Baby slept through plane crashing above him
ICE CAUSE THE AIRCRAFT TO HIT TWO HOMES IN RUISLIP IN 1946
LAST week a driver made headlines for all the wrong reasons after managing to park his Range Rover on top of another car in Enfield.
But what if I told you that 75 years ago a pilot managed to go one better than that?
Capt WJ Johnson’s Dakota aircraft had been taking off from Northolt Airport (now RAF Northolt) in South Ruislip on the evening of 19 December 1946.
The planned journey for the ‘Railway Air Services’ airline was to Glasgow Airport, with four crew members and one passenger aboard.
However due to the snowy winter conditions, there were long delays before take-off, giving ice enough time to solidify on the wings of the aircraft.
This ice meant that during takeoff, after the plane left the ground, it was unable to gain any height.
With not enough runway to abort the landing the Capt Johnson was forced into desperately trying to force the plane up into the sky with full power.
It was no use though and soon they ran out of runway and were flying just metres off the ground, down residential road Angus Drive.
In 2006 witness Audrey Hawkridge told the BBC how she and two of her friends stood transfixed as the Dakota appeared to be flying straight for the window in the upstairs office where they worked at the British European Airways headquarters.
“But,” she said, “the Dakota gave a nerve-racking little wobble upward, and scooped itself in a painful sort of limp over our roof.”
A few hundred yards after just missing Audrey, the aircraft’s left wing caught the top of the rooftops on 44 and 45 Angus Drive, pivoting round violently before miraculously coming to rest atop the roofs of the two houses.
Incredibly nobody was injured in the plane or on the ground.
In fact, four-month-old David Zigmund of number 44 was asleep upstairs in his cot at the time the Dakota came to rest on the roof next door and wasn’t even woken up.
In a scene that must have looked darkly comical, the aircraft’s occupants exited the plane into the house’s loft and each filed down the stairs and out the front door.
The aircraft was a write off and the houses were left in need of serious repair, but the pictures that remain of the one in a million scene are quite something.
For his role in the crash, pilot WJ Johnson earned himself the nickname ‘Rooftop Johnson.’