The 1940 Canberra air disaster was an aircraft crash that occurred near Canberra, the capital of Australia, on 13 August 1940, during World War II. All ten people on board were killed: six passengers, including three members of the Australian Cabinet and the Chief of the General Staff; and four crew. The Lockheed Hudson aircraft is believed to have stalled on its landing approach, when it was too low to recover.
The deaths of the three cabinet ministers severely weakened the United Australia Party government of Robert Menzies and contributed to its fall in 1941.Tink, Andrew "Air Disaster Canberra: the plane crash that destroyed a government ". NewSouth Books. 1 April 2013, , Retrieved 17 April 2013 via boffinsbookshop.com.au
Background The aircraft involved in the crash, military serial A16-97, was one of a batch of 100 Lockheed Hudson bombers, recently delivered to No. 1 Aircraft Depot at RAAF Base Laverton on 20 June 1940 and assigned to No. 2 Squadron RAAF. It was the first Hudson in the RAAF to be fitted out with passenger seating, to be reserved for transporting "essential maintenance stores and personnel to advanced operational bases", as well as ministerial traffic when required. On 9 August, the station administrative officer at RAAF Laverton received instructions to prepare a flight to Canberra on 13 August, to be reserved for James Fairbairn, the Minister for Air and Civil Aviation. The aircraft had 7 hours and 10 minutes of flying time, of which 2 hours and 35 minutes had been completed by Lockheed test pilots. A daily inspection was completed on the morning of the flight and signed off by the pilot Flight Lieutenant Robert Hitchcock. At 8.47 a.m. he and three crew members left RAAF Laverton for Essendon Airport.
Fairbairn had been working at his departmental headquarters in Melbourne and requested the flight in order to attend an important cabinet meeting on defence policy, which would discuss the allocation of Australian resources in the war. It had been called partially in response to a telegram from Winston Churchill to Menzies outlining his views on the prospect of war with Japan. The chiefs of staff of the army, navy and air force were also due to be in attendance. Fairbairn invited three other senior officials to join him on the flight – Geoffrey Street, Minister for the Army; Henry Gullett, Minister for Information, and General Brudenell White, Chief of the General Staff. Fairbairn's private secretary Dick Elford and White's staff officer Frank Thornthwaite were the two other passengers. Two other ministers, George McLeay and Arthur Fadden, were also invited, but declined seats as they had already arranged to take the train. Prime Minister Robert Menzies' assistant private secretary Peter Looker had reserved two seats on the flight, but Menzies also preferred to take the train.
Crash The Ministers and General White, with their staff, were being flown from Melbourne to Canberra.
The Perth Daily News reported: "The plane was seen by watchers at the Canberra Aerodrome and the Air Force station to circle the drome, and then rise and head south. It disappeared behind a low tree-dotted hill. There was an explosion and a sheet of flame, followed by a dense cloud of smoke... The Canberra Fire Brigade and ambulances from Canberra and Queanbeyan, across the border in New South Wales, as well as several Air Force tenders, arrived soon afterwards and fire extinguishers were played on the blazing wreckage. After about half-an-hour, when the blaze had died down, it was seen that the entire undercarriage, wings and structural supports of the plane had been torn away and were a smouldering mass in which were the charred bodies of those on board."
The plane came down in a paddock on "Dundee", a grazing property of owned by Duncan Cameron.
Casualties
Brigadier Geoffrey Street, Minister for the Army and Repatriation. A World War I veteran who had been awarded the Military Cross, Street entered Federal Parliament in 1934 and became Minister for Defence in 1938. With the onset of World War II, Street's portfolio was split, and he became Minister for the Army. He gained the Repatriation portfolio in 1940.
James Fairbairn, Minister for Air and Civil Aviation. A pastoralist and accomplished aviator who served with the Royal Flying Corps during World War I, Fairbairn was elected to Federal Parliament in 1933 and became Minister for Civil Aviation and Vice-President of the Executive Council in 1939. He was appointed Minister for Air at the onset of World War II, and regained the Civil Aviation portfolio in 1940.
Sir Henry Gullett, Vice-President of the Executive Council and Minister in charge of Scientific and Industrial Research. A journalist until his enlistment in 1916, Gullett became Australia's official war correspondent for the AIF in Palestine in 1918. He was elected to Parliament in 1925, becoming Deputy Leader of the Opposition from 1929 to 1930, Minister for Trade and Customs from 1928 to 1929 and 1932 to 1933, Minister without portfolio from 1934 to 1937, Minister for External Affairs and Information from 1939 to 1940, and was appointed vice-president of the Executive Council in March 1940.
General Sir C. Brudenell White, Chief of the General Staff. With a background of service with Australian forces in South Africa in 1902–03, White served as Chief of Staff to Generals Bridges and Birdwood during World War I. He became Chief of the General Staff in 1920 and, in 1923, was appointed the first chairman of the Public Service Board. White returned to the Army as Chief of the General Staff in 1940.
