Crash
The Ministers, General White and their staff were being flown from Melbourne to Canberra for a Cabinet meeting. The aircraft, an RAAF Lockheed Hudson bomber, was flown by an experienced RAAF officer, Flight Lieutenant Robert Hitchcock.
The Melbourne Herald reported: "The plane was seen by watchers at the Canberra Aerodrome and the Air Force station to circle the drome, and then rise and head south. It disappeared behind a low tree-dotted hill. There was an explosion and a sheet of flame, followed by a dense cloud of smoke... The Canberra Fire Brigade and ambulances from Queanbeyan and Canberra, as well as several Air Force tenders, arrived soon afterwards and fire extinguishers were played on the blazing wreckage. After about half-an-hour, when the blaze had died down, it was seen that the entire undercarriage, wings and structural supports of the plane had been torn away and were a smouldering mass in which were the charred bodies of those on board."
Two other Cabinet ministers, Senator George McLeay and Arthur Fadden, leader of the Country Party, had intended to fly to Canberra on the same flight, but for personal reasons decided to travel by train instead.
Read more about this topic: 1940 Canberra Air Disaster
Famous quotes containing the word crash:
“O ship
white-sailed of Crete,
you brought my mistress
from her quiet palace
through breaker and crash of surf
to love-rite of unhappiness!”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not to bar
Our passage to our journey’s end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we are....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)