At 1:05 in the afternoon on 25 August 1942, a Short Sunderland flying boat lifted off from the calm grey water of the Cromarty Firth. Aboard were fifteen men, including Prince George, Duke of Kent, brother to the reigning king, bound for Iceland on a wartime liaison mission. Thirty-seven minutes later, the aircraft drove into a hillside at full power. Only one of the fifteen would walk away from Eagle's Rock alive.
The Sunderland W4026 belonged to 228 Squadron, based at RAF Oban on Scotland's west coast - flying boats whose normal work was hunting U-boats across the North Atlantic. This flight was different. The Duke of Kent, an Air Commodore in the welfare branch of the RAF, was travelling to Reykjavik to inspect Allied bases and meet personnel. Royal duty in wartime meant unglamorous transport: a maritime patrol bomber, a fog-bound seaplane base, a crew accustomed to long lonely hours over the sea. The Duke had held a private pilot's licence since 1929. Whether he was at the controls that afternoon - or in the cabin, as the official record states - has been argued ever since.
The planned route ran north along Scotland's eastern coast, hugging the Caithness shoreline before swinging out across the North Atlantic. Instead the Sunderland drifted inland. Visibility was poor, the wind was stronger than the forecast allowed for, and the navigator's track failed to account for the drift. At 13:42 GMT the aircraft struck a remote headland called Eagle's Rock, near the village of Braemore in the Caithness hills, about ten miles inland from where the coast should have been. The wreckage was scattered across the heather. The engines, investigators later determined, were running at full power at the moment of impact - the crew never saw the ground coming.
Sergeant Andrew Jack, the tail gunner, regained consciousness in the rear turret with the world burning around him. Severely burned, he crawled clear of the wreck and spent the night on the hillside before walking miles to raise the alarm at a shepherd's cottage. He was the only one left alive. Jack stayed in the RAF until 1964, retiring as a flight lieutenant, and died in Brighton in 1978 aged fifty-six. He spoke little about what he had seen. After his death, his niece told the BBC that her uncle had confided to his brother that the Duke had been at the controls when the aircraft hit - and that there had been a sixteenth person aboard whose name was never recorded. The Royal Air Force has never confirmed either claim.
Prince George, Duke of Kent, was thirty-nine, married to Princess Marina of Greece, and father of three young children - including the future Prince Michael of Kent, born just seven weeks before the crash. He was the first member of the British royal family to die on active military service since Prince Maurice of Battenberg fell leading his infantry company in October 1914. Winston Churchill rose in the Commons to propose the message of condolence. Four of the 228 Squadron crew were buried together at Pennyfuir Cemetery in Oban, alongside their flying-boat comrades. The Duke was interred at the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore. A simple stone cairn, raised by local people, still marks the impact site on Eagle's Rock - reached only on foot, across miles of empty moor.
Eagle's Rock crash site is at 58.23 N, 3.52 W, on remote moorland inland from the Caithness coast near Braemore and Dunbeath. From cruise the site lies between Inverness and the far north, about 30 nautical miles northeast of RAF Lossiemouth (EGQS) and roughly 35 nautical miles north of Inverness Airport (EGPE). The terrain here is rolling heather hills rising to around 1,000 feet - the same low cloud and shifting winds that confused W4026's navigator in 1942 still close down the Caithness uplands without warning. The Cromarty Firth, where the Sunderland began its final flight, is clearly visible to the south.