Miscellaneous - This Day That Age   

dated January 22, 1954: Calcutta Comet Crash: Possible Reasons

British experts dismissed opinion that the Comet crash near Calcutta in May 1953 was due to lightning and explosion in the aircraft. Dr. P.D. Walker, Head of the Structures Department of the Royal Aircraft establishment at Farnborough, said that seven months of reconstruction and analysis of the parts of the wreckage brought to Britain, indicated that the starboard tail-plane had failed first. The port tail-plane followed; soon after one wing, and then the other. Fire, following the structural failure, was a secondary cause of the disaster. Dr. Walker said: "It seems some event occurred which led the aircraft into a very abnormal condition of flight, or the Comet encountered weather which would have broken any plane." Experts had sorted out parts of the wreckage and laid them out on the floor of a special hanger, as far as possible in their correct relative positions in a similar unbroken plane. The position of every part, as it fell into the ground, was plotted on a map to deduce the order in which it broke away from the plane.

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