On 26th May, 1952, A Handley Page Hermes, G-ALDN, operated by BOAC, departed from Tripoli in Libya (which was much more friendly then) bound for Kano, Nigeria. Total souls on board was 18.

During the flight (at night) the airliner's crew became lost (due to a faulty compass) and the airplane slowly turned right and flew to the west. Eventually, some 1200 miles off course, lost over the Sahara Desert, and almost out of fuel, the crew made a wheels up, forced landing, some 71 miles SSE of Atar (where the RAF had a manned landing strip) in Mauritania (Check the actual flight route v the planned route, all out in your Atlas. It's quite a distance.)

The left wing broke away during the ground slide but other than that, the airplane remained intact and all survived.

One crew member died of heat stroke while awaiting rescue (which took some days.)

The airplane was never salvaged.

An expediditon is to be mounted this year from the U.K. to visit the site, to see just what can be salvaged for possible use in a partial restoration of the only surving Hermes Fuselage.

Last report was that the crashed airplane was still in good condition, down to the BOAC paint livery on the fuselage.

A film crew is accompanying the expedition and hopefully footage will be made into a video report that will be made commercially available.

I saw an air to ground photo of the Hermes in a book or magazine several years ago. In that dry heat I am sure everything is still in very good order...just like the conditions found aboard the
Consolidated B-24 heavy bomber "Lady Be Good".
Everything aboard that airplane which survived the
crash landing was in perfect shape...including. according to reports, the radios (which were turned on and used by the archival team) and liquids inside of thermos bottles. As you know the old bomber had been in the desert for years after the second world war before it was located.

Doug

David,

If the Hermes is still in near excellent condition would there be, to your way of thinking a possibility
of recovering the complete aircraft by way of heavy
helicopter lift following dismamtling of it? I certainly understand you cannot speak for the recovery
team...but has there been any indication through the media or anyone else that this possibility has been given any thought?

Doug

Doug,
Further to the private e-mail I sent you on this, the U.K. "Old Props" Website will probably feature info on this expedition as it develops.

Incidentally, for other readers of this site, the crashed B24 "Lady be Good" that Doug mentioned, was moved to Tripoli by the Libyan Government some years ago.

The remains are still intact ( in about 4 bits,) but are still under "lock and key" for some obscure reason, known only to the Libyans. The a/c can hardly be termed as "Top Secret" now days, so the reason for their paranoia is mystefying.

For a nice pic of a Hermes in flight,check out

http://www.handleypage.com/Aircraft_hp81.html

The program was shown on Australian channel SBS on 17 Feb 06. It may well have been a repeat.
My wife was born in Holland and as a very little girl at the time, flew with her family to NZ in 1952. Her father has told her that the aircraft they flew on, ran out of fuel and crashed "in the desert" (place unspecified). She has never thought much about the story until she started watching the program, and she was amazed. She has a photo of her family standing alongside the tarmac in front of the aircraft that they flew out in, and she's now in the process of searching for the photo. It will be interesting to find out if it was indeed a Hermes, and if is, whether the name "Horus" is legible. We found the story to be very interesting and well done, even though we couldn't understand why the exploration apparently took place at the hottest time of the year, and no prior recce seemed to have been made, which might have determined what had happened to the fuselage. The team took up much of their time on-site trying to find it, and they only asked the locals when they had wasted a lot of time searching for it, and when they asked the locals, they were told about the salvage of all the aluminium some time before. We found that a little odd. The captain of the aircraft did a pretty good job landing in the desert with all its crew and passengers intact (at the time). Guess this must have been taken into account at the time when he was dismissed, but when one looks at the numbers of errors (see the Aviation Safety Network report on probable cause of crash), there were eight errors contributing to the crash. I wonder what would have happened if it had been a 747. Survivable?

It took a great deal of time to locate the crash site. Between the time of location and a further "reccee" trip there was a sandstorm, covering remains. Some would say that the locals kept quiet regarding the aircraft's destruction because with that information their job and the wages that went with it would disappear.