Few believed that anyone could have survived impact Riddle of the lost flight
A plane vanishes after take-off. The pilot’s body is discovered months later on a hillside a mile from the airport. But astonishingly, there is no sign of any wreckage...
IT’S a coarse, December day on the Isle of Mull. Just off the main road a little south of Salen, there is a silent, shuttered hotel. By a galvanised gate, beyond which run long, closely mown links – a sign leaves the traveller in no doubt as to the significance of these thousand grassy yards: GLENFORSA AIRFIELD – NO ADMITTANCE.
Sheep chomp in the distance. A wind sock flaps in a desultory sort of way. Beyond are angry waves between the shore and the hills of Morvern… but nothing betrays this as the scene of one of Scotland’s most baffling post-war mysteries.
Late on Christmas Eve 1975, drink having been taken, a hotel guest – Norman Peter Gibbs, 55, insisted on heading out in his little chartered plane to satisfy himself that a night landing at Glenforsa was feasible.
Minutes later, the red and white Cessna F150H vanished into the inky sky with a take-off one witness described as ‘flawless’… for a circuit or two before, in not five minutes, Gibbs and his aircraft were expected to return. They never did. Despite days of intensive searching by the RAF, the Coastguard and hundreds of volunteers, he was never seen alive again.
Had that remained the case, it would have been assumed Gibbs had crashed calamitously into the sea, he and his Cessna long forgotten.
But months later, on the morning of April 21, 1976, local shepherd Donald Mackinnon made a frightful discovery on the hillside lowering down over Glenforsa.
A full mile from the hotel, 400ft above sea level, slumped over a tumbled tree, was the body of a middle-aged man in distinctive flying boots.
How? The authorities were baffled, for the entire area had been closely searched in the days after the tragedy. Nor had Mr Mackinnon, and other farmers and herdsmen frequently on the move in these woods, hitherto noticed these remains.
At post-mortem examination, still more bewilderingly, no injuries were found in any way consistent with an air crash or even falling from any significant height – merely a superficial cut on the right leg.
There wasn’t a square inch of aircraft wreckage anywhere, nor traces, in the clothes or in the folds of the corpse or under the fingernails, of sea water or marine life.
Yet it was indisputably the body of Norman Peter Gibbs – who, pathologists confirm, died of simple exposure. What could possibly have happened?
There are scant further clues. In October 1976, local man Robert Duncan found the wheel of a light aircraft washed up on the shore not far from Glenforsa Airfield.
It was from a Cessna and damage to the tyre was consistent with violent, sideways impact – an aircraft at speed smashing and somersaulting onto the cold and implacable sea.
That the wheel was from Peter Gibbs’ aircraft is near certain. The discovery a decade later by two local clam divers of a smashed red and white plane, in about 100ft of water just over 500 yards off Oban, is more ambiguous.
The blurry photographs taken by Richard and John Grieve gave almost nothing away. And the wreck was never salvaged; indeed, since that day, no one has even managed to re-locate it. But they were adamant the aircraft was a Cessna; that it had the same registration, G-AVTN, as the one fatefully flown by Gibbs; and that it was badly smashed.
There was, they said, a hole in the windshield. Both wings and one landing wheel had been torn off; the engine lay some distance away. The Grieves also insisted a close search had found no human remains and that both the plane’s doors were locked from the inside.
The lack of a corpse was not that significant: bodies submerged in the sea – even bones – dissolve within years. Few experts, considering the Grieves’ description, believed anyone would have survived such impact and, at the very least, the pilot would have been grievously injured. Either Gibbs was not the pilot or the wreck was not his plane.
Three books and at least six TV dochours, umentaries have since addressed the Great Mull Air Mystery – and there have been ever more fantastic theories as to Gibbs’ death.
But who was he? Born in 1921, Gibbs attended Swindon High School and in 1941 went to war and with distinction, serving with the RAF, bringing down four German V-1 missiles, surviving a crash in 1942 and a bailing-out in 1944.
Handsome, intense (‘He crammed about four people’s lives into his lifetime,’ his ex-wife subsequently told police) Gibbs resumed his studies, became a seriously good violinist, performed in some of the world’s greatest ensembles and lived down a most public 1957 row with the arrogant (and frightfully German) conductor Herbert von Karajan.
Gibbs also kept flying, joining the Surrey Flying Club and relinquishing his commission with the RAF Voluntary Reserve only in 1971. All this suggests extraordinary talent in wholly different spheres.
Yet he cut corners. A friend who once accepted the invitation to join him for a quick flight over the Trossachs never chanced it again – to his horror, he realised that Gibbs was navigating only by a small AA handbook and, occasionally, swooping down low to glance at road signs.
By 1975 he had amassed 1,200 hours of civilian flying, on top of his military ones, and was in prosperous charge of the Gibbs and Rae development company. When, that fateful Yule, he arrived on Mull in his Jaguar with his latest love interest, 33-year old Felicity Grainger, it was with an eye to buying Tobermory’s Western Isles Hotel.
