The Avro Tudor had a troubled history. Originally designed as a pressurized transatlantic airliner for the postwar market, the type had never achieved commercial success, and a series of unexplained losses -- including the disappearances of Star Tiger and Star Ariel in the Atlantic -- had led to the Tudor being banned from passenger service on Britain's publicly owned international airlines. The aircraft used for the Llandow charter, Star Girl, was operated by the private company Airflight Limited under the "Fairflight" name. The plane had been booked for 72 passengers, but was stripped of some fixtures to accommodate an additional six. With 78 passengers and 5 crew aboard, the Tudor headed for South Wales.

At 3:05 in the afternoon, eyewitnesses near Llandow aerodrome saw the Avro Tudor approaching runway 28 at an abnormally low altitude with its undercarriage down. The pilot, recognizing the aircraft was too low, increased engine power to correct the descent. The nose pitched up sharply -- to an angle of 35 degrees -- and the aircraft climbed to roughly 300 feet before it stalled. With insufficient altitude or speed to recover, the Tudor fell. Eighty people died: seventy-five passengers, killed on impact or in the hours that followed in local hospitals, and all five crew. Three men survived.

A court of inquiry chaired by William McNair KC determined the probable cause: the aircraft had been loaded in a way that moved its centre of gravity far aft of the safe range, critically reducing the effectiveness of the elevators. When the pilot tried to pull up from the low approach, the tail-heavy loading made the nose pitch to an extreme angle. The New York Times reported the crash on its front page the following day, noting that the death toll of 80 eclipsed every previous aviation disaster, surpassing the loss of 55 in the 1949 Washington midair collision and the 73 who died when the Navy airship Akron went down off New Jersey in 1933. The Times pointedly observed that the Tudor type had "already caused fifty-four fatalities and had been banned from passenger service on Britain's publicly owned international airlines."

The dead included members of rugby clubs across the South Wales valleys -- communities where rugby was not a spectator sport but a binding force. Abercarn RFC lost three members. Llanharan RFC lost six members of their playing team. Both clubs incorporated symbols of remembrance into their badges, carrying the memory of the disaster into every match played since. On 25 March 1950, at the final game of that year's Five Nations Championship -- Wales against France at the Cardiff Arms Park -- the crowd stood in silence while five buglers sounded the Last Post in tribute to the supporters who had died thirteen days earlier. The Llandow disaster remains the deadliest air crash in Welsh history. A memorial plaque was dedicated at Sigingstone in 1990, on the 40th anniversary, marking the field where the Star Girl came down with its cargo of rugby fans who never made it home.