The Winter Hill air disaster occurred on 27 February 1958 when the Silver City Airways Bristol 170 Freighter G-AICS, travelling from the Isle of Man to Manchester, England, crashed into Winter Hill (also known as Rivington Moor) several hundred yards away from the Independent Television Authority's Winter Hill transmitting station.
Thirty-five people died and seven were injured. The weather that night (note: the ICAO report states that the accident occurred at 09.15 in the morning) was so severe that none of the engineers working in the ITA transmitting station were aware of the crash. Several feet of snow hampered rescue efforts, and a snow cat vehicle had to be diverted from the A6 to cut a path for emergency vehicles though the track had been cleared by people using spades by the time it arrived.
Read more about Winter Hill Air Disaster: Background, Crash
Famous quotes containing the words winter, hill, air and/or disaster:
“The sky seemed so small that winter day,
A dirty light on a lifeless world,
Contracted like a withered stick.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“In the schoolyard,in the cloakrooms, the children boasted their
scars of dried snot;wrists and knees garnished with impetigo.”
—Geoffrey Hill (b. 1932)
“What is lawful is not binding only on some and not binding on others. Lawfulness extends everywhere, through the wide-ruling air and the boundless light of the sky.”
—Empedocles 484–424 B.C., Greek philosopher. The Presocratics, p. 142, ed. Philip Wheelwright, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc. (1960)
“The disaster ... is not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect—this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they’re not critical to a culture’s existence.”
—Twyla Tharp (b. 1941)