ON Saturday, December 28th, 1946, Shannon Airport witnessed its first fatal accident when the TWA Constellation aircraft Star of Cairo crashed into Inishmacnaughtan, an island on the outskirts of the airport.
It was the first fatal accident in the history of civil aviation in this State. The plane was en route from Karachi, via Paris, and was attempting to land at Shannon before travelling on to New York.
Of the 23 people on board, nine passengers and three crew members died in the early hours of Saturday morning, where the river Fergus joins the Shannon.
When the four engined aircraft hit the ground, there was an explosion and fire broke out. The rear end of the fuselage broke off and turned around 180 degrees.
Most of the survivors and a hostess, Miss Vina Ferguson (25), who minutes earlier had gone back to instruct the passengers on adjusting their seat belts, were in the tail section of the aircraft.
The then recently appointed station manager of TWA, Capt Jim Devoy, warned a colleague and myself to remove ourselves from the scene.
While retreating, I heard a faint cry from the rushes in the swamp, which at first I thought came from some animal. But the crier turned out to be a four month old baby boy who had been tossed from his mother's arms in the crash.
The mother was a GI bride, Edith Augustine Delaby, flying to Newark, New Jersey, to join her husband, and had been crying out for her baby, Charles Bruce.
I handed him over to a member of the Red Cross rescue party, who returned him to his mother.
He had suffered a broken thigh bone, and like his mother had extensive burns, but they later recovered in hospital.
The Lockheed Constellation, with its aerodynamic design and four powerful Wright engines, was the most advanced aircraft of its day. On its inaugural flight in February of that year, it brought four cardinals (three American and one Chinese) from New York to Shannon en route to Rome for the first post war Papal Consistory.
Mr R.W. (Dick) O'Sullivan, chief aeronautical officer with the Department of Industry and Commerce, who conducted the investigation on the ground into the cause of the crash and later attended the hearing in New York, came up with a remarkable finding.
The pilot, Capt Hubert Tansey, whom he interviewed in hospital at Ennis, told how he believed that all the Shannon Airport lights went out as he turned on his final approach to the runway.
As Mr O'Sullivan said, this turned out to be an optical effect produced by the aircraft on a steep approach path when it passed behind a low hill on the island outside the airport boundary.
Mr Wayne Sneddon, head of the Lockheed team of investigators, discovered that the two pipelines leading to the altimeter had been incorrectly coupled at the last maintenance check. This had resulted in "a grossly exaggerated indication of height above the ground".
Later, as Mr O'Sullivan outlined in his report, the couplings were modified so that with different screw thread sizes it would be impossible to assemble them incorrectly again.
The inquest on the victims opened in Ennis 50 years ago today and 12 bodies were flown home for burial.