Unsolved Aviation Mysteries

Five Strange Tales of Air and Sea

Keith McCloskey

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780750992589
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750994576
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Aviation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Conspiracy theories of sabotage, murder and even UFOs flourish around the greatest unsolved mysteries of aviation from the twentieth century. This account of the most intriguing loose ends from aeronautical history provides the known details of five great mysteries and the best (and most colourful) attempts to explain what might have happened. Planes disappearing out of the sky, shady dealings with Sri-Lankan businessmen, the plummeting death of the richest man in the world in 1928 and even the Kennedy family all feature in these gripping open cases. Having previously written about the Dyatlov Pass Incident and cast his detail-oriented eye over many other aviation mishaps, Keith McCloskey now turns his attention to reassessing these five mysteries –all of which occurred over water, none of them ever resolved.

CHAPTER 1

THE ISLE OF MULL CESSNA

The Isle of Mull is the second largest island of the Inner Hebrides after Skye. Despite its size, it has always had a fairly low population, with the small town of Tobermory acting as the main centre on the island. The island is known for tourism and its whisky, but despite being 90 miles from Glasgow, it used to require an eight-hour journey by road/rail and ferry to get there. With the advent of Scottish airline Loganair in the early 1960s, a proposal was put forward to establish an airfield on Mull. Army sappers cleared an area near Salen of 50,000 tonnes of earth and 1,000 trees to lay out a 780ft (238m) grass runway in only fifty-four days.

Once the airstrip was ready, Loganair started a service from Glasgow to Mull via North Connel, which was the airfield for Oban. The service ran at weekends in the summer and eventually became a daily service during the summer months. The schedule continued until 1975, when it was dropped as not being viable, which was a blow to the tourist economy of the island. However, the airstrip with the adjoining Glenforsa Hotel proved to be popular with private flyers, who would fly in and park their aircraft there, stay at the hotel and explore the island. The hotel had almost burned down in 1968 and was rebuilt in a Norwegian log style with chalets. In the same year that Loganair discontinued its summer service from Glasgow, the Glenforsa strip became the scene of one of the most enduring mysteries in Scotland to date.

On 20 December 1975, two guests arrived at the hotel, Norman Peter Gibbs and his companion, university lecturer Dr Felicity Grainger. They had visited previously on a few occasions and enjoyed the laid-back atmosphere of the area. Gibbs, who used Peter as his first name, was a 53-year-old property developer and had formed a company named Gibbs and Rae with a partner. He had come to Mull on holiday but also tohave a look at property in the area with a view to buying a place he could turn into a hotel with some land, where he could make an airstrip for visiting aircraft. What had given him the idea was the Glenforsa Hotel itself, with its own airstrip.

The two of them had driven to the Glenforsa Hotel by car having travelled over from Oban on the ferry. Gibbs was a pilot and had served in the RAF during the Second World War. After his arrival, he was advised that there was an aircraft for hire at North Connel airfield at Oban. The aircraft was Cessna F.150H G-AVTN and its owner was a well-known person named Ian Robertson Hamilton, a local market gardener and businessman and one of the four men who had stolen the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day in 1950. After a phone call from Gibbs to Hamilton, it had been intended that Hamilton was to fly the Cessna from North Connel over to Gibbs at the Glenforsa Hotel strip and Gibbs would then fly Hamilton back to North Connel before returning to Mull. It was a fairly short journey each way of around twenty minutes, and with the time taken for the formalities of handing the Cessna over to Gibbs when he arrived at Glenforsa and Gibbs landing at North Connel to drop Hamilton off and take off again the whole exchange should have taken well under two hours. However, the weather, which was to play a significant part in this story, intervened and so Hamilton rang Gibbs to say he could not fly over. From all accounts, Gibbs was never one to let anything stand in his way, so he arranged with Hamilton that he would drive over on the ferry from Mull to Oban with Grainger, meet Hamilton and return himself with the aircraft. Grainger would then drive the car back to the hotel.

Once back at the Glenforsa Hotel, both Gibbs and Grainger spent the next few days looking at property in the area and taking the time to relax.

