Llandow Air Disaster
On 12 March 1950, an Avro 689 Tudor V owned by Airflight Limited and being operated under the Fairflight name, took off from Dublin Airport in Ireland, on a private passenger flight to Llandow aeordrome in South Wales.
The aircraft, named Star Girl, had 78 passengers and 5 crew on the manifest. The weather conditions were clear, and on the outboard journey aboard the same craft no incidents were reported.
Eye-witnesses (including police constable John Davies) state that at 3:05p.m. the Avro Tudor was approaching runway 28 of Llandow aerodrome at an abnormally low altitude with the undercarriage down. The pilot attempted to correct the descent by increasing the power of the engines and brought the plane up. The aircraft rose steeply to 100 m (300 ft) attaining a nose-up attitude of 35 degrees to the vertical, and then the aircraft stalled
From Cardiff, in Wales, a four-engined Avro Tudor V took off one day last week for the 200-mile hop across the Irish Sea to Dublin. Aboard were 78 passengers (72 men, six women) and a crew of five bound for a championship Rugby match in Belfast.
The Welshmen went by bus to Belfast, watched jubilantly while their team won. Then they returned to Dublin, spent a morning eating steak for breakfast and buying souvenirs for their families—toys, canned fruit, nylons, a string of pearls. At the airport, customs officials grinned and waved as the Welshmen sang a final chorus of Land of My Fathers. The big plane took off at 2:10 p.m.
It was on the 12th March 1950 that the hearts of the Llanharan and Abercarn Rugby Football Clubs were ripped out on a bright, sunlit afternoon when an AVRO-TUDOR V plane carrying 78 Welsh rugby fans and five crew crashed into a field near Llandow in the Vale of Glamorgan. The plane was packed with supporters fresh from celebrating a 6-3 victory over Ireland in Dublin, which had given Wales their first Triple Crown for 39 years and their eighth in all. Of the 83 people on board only three survived and numbered among the many dead were five members of the Llanharan rugby team including Henry Pascoe, nephew of former Welsh international forward Dan Pascoe of Bridgend. Seven were women, including the wife of one of the Llanharan players who perished, and the air hostess.