Lieutenant Colonel Francis Thornthwaite, Staff Officer to General White. An officer in the Australian Army from 1910, Thornthwaite was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross for his service during World War I. He was serving as Army Liaison Officer on the General Staff at the time of his death.
Richard Edwin Elford. Elford, who had a good knowledge of aeronautics, was Fairbairn's private secretary. Wanting to stay overnight in Melbourne to celebrate his first wedding anniversary, he traded places with Arthur Fadden, who instead took the overnight train.
RAAF crew: Flight Lieutenant Robert Edward Hitchcock Pilot Officer Richard Frederick Wiesener Corporal John Frederick Palmer Aircraftman Charles Joseph Crosdale
Cause The cause of the crash has always been indeterminate, although there has never been any suggestion of enemy action or sabotage. The crash took place at 10:15 a.m. in fine weather, in what the Melbourne Herald called "ideal flying conditions".
James Fairbairn had served in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I and still enjoyed flying. It has always been suspected that he may have persuaded the RAAF crew to allow him to fly the plane into Canberra. A week before the accident, Fairbairn told an Adelaide headmaster, "Hudson bombers have a rather nasty stalling characteristic.... From what I have been told, a pilot coming in to land can find himself, suddenly and without warning, in a machine that is no longer airborne, heading straight to the ground.... Personally, I think it's only a matter of handling your throttles wisely".Andrew Tink (23 March 2013) "Fatal Flight". Sydney Morning Herald, accessed 19 May 2013 (Edited extract from Tink, "Air Disaster Canberra")The 1940 Canberra air disaster that changed history — and the unanswered questions that remain ABC News, 4 September 2018. Retrieved 4 September 2018.
More recently the RAAF Historian C. D. Coulthard-Clark, in his book The Third Brother, called into question the flying ability of the pilot-in-command, Flt Lt Hitchcock. An account of his comments appears in the book Air Crash vol. 2 by Australian aviation writer Macarthur Job (Aerospace Publications, Canberra 1992). However, Andrew Tink, author of Air Disaster Canberra: the plane crash that destroyed a government (2013), was reported in 2018 as doubting whether Hitchcock had been at the controls at the time of the crash.
On 12 August 2020, the day before the 80th anniversary of the crash, Michael Wooldridge, a former Minister of the Australian Government, wrote a revelatory story in The Australian. He recalled a discussion he had with Sir Harry White, Australia's first National Librarian, whose friend, Norman Tritton, was Prime Minister Menzies' Private Secretary. Menzies sent Tritton to the crash site to find out the details. Tritton had told White that he had been allowed access to the crash site itself, and the body of Fairbairn was still strapped into the pilot's seat. Wooldridge discussed the matter with White early in his tenure as a politician, and said that White kept the secret for 50 years, and he did for another 30 years.Pilot of doomed RAAF bomber can finally be revealed - The biggest cover-up in Australian political history is finally revealed., Michael Wooldridge, The Australian, 2020-08-12
The account passed on by Wooldridge is contradicted by the findings of the coronial inquest, which recorded that the bodies in the plane were burned beyond recognition and had to be differentiated via the application of body identification techniques.
Investigations The Court of Inquiry into the accident found that it was most likely from the aircraft stalling on its landing approach, resulting in loss of control at a height too low to recover. The aircraft crashed into a hill with great force, killing all occupants instantly, then burning fiercely.
Coronial inquest A coronial inquest was conducted by John Goodwin, the chairman of the Australian Capital Territory Advisory Council and the territory's acting coroner. He had been a special magistrate since 1930 and was "experienced in coronial duties". Goodwin was assisted by Thomas Mills, a representative of the Crown Solicitor's Office. Mills advised Goodwin that his jurisdiction was limited to determining the identity of the victims and their cause of death.
Goodwin's report, issued on 27 August, accepted the identification of the victims made by Duncan Mackellar, the medical superintendent of Canberra Hospital. Mackellar was a general practitioner with limited experience in forensic medicine, and faced difficulties in distinguishing between the victims' bodies which had been burned beyond recognition. The six civilian passengers were identified with the assistance of Street's private secretary Percy Hayter. Thornthwaite was identified by his personal belongings, White by his general's insignia, Street by a signet ring, and Gullett by his dentures; Fairbairn and Elford were identified by previous injuries. The four military passengers were identified with the assistance of Group Captain Douglas Wilson, who did not know them personally. Wilson used a process of elimination based on the victims' uniforms and positions within the plane.
Based on Mackellar's evidence, Goodwin concluded "I am of the opinion that the men were killed before the plane was burnt". He determined that in each case the "immediate cause of death" was a fractured skull. Mackellar had attested that it would be "fairly safe to assume that all ten men were killed when the plane hit the ground". This conclusion contradicted initial newspaper reports that the victims had been killed by the post-crash fire. There is anecdotal evidence that at least one eyewitness believed there were still people alive after the crash. However, no evidence of that nature was brought before the inquest.
RAAF investigations