Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Pilot killed in crash horror ‘exceptional’
A FORMER RAF flyer who died alongside an amateur when their light aircraft nosedived has been described as an “exceptional” pilot .
Experts could not work out what caused the Super Dimona carrying Paul Gunnell, 57, and Gordon Davis, 66, to plummet.
They were 18 minutes into a flight when it fell from around 1,000ft, an inquest jury at Swindon coroner’s court heard.
An Air Accident Investigation Branch report said the July 2017 crash in Marlborough, Wilts, was “not survivable”.
Mr Gunnell, described as an “exceptional” pilot, joined the RAF in 1982.
Mr Davis, of Gloucester, had a private pilot licence and owned the aircraft. Verdicts: accidental death. IN the autumn of 1945, schoolgirl Margaret Nutley was intrigued to see boys in stripey tops playing football on Ascot racecourse.
Unbeknown to her, they were Holocaust survivors, flown here to recover from their ordeal in the concentration camps of the Second World War.
Known as the Ascot Boys, the 30 Jewish youths befriended local children like Margaret and pal Irene Baldock, who helped them to enjoy freedom again.
Now, 73 years on, the women have been reunited with two of the boys for the first time, Ivor Perl and Sam Freiman, for Channel 5 show Do The Right Thing.
Some of the boys had lost their whole family at the hands of the Nazis but Margaret, 85, recalled the boys being proud of having survived the atrocities.
She said: “I remember some of the boys showed us their tattooed wrists quite proudly, and some were still wearing their blue camp stripes.”
Irene, also 85, added: “They didn’t seem to dwell on the fact that they had been in a concentration camp.
“It is amazing when you think about it. How the devil did they manage to brush it out of their minds?”
But Ivor said thoughts of the Holocaust were never far away, and still