Qualla: Halifax V9977 Crash, Welsh Bicknor

Halifax V9977 Crash, Welsh Bicknor: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlanBlumlein, CC BY-SA 4.0. At 4:20 in the afternoon on 7 June 1942, a farmer in the Forest of Dean looked up and saw a Halifax bomber passing overhead with its outboard starboard engine on fire. Moments later the left wing tore away. The aircraft rolled, then dropped into a field on the Courtfield estate above the River Wye, near the village of Welsh Bicknor. All eleven men aboard were killed. One of them, Alan Dower Blumlein, had invented stereophonic sound and the 405-line television system that would carry pictures into British living rooms for more than forty years. The plane he died in was carrying the most secret radar in the world. It remains the deadliest crash in the history of British military flight testing, and for nearly half a century almost nobody outside a few corridors of Whitehall knew it had happened.

Image: AlanBlumlein | CC BY-SA 4.0

Halifax V9977 Crash, Welsh Bicknor: The Aircraft and the Secret

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlanBlumlein, CC BY-SA 4.0. V9977 was an early Halifax II, a four-engine heavy bomber, modified into the strangest of flying laboratories. Bolted to its belly was an eight-foot perspex blister housing the rotating scanner of H2S, the first airborne ground-mapping radar. With H2S a bomber could see, in fog a...

Image: AlanBlumlein | CC BY-SA 4.0

Halifax V9977 Crash, Welsh Bicknor: The Eleven

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlanBlumlein, CC BY-SA 4.0. They took off about 2:50 pm, eleven men in all. From the RAF: Pilot Officer Douglas Berrington at the controls; Flying Officer Algernon Phillips beside him; Warrant Officer Gavin Millar as observer; Leading Aircraftman Brian Dear, flight engineer, just twenty years old; Aircraftm...

Image: AlanBlumlein | CC BY-SA 4.0

Halifax V9977 Crash, Welsh Bicknor: Forty-Eight Lock Nuts

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlanBlumlein, CC BY-SA 4.0. What killed them, investigators would eventually conclude, was a maintenance error counted in eighths of an inch. Rolls-Royce had noticed that the Merlin engine's tappet valves tended to work loose in service. Their fix was to tighten the clearances slightly at the factory. For e...

Image: AlanBlumlein | CC BY-SA 4.0

Halifax V9977 Crash, Welsh Bicknor: The Long Silence

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlanBlumlein, CC BY-SA 4.0. They were at 15,000 feet when the fire began, high enough to bail out if everyone had a parachute. Crew had them. The civilian observers did not. So the men chose to stay together and try to bring her down. They almost made it. The aircraft held together until about 350 feet befo...

Image: AlanBlumlein | CC BY-SA 4.0