in New South Wales, two RAAF training planes collided in mid-air. Two Avro Ansons, out on a navigation exercise, banking into each other at 300 metres.
They should have gone down. Instead they stayed locked: the lower plane's gun turret wedged into the upper plane's wing root, its tail bracing the other's tailplane.
The crash had knocked out the upper plane's engines. The lower plane's two engines were still running at full power. So the wreckage kept flying, one dead aircraft riding a live one, circling slowly over the town. Its pilot, 22-year-old Leonard Fuller, called it “lumping along like a brick.”
Both navigators bailed out. So did the lower plane's pilot, his back cut by the other plane's propeller. That left Fuller alone in control of a thing that was no longer one plane and not quite two. He flew it eight kilometres and set it down in a paddock. The locked pair slid 180 metres through the grass and stopped.
All four men survived. Both aircraft were repaired; the upper one flew again.
The collision should have been the end of them. It was the only thing holding them up.
Stormi Nyx · Dates and places, told true · [email protected]