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:
“Out alone in the winter rain,
Intent on giving and taking pain.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“John Anderson my jo, John,
We clamb the hill the gither;
And mony a canty day, John,
We’ve had wi’ ane anither:
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we’ll go;
And sleep the gither at the foot,
John Anderson my Jo.”
—Robert Burns (1759–1796)
“It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,
Tugging at banks, until they seemed
Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,
That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,
The breath of turgid summer, and
Heavy with thunder’s rattapallax....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.”
—Ben Elton (b. 1959)