On Christmas Eve, the two of them set off from the Glenforsa airstrip in the Cessna to the Isle of Skye and returned at 4.30 p.m. It was Gibbs’ birthday the following day as well as being Christmas Day, so they had an evening meal with wine in the hotel rather than go out. At 9.30 p.m., after he had finished his meal, Gibbs made an extraordinary decision and told his companion that he wanted to take the Cessna up for a quick circuit. It was a dark night with clouds and the airstrip had no facilities for night flying. Gibbs must have had some inkling that what he was about to do entailed some risk because he assured Grainger that if he got into trouble, he would bring the wheels down into the water to slow the aircraft down, then escape and make his way to the shore.

Unknown to Gibbs was the fact that the weather was shortly going to deteriorate rapidly. Gibbs should have phoned for a forecast but chose not to. He changed and then informed Roger Howitt (one of the hotel owner’s sons) that he was about to undertake a quick circuit in the Cessna. Gibbs asked Grainger to place two torches for him at the end of the runway for him to use as a guide to landing. They both walked out to the Cessna and got in. Gibbs started the engine and let it run for a while before taxiing to the end of runway 26 at the eastern end of the strip. Grainger got out of the aircraft and placed the torches on the end of the runway. She then walked to a nearby fence to wait for him to carry out the short flight. Gibbs taxied to the other end of the runway and again ran the engine for a number of minutes. He then released the brakes and gathered speed down the grass airstrip to take off.

Grainger watched as the Cessna took off and made a right turn to come back parallel to the airstrip. The plane then made another right turn to come around to line up and begin its descent for landing, when it disappeared behind a group of trees beyond the runway end. It was the last time anyone would see Peter Gibbs alive and the last time anyone would see the aircraft, which, at the time of writing, has yet to be ‘officially’ found and recovered.

Grainger waited for some time and when it was apparent that there was no sign of the Cessna, she made her way back to the hotel. Once it was clear that Gibbs and the Cessna had disappeared, the RAF Kinloss Mountain Rescue Team, based at Fort William, were called in immediately and police and local volunteers started searching the hills. Around forty-five searchers went out each day and were spread fairly widely as they were looking for an aircraft rather than a body on its own. These searches lasted for five days, in extremely bad weather.

Due to the holiday period at the time of the disappearance, there were no fishing boats out in the sound, so other than the witnesses at the Glenforsa Hotel, nobody else had seen what happened. The strong possibility that the Cessna may have come down into the Sound of Mull itself led to a search with Royal Navy Sea King helicopters. Unfortunately, they found nothing and the search on land and over the Sound of Mull was called off.

After the searches had been called off, life started to return to normal and the general feeling was that both the Cessna and Gibbs had gone down into the sea with the possibility that they would never be found. However, on 21 April 1976, almost exactly four months after the disappearance, Glenforsa Farm Manager and shepherd Donald McGillivray was out walking across the high ground above the Glenforsa Hotel when he came across a body lying on a tree trunk. The spot where he found the body was roughly 400ft above sea level and over a mile away from the hotel. It was the body of Peter Gibbs.

The discovery of Gibbs’ body sparked another bout of intensive searching for nearly a week with, again, a similar number of people (forty-plus) involved. However, there was no sign of the Cessna and no other sign of how Gibbs might have reached the spot he was found in. The discovery of his body raised more questions than answers in what was turning into a peculiar tale.

The system for investigating deaths in Scotland is different to the rest of the UK. There is no system of coroners’ inquests in Scotland as there is in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Accidental, unexpected, unexplained, sudden or suspicious deaths are investigated privately for the local crown agent, an official called the Procurator Fiscal. Only certain types of death are investigated further at Fatal Accident Inquiries (FAIs). Gibbs’ death fell into the category of requiring an FAI and this was duly held in Oban on 24 June 1976. The Board of Trade Senior Accident Inspector William Black Cairns was the first to give evidence at the inquiry. Cairns had spent eleven years in the RAF with a further eighteen years of test-flying experience behind him, totalling over 10,000 hours of flying time. He had arrived in Oban on 2 January 1976, nine days after the Cessna had disappeared and two days after the search had been called off. (At this point Gibbs was assumed to be with the missing aircraft.) Cairns gave an outline of the servicing of Cessna F.150H G-AVTN, that it was maintained by a company in Edinburgh (Lowland Aero Services) and that the certificate of registration and certificate of airworthiness were both in order. Cairns was asked if there was anything at all about the Cessna that would have suggested it had not been looked after properly or was in such a condition that it was dangerous to fly, to which he replied no.

