The Clare Champion Clare news, sport, entertainment and local notes
A PERMANENT marker has been put in place in the townland of Killula, close to Shannon Airport, to commemorate a 1961 plane crash in which four people were killed.
The crash happened early on the morning of January 27, 1961, when an air corps De Havilland DH.104 Dove crashed while on a training exercise. There were five people on board, four of whom were killed.
A person involved in the preparations for Tuesday’s event said, “The air corps are laying a marker stone on a site where an Air Corps plane crashed in 1961, four people lost their lives in that crash, it was on the approach to Shannon, in a place called Killula, on the way in.
“There was a temporary marker on the site but they’ve put on a permanent one, and they came down to do that on Tuesday.”
He said that the crash saw the deaths of two air corps pilots and two air traffic control assistants.
“In those days the pilots used to get talked down to land, and they were training the pilots in this procedure. They’d be down for the week and they were due to go home later that day. This happened at 6.05 in the morning on January 27. There were five people on board.”
The sole survivor was Captain Jim Liddy.
There is a steep hill with a row of trees on it close to the crash site, while the weather was quite windy on the night, but the exact circumstances of the accident are unknown.
Later that year 83 people died in a separate crash at Shannon, when a President Airlines DC6 airliner crashed into the Estuary, just after taking off for Chicago.
Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked for a number of other regional titles in Limerick, Galway and Cork.
