1940 Canberra air disaster

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.

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 888 acre owned by Duncan Cameron.