Remembering the last flight of Aer Lingus 712

There’s something about anniversaries. You can’t get away from Cork band Frank and Walters all week. It’s 25 years since their hit “After All”. It’s got a second life thank to “The Young Offenders”. 

There’s another anniversary however. It’s 50 years today since the first air disaster I remember. It wasn’t just any air crash. It touched my life as I grew up close to Dublin Airport and many of our neighbours worked there or directly for Aer Lingus.

It was a Sunday lunchtime and I had been in the bad books. I’d been playing football and a wild shot had broken a bathroom window earlier. Much of the usual Sunday lunchtime banter was missing as a consequnce. As the RTE News ended at 2 pm the newsreader broke a story that an Aer Lingus Vickers Viscount en route from Cork to London was missing in the vicinity of Rosslare. My   father’s first words were “I   hope that doesn’t involve Barney O’Beirne”.

The O’Beirne’s lived about 400 metres away from us. Barney’s daughter and my sisters were in the same school. Sadly it did involve Barney.  He, his aircraft, his crew and passengers came down about 2 miles from Tuskar Rock with no survivors.

Captain O’Beirne didn’t accept the catastrophic malfunction of his aircraft easily. the last message from the aircraft was from the Co pilot who said the aircraft was hurtling towards earth at 12,000 feet. The plane entered a spin over Fethard On Sea. Captain O’Beirne and  First Officer Heffernan rescued the situation and the plane levelled off. However with parts falling of the aircraft they eventually lost the battle to stay airborne 10 minutes later at Rosslare with no radio contact to Shannon air traffic control.

Barney and his wife had a young son, David. When I progressed to secondary school, David was in the junior school and often we’d be on the same school bus as me getting on and off at the same stop.  I was too young to understand about the investigation into the crash.

Later in life when I married, my mother in law was in hospital for an operation in Cork. Sharing her room was the mother of Barney’s 22 year old co-pilot. My father in law actually saw the plane taking off on its final journey 30 minutes before it crashed.  The flight path into and out of Cork airport passes over their home.

So there are lots of connections between me and Flight 712. A work colleague of mine told me that as a small girl she watched the plane along with her grandmother as it flew along the South Wexford coast in its final minutes. Little was I to know when I moved to work in Wexford how something from the past can come back to meet you. That’s’ why I was there in Rosslare today. Good to shake hands and renew old links.

Let’s leave the issue for another day as to what caused the crash. There’s lots of different suggestions as to what happened on the day. After all what will remain is that 61 people died after a pilot and crew did their very best to protect their passengers on flight 712.