Qualla: 1955 RAF Shackleton aircraft disappearance

1955 RAF Shackleton aircraft disappearance: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RuthAS, CC BY 3.0. Two aircraft took off six minutes apart on the morning of 11 January 1955, and twenty-one airmen never came home. The aircraft were Avro Shackleton MR2s, four-engined maritime patrol bombers built around the wings of the Lancaster. The squadron was No. 42, based at RAF St Eval on the Cornish coast, and the patrol area was the stretch of Atlantic southwest of Ireland that aircrew called Fastnet, after the rock that marked its eastern boundary. The first Shackleton, WG531, lifted off at 10:14. The second, WL743, followed at 10:20. They were meant to be half an hour apart. They never reported a problem. By dawn the next morning, both crews were missing.

Image: RuthAS | CC BY 3.0

1955 RAF Shackleton aircraft disappearance: Six Minutes Instead of Thirty

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RuthAS, CC BY 3.0. Standard procedure called for a thirty-minute separation between Shackletons heading to the same patrol area. On the morning of 11 January, that procedure broke down. WG531's takeoff had been delayed; WL743's was brought forward. The result was a separation of six minutes between...

Image: RuthAS | CC BY 3.0

1955 RAF Shackleton aircraft disappearance: The Silent Radio

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RuthAS, CC BY 3.0. At 20:58 a ground controller at St Eval tried to contact WL743 with a barometer reading the navigator had earlier requested. There was no reply. This did not, at first, alarm anyone. Loss of radio contact was common when Shackletons flew at their normal patrol heights of a few th...

Image: RuthAS | CC BY 3.0

1955 RAF Shackleton aircraft disappearance: Twenty Thousand Square Miles

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RuthAS, CC BY 3.0. By 03:50 on the morning of 12 January, search aircraft were over the patrol area. Over the next three days, at least eight Shackletons from St Eval, two Short Sunderland flying boats from RAF Pembroke Dock and RAF Aldergrove, and a flotilla of military and civilian ships combed a...

Image: RuthAS | CC BY 3.0

1955 RAF Shackleton aircraft disappearance: An Engine in a Trawler's Net

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RuthAS, CC BY 3.0. For eleven years the only memorial to the missing crews was the silence of the Atlantic. Then, in July 1966, a trawler working between Skellig Michael and the Bull Rock lighthouse off County Kerry pulled up its nets and found inside the No. 4 engine from WL743. The position was a...

Image: RuthAS | CC BY 3.0

1955 RAF Shackleton aircraft disappearance: Panel 93

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RuthAS, CC BY 3.0. Twenty-one names are inscribed on Panel 93 of the Armed Forces Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. They include the pilots and crews who flew out of St Eval on a January Tuesday in 1955 and were lost somewhere over the Fastnet Atlantic. Some of them had ...

Image: RuthAS | CC BY 3.0