Climbers saved by 60-year-old plane crash

IT ONCE propelled a mighty bomber to victory on the Dambuster raid, before crashing on a Highland mountain during the post-war peace.

Now, almost 60 years on, the wreckage of a Lancaster bomber has returned to active service – saving the lives of two climbers.

While mountaineering this winter, Ian Parnell and Jon Winter were swept down a gully in Wester Ross by an avalanche. Hurtling towards a 1,200ft drop on Beinn Eighe, they came to a halt when they struck the propeller of the Lancaster bomber, which crashed in 1951 claiming the lives of eight airmen.

Yesterday Mr Parnell, 40, from Sheffield, who has scaled peaks from the Himalayas to Patagonia, explained how he and his climbing partner, Mr Winter, 44, had planned to establish a new route on Beinn Eighe when they were caught in an avalanche last December. "We reached the summit and left some of our stuff so we could abseil down into the corrie to begin the new route. We were roped together and followed a ledge round into Fuselage Gully, named after the wreckage of the plane, and we could see it above us.

"We got about 50ft above the plane when the snow around me started to move. I tried to swim to the side of the gully, but I was swept down by huge slabs of snow. I remember thinking, 'If I hit the propeller, we won't go over the cliff and drop 1,200ft'.

"Jon was hit by the avalanche and buried in it, but the fact we were roped together and me hitting the propeller prevented us from having a long ride down.

"Eventually, the battering of snow finished and I found myself wrapped around the 8ft-long propeller blades. My back was torn and my left arm hurt, but pain never felt so good.

"I remember having this odd thought that I was thankful the plane had crashed because it had saved our lives. The tragic misfortune of those eight airmen was our good luck."

The ill-fated Lancaster TX264 was operating in a maritime reconnaissance role, and had taken off just after 6pm on 13 March, 1951 from RAF Kinloss for Rockall and the Faroe Isles. It was due back at RAF Kinloss around 2:25am the following day.

However, on the return journey the aircraft hit atrocious and freezing weather conditions. Some time after transmitting its last radio message, the Lancaster crashed just 15ft below the summit of Beinn Eighe, and at the top of the almost-inaccessible Far West Gully (now called Fuselage Gully), west of Triple Buttress. It took almost six months for Royal Marines to recover the bodies of all eight crew members.

The wreck of the Lancaster was destroyed by explosives, resulting in debris being strewn down the mountainside. A memorial plaque is fixed to a blade on one of the propellers.

Yesterday, Mr Parnell said: "I have been back to Beinn Eighe twice and recently I completed the new route we had set out to do that December. I called it 'Bruised Violet' after the colour of my badly bruised arm. But my return was an emotional experience. I relived that day and thought of what might have happened had it not been for the fate of those poor airmen."