Warbird Information Exchange

Interesting discussion on Canberra's worst air crash in WW2 which killed several senior government officials - http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-16/n ... er/4893354 - was there mistakes made after the crash??

Well done article and video clip. As a casual observation, it seems the Aussies are far more conscientious of their history than Americans. Could you see this news story being aired on any of the major American news outlets?

With Aviation still a relatively new technology, crash investigations and forensics were nowhere even close to today's standards, and it's entirely possible errors were made. With the Hudson being the newest aircraft in the RAAF fleet, I could completely picture the Air Minister wanting to get some "stick time", not realizing that this plane flew differently than anything he had flown before. It sounds like the Hudson was typical of American transports at the time: Very easy to fly, but if you get yourself into trouble, they bite back hard.

You see a lack of strong forensic investigations in the United States with crashes around the same era. Two that pique my interest are the crash of a National Air Transport Boeing 247 on October 10, 1933 -- the first ever documented incident of an airliner being brought down by sabotage...and still remains unsolved who planted the explosive and the "Lovettsville Air Disaster" of August 31, 1940, when a PCA DC-3 nosed over and crashed. The CAB ruled that the pilots were incapacitated by a lighting strike. Wind shear seems like it would be the more likely cuplrit, although little was known about that concept until the 1970s.