Remembering Tuskar Rock and the St. Phelim.

Our first child was two days old and I was watching television in Mount Carmel Nursing Home when the tragic news of the crash of the Aer Lingus Viscount St Phelim flashed on the screen.  How well I remembered that aircraft. I must have flown on it a good number of times. Indees, my very first  flight out of hostess training was on a Viscount - a gruelling duty known as a London/Shannon, with four legs of a journey, forty minute turnarounds and no time to eat in all that  long day. 

For ten months before marriage I had flown the Atlantic with two trips each week to New York and a four day trip to Chicago every so often. But the tragic plane crash off Tuskar Rock brought it home to me how easily I could have been one of that ill-fated crew had the timing been different and I still flying European routes.  Deeply emotional, I remember thinking I knew every mile of that route. In air miles I had walked  the cabin many times over and it gave me a certain affinity with the stricken crew. 

Today as I flew on an Aer Lingus Airbus 320 to Malaga I was very conscious of the significance of today's date. I know I wasn't the only one who would have been marking this forty-sixth anniversary. So many other flight crew would have been aware too, remembering with varying degrees of affection and regret those former colleagues, not to mention the grieving families and friends of passengers and crew.