But go back over these last days and in detail, and one grows curious…
Gibbs and Grainger arrived at the Glenforsa Hotel on Saturday, December 20, 1975, for the festive season. Within hours he heard of a small plane for hire at Connel, a little north of Oban with a somewhat superior airfield, and was swiftly on the phone to charter it.
It belonged to the colourful Ian Hamilton, advocate, Scots patriot and best known for ‘liberating’ the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey in 1950. An hourly flying rate of £14.50 was agreed and Gibbs and Grainger, heading round by the ferry from Craignure, duly collected the Cessna F150H on Tuesday 23.
At dawn the next day, Gibbs and Grainger flew to Skye – he viewed property there – and, cutting it fine, returned to Glenforsa at ten past four, when it was almost dark. It would become very dark indeed: the night was moonless and by the moment of the tragic take-off, there was no more light than the stars.
The airfield, then and now, is not equipped for night flying. Had Hamilton insisted on seeing Gibbs’ pilot’s licence, he would have learned both that he was not entitled to fly in the dark and that the licence had been void since October 1974, his medical certification having expired.
Gibbs and Grainger enjoyed Christmas Eve dinner. Most of a bottle of wine was consumed. One witness also recalled a little whisky. They retired to their room – and then, almost theatrically, materialised at reception around a quarter past nine. Gibbs had changed into a blue woollen sweater, donned his flying boots and announced he was going out to fly.
It would be a single trial circuit, with Gibbs alone, and, if straightforward, Grainger would then join him for a second. Hotel staff – notably proprietor David Howitt – expressed alarm; begged him not to go. ‘I am not asking permission,’ said Gibbs pleasantly. ‘I just thought it was courteous to let you know. I don’t want a fuss.’
By 9.30, with two torches borrowed from Mr Howitt, the couple were on the airfield. Mr Howitt’s son Roger afterwards testified that the engine was left to idle unusually long – ‘five or ten minutes, perhaps’ – before the Cessna, with Gibbs and Grainger aboard, taxied to the threshold of the westward-facing runway.
Grainger would say: ‘Then I got out and put the torches on the landingstrip.’ She put them down ‘to illuminate the letters at the end of the runway.’
It is hard to overstate Gibbs’s irresponsibility. Two skilled people can direct a pilot safely onto an airstrip in deepest night with one torch each – but one to mark the left-hand corner of the threshold; the other to signal the right-hand corner of the strip’s end.
There was, in 1975, another hazard –
Evidence suggests he never flew the plane that night
the poor carbon-zinc batteries of the time. The torches could have died at any minute, leaving Gibbs in the air and on little more than a suicide mission.
And why use torches at all? It would have been far safer, and much easier, to use the headlamps of his own car.
But, at a critical moment – and, no doubt, with stern warning as to the importance of keeping clear of the plane’s propeller – Grainger was kept well clear, behind the Cessna, preoccupied and distracted.
David Howitt later remembered being puzzled by ‘an excessively long wait’ before the plane at last revved up; a further wait, until the brakes were loosed; and then, at last, the Cessna began accelerating down the sward for take-off.
As it was abeam the hotel, just airborne, the landing lights flashed on and off.
Those watching from the hotel followed the aircraft’s navigation lights, as it turned right and over the Sound of Mull; then right again, heading south. It was then lost from view.
Other witnesses remember seeing, minutes later, a flash of light on the water – like a flare.
By 10pm, with no sign of the Cessna, a worried Felicity Grainger hurried into the hotel to say her man was missing. It was sleeting heavily.
The police were called and full hunt raised the following day.
What really happened? It is unlikely in the extreme that Gibbs would have survived the crash of his plane or – even at low altitude, jumping out over woods – without the gravest injuries.
It is almost as unlikely that a 55-year old man, shocked and shaken and with drink in his system, could have safely swum ashore through chilled December seas and, if so – granted such vigour – then ambled right past hotel and help, over the main highway and far up a hillside in thick night and icy sleet.
Nor was there any sign, on Gibbs’ body or clothing, that he had been anywhere near salt water.
It is hard not to agree with the recent analysis of experienced pilot Allan J Organ that the weight of evidence suggests Gibbs never flew the plane that night at all.
He had most dramatically drawn attention to himself, loudly proposed the flight, scarce an hour after conspicuous drinking. There were weird delays, as if waiting for someone to arrive or for events elsewhere to unfold.
At a critical moment, just before take-off, his girlfriend was placed well clear and unsighted.
At that point, someone else could have furtively assumed the cockpit position as Gibbs made himself scarce.
Why? There were whispers of money troubles. There had, just a day or two before, been serious thefts of jewellery in Oban and Skye. Gibbs may well have accepted a ‘bung’ for the brief use of the Cessna to make off with something… or to dispose of something.
Not very well dressed, skulking in the shrubbery, waiting for the return of the plane, he was probably rather hypothermic by the time he grasped something had gone wrong.
He may have deliberately sought refuge in the wild woods, or wandered off quite disorientated… but, in all probability, that Christmas four decades ago, two men in fact perished.
We can never know for sure. Like so much else, the Great Mull Air Mystery is yet another dismal secret of the green Hebridean sea.