When it came to the background of Peter Gibbs and his suitability as a pilot, a slightly different picture began to emerge. Cairns said that Gibbs was an ex-RAF pilot and after the end of the war had subsequently joined the RAF Reserve with the rank of flying officer. Gibbs held a private pilot’s licence, which Cairns said had expired in October 1974, a full year and two months before the Cessna went missing. The renewal of a licence was dependent on the pilot’s age and in Gibbs’ case, he was required to renew it every twelve months. The renewal of Gibbs’ licence was also dependent on him passing a medical examination, which he had undertaken in May 1975. Following the medical, Gibbs applied for the licence renewal, only to be told that he would have to undergo a general flying test before it could be renewed. The records show that Gibbs did not bother to take the test for whatever reason. Flying with an out-of-date licence might be viewed as a lesser offence by some, especially as Gibbs was only flying himself in a light aircraft on the lowest category of licence, but Cairns stated that Gibbs ‘was flying illegally’.

There was also a further issue with regard to the licence, because the medical undertaken by Gibbs on 10 July 1975 found that his eyesight was defective; a condition was attached to the medical certificate that stated Gibbs had to wear spectacles when he was flying. What Cairns took pains to point out was that although Gibbs had passed his medical with the condition that he would have to wear glasses whilst flying, he had not taken the general flying test, so as matters stood, his flying licence was still invalid. It is possible to argue that the invalid licence was a technicality. Gibbs had, at least, made an effort to partially renew it by taking the medical. However, the next issue raised in the inquiry was not so lightly dismissed and called into question his judgement as a competent pilot.

When Gibbs announced his decision to take the Cessna up for a quick circuit, it was already well after 9 p.m. It was also a cold, dark, cloudy night, so visibility was very poor. On top of this, snow or sleet had been forecast so the weather was set to deteriorate very shortly. Cairns was asked what experience Gibbs had of night flying and the answer was a total of only five hours. In response to the question as to whether this might be considered ‘limited’, Cairns replied that it was extremely limited. Despite Gibbs’ lack of experience of flying at night, there was nothing to officially stop him from doing so, notwithstanding the issue over his invalid licence. The only problem that might have arisen would have been if he had taken a passenger up with him, for which he would have needed a night rating on his licence. Tied in with Gibbs’ lack of experience of night flying was the problem of the Glenforsa strip itself. Cairns responded to a question as to its suitability for night-flying operations that it was not suitable at all. He went further, saying, ‘As a personal opinion, with the experience I have in flying, I would certainly not attempt night flying from Glenforsa.’

At this point in the FAI, the Fiscal mentioned the very poor weather that night and then asked Cairns for his opinion as to the suitability of the two torches used by Grainger to act as landing aids. The Fiscal indicated the two torches in the room before he asked Cairns for his opinion. Cairns was scathing in his response, saying, ‘In my opinion, they are absolutely worthless as a form of indication.’

The damning of the torches by Cairns was followed by his statement that the Glenforsa airstrip had no landing lights at all. Cairns then pointed out that in the absence of any wreckage of the Cessna itself, he could only make preliminary enquiries as his work was primarily concerned with an examination of the aircraft, if it was available. The Fiscal said he accepted that and put two hypothetical questions to Cairns.

The first question he asked was: Would the Cessna have been completely consumed with little or no trace if a serious fire had broken out? Cairns replied that it was unlikely as, even with a serious fire, there was always something left as wreckage. Cairns was then asked to consider if it had been possible there had been a total or partial engine failure while Gibbs was flying the plane and had made a soft landing on some part of the island. Again, Cairns responded that it was unlikely because although it was a hypothetical question, he felt that as the Cessna had been recently serviced, there was only a remote chance of that happening, unless it had run out of fuel. After prompting, Cairns did say that a stall might have been possible and that for this Cessna in landing configuration, the stalling speed would be in the region of 50mph. He made the point that if the Cessna was headed into the wind, the effective speed could have been as low as 25mph.

