The family of a pilot who was barred from flying for life following the first public inquiry into an Aer Lingus crash in 1953 have applied to the Minister for Public Enterprise, Mrs O'Rourke, for an independent review of the case similar to that conducted into the Tuskar Rock air disaster.
The daughters of the late Captain T.J. Hanley have asked the Minister to allow the two recently appointed international investigators into the Tuskar Rock tragedy to investigate the circumstances surrounding their father's inquiry.
They claim many of the personnel in Aer Lingus and the accidents investigations branch of the old department of industry and commerce who conducted the controversial 1970 inquiry into the Tuskar Rock disaster were also involved in their father's case.
Following the reopening of the Tuskar Rock disaster inquiry, Mrs Nuala Hanley-Pearse, Ms Patricia Hanley and Ms Aoife Hanley believe there are equally compelling grounds for reviewing the findings of the 1953 inquiry. Mrs Hanley-Pearse lives in Florida while her sisters have retired to Sligo and Mayo.
Captain Hanley, who died aged 85 in 1992, was the pilot of an Aer Lingus DC3, St Kieran, which force-landed in a field at Spernall Ash, near Birmingham, on January 1st, 1953.
His Dakota aircraft was on a scheduled flight from Dublin to Birmingham when the accident happened. The aircraft was a total loss, but none of the 22 passengers was seriously injured.
An 11-day public inquiry, the first such formal investigation in this State into an aircraft disaster, was held. The main conclusion of the inquiry, chaired by the late Mr Justice Thomas Teevan, was that the primary cause of the accident was loss of engine power due to fuel starvation; this was caused by selecting the port engine to the right main tank, to which the starboard engine was also selected.
Captain Hanley's licence for passenger-carrying aircraft was endorsed for life. He was president of the Irish Airline Pilots' Association at the time and, for the previous four years, had been in conflict with the company and the Department on matters of air safety. He was forced to emigrate after the inquiry and did ground work at Honolulu international airport for almost 20 years until he retired.
On his retirement, Captain Hanley and his family began campaigning for the case to be reopened. He claimed relevant evidence had been withheld. He had based his defence in the public inquiry, he told The Irish Times in 1974, on the possibility of water contamination of the fuel and alleged that this was not properly investigated in court.
The Irish Airline Pilots' Association, under its then president, Captain P.V. Donoghue, made submissions to the Government in the mid-1970s supporting his contention that a miscarriage of justice had taken place. The pilots asked for the case to be re-opened on the following grounds: that the water-in-fuel theory, "then a serious hazard at Dublin airport", was not properly investigated; that the most important evidence to support this theory - a Liverpool police report, dated March 5th, 1953, which the court said did not exist - was "apparently deliberately withheld"; that vital evidence from witnesses at the scene, including the land-owner and two firemen, who were not called before the court, refuted the court's verdict of fuel mismanagement; and that references to water in fuel were deleted from the verbatim report of the inquiry, thus preventing the court from coming to a just conclusion.
The IALPA submission, made to the then minister for transport and power, Mr Peter Barry, was backed up by a separate technical appraisal of the case carried out on the pilots' behalf by an English air accident investigator and engineer, Mr Eric Brereton.
Mr Brereton was an aeronautical inspector on the aviation staff of the Irish department of industry and commerce at the time of the accident. He told The Irish Times in 1977 that he had resigned from the department in 1953 because of this case. He said he considered it "one hundred per cent certain that it (the cause of the accident) was not fuel mismanagement". The evidence obtainable from the sketch of the accident, plus the evidence of eyewitnesses not called, indicated the engines were operating under power when the aircraft touched down, he added.
In all communications with Mr Barry and his successors in 1977, IALPA requested that the original court and assessors examine the new evidence.
In a letter to Ms Patricia Hanley on November 17th, 1972, Mr Teevan disclosed that the then Taoiseach, Mr de Valera, permitted a private meeting after the judicial inquiry in 1953 to discuss "relevant and important" evidence not heard in the case. The chairman of the inquiry also said he thought Captain Hanley was "too harshly treated" and personally tried to have his licence restored.
Mr Teevan made his personal copy of the transcript of the inquiry available to the minister, Mr Barry, and the department for the reappraisal, since all official verbatim records of the case were missing. Three ministers - Mr Barry, Mr Tom Fitzpatrick and Mr Padraig Faulkner - were involved in the re-examination of the case. Captain Hanley was informed by the minister for transport and tourism, Mr Faulkner, on August 3rd, 1977, that it had been decided to restore his licence "unconditionally". Following the Tuskar Rock review, however, his daughters are now asking for his verdict to be overturned and his good name restored.