The flight had received clearance from air traffic control at Manchester Ringway and was navigating inland toward the Wigan Beacon, a non-directional beacon in the Manchester Zone that transmitted a recognition signal of 'MYK' in Morse code on a frequency of 316 kHz. The beacon had a range of approximately 25 miles. Somewhere in the sequence of navigation, something went wrong. The aircraft, which should have been safely clear of the high ground of the West Pennine Moors, was instead flying directly toward the summit of Winter Hill, which rises to over 1,400 feet above sea level. The crash occurred several hundred yards from the Winter Hill transmitting station, the Independent Television Authority's broadcast tower that was already a landmark on the hilltop.

Several feet of snow covered Winter Hill, turning the crash site into an almost inaccessible scene. Emergency vehicles could not reach the wreckage through the deep snow. A snow cat vehicle had to be diverted from the A6 road to cut a path, though local people had already begun clearing a track with spades before it arrived. Seven people survived, all of them injured. The conditions that hampered rescue -- the snow, the altitude, the remoteness of the moorland summit -- were the same conditions that had contributed to the crash. Winter Hill in a February snowstorm is bleak, exposed terrain where visibility can drop to nothing within minutes.

The subsequent investigation determined that navigational errors caused the crash. The inquiry also spread blame more widely. Air traffic controllers bore some responsibility for the clearances they had given. The aircraft's cockpit design came under scrutiny: the navigation displays in the Bristol 170 Freighter were positioned above and slightly behind the pilots' seats, making them difficult to read during critical phases of flight. This design flaw meant that the crew had to look up and back to check instruments that should have been directly in their line of sight. At the time of the disaster, it was the worst high-ground air crash in the United Kingdom, and it ranked as the 11th-worst for number killed since 1950.

Winter Hill remains a prominent feature of the Lancashire landscape, its summit crowned by the transmitting station that was already there when the aircraft struck the hillside. The moorland terrain looks much as it did in 1958 -- open, exposed, and unforgiving in poor weather. The disaster is commemorated locally, though it has faded from wider British memory. For the Isle of Man, where many of the victims lived and worked, the loss struck a small community hard. These were neighbors and colleagues, people bound together by the motor trade on an island where everyone knew everyone. They had boarded the flight for a routine business trip to the mainland, the kind of short hop across the Irish Sea that connected the island to the commerce of northern England. That such an ordinary journey could end on a snow-covered hilltop remains the disaster's most unsettling lesson.