The Fiscal came back to the theme of the plane making a soft landing on some part of the island with the suggestion that Gibbs had jumped out and it had continued on its set course without him. Cairns didn’t reject the possibility but argued that to do such a thing and open the door in a flight, which he said was most likely in a climb condition, would be a very difficult thing to do. Furthermore, Cairns said he had never heard of anyone climbing out of a plane to jump in this way. Continuing in this argument, Cairns was asked if Gibbs would have hurt himself by jumping from a moving plane. Cairns said that he had never heard of anyone doing so and compared it to jumping from a window on the second floor of a building, and that he would expect someone jumping from a building at this height would almost certainly sustain fractures.

There followed an odd exchange between Cairns and the Fiscal. The Fiscal was presumably wanting to be clear in his mind about what exactly was involved in opening the door of a Cessna, so he asked Cairns if the pilot would step out on to the wing, to which Cairns confirmed that he would. However, the Cessna was a high-wing monoplane and a pilot opening the door would step out into nothing, other than a small footstep built into the fixed undercarriage strut. The small footstep was just an aid to getting in and out and a pilot wanting to exit could just push away from the door onto the ground or into the air as there was nothing to impede him.

The Fiscal then focused on the crux of the matter – where was the Cessna? It was Cairns’ view that the plane was very unlikely to have come down in the sea surrounding Mull owing to the absence of sodium chloride in the flying boots worn by Gibbs or in his watch. These were two places where it would be expected to find evidence of salt water if someone had been in the sea. He said that the pathologist would also have expected to find traces of sea vegetation in these two places and there had been none.

On the issue of Gibbs’ body being found near the top of the hill above the Glenforsa airstrip, Cairns was asked by the Fiscal to describe a situation he had been involved in concerning the loss of a light plane in the UK that had come down in a forest and had been covered over by the trees. Cairns said that the situations were different and no parallel could be drawn because the earlier accident had involved the plane coming straight down into the forest nose first and the pilot had been killed on impact. The plane had been suspended in the trees and was not found for two months.

The Fiscal was keen to examine all the scenarios as to where the Cessna may have ended up and asked Cairns if he thought the aircraft had come down in one of the hill lochs on Mull. Cairns was shown some pictures and asked if he felt that 300 yards (274m) would be enough for the Cessna to stop in if it had stalled. Cairns did not want to be drawn and replied that the pictures of the loch in question did not give any idea of dimensions or size. He did say that if it had been in a stall condition, the Cessna’s undercarriage could bring it to a stop in water within a distance of 100ft (30m) and that the aircraft would eventually sink. Cairns again did not want to be drawn on whether the Cessna may have made any marks around a loch as it came down and, in fairness, it was far too generalised a question for him to give a specific answer.

Ian Robertson Hamilton, from whom Gibbs had hired G-AVTN, came into the exchange and asked Cairns to describe the radio equipment on board the Cessna that night. These were a 360 degree VHF transceiver, a VHF Omni-frequency radio finding facility, a medium-frequency radio finding facility and a radar transponder. Hamilton then produced some handling notes and asked Cairns to confirm that what was written on the back cover of the notes was a list of VHF stations along with a list of Omni-frequency stations. His aim was to show that assuming a copy was in G-AVTN, which it most likely was, then Gibbs could have chosen a station on one of the channels and be in instant communication should he have needed this. Hamilton asked Cairns to confirm that the international distress frequency was 121.5 and that no calls had been made from G-AVTN on the night of 24 December 1975. He also asked Cairns to confirm that Gibbs could have used the Omni-range unit to check his position from Omni stations at Machrihanish, the Isle of Jura, Stornoway and Prestwick. They were all listed, with their frequencies, on the back cover of the notes and Gibbs would have known how to use them. The point was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Isle of Mull Cessna
• Chapter 2 The Kennedy Curse
• Chapter 3 The Kinross Incident
• Chapter 4 A Sri Lankan Mystery
• Chapter 5 Murder, Suicide or Accident?
• Acknowledgements and Sources