Pilot, 2nd Lieutenant Robert L Wells USA

[Laurent Rizzotti]

Originally Posted by noggin

Has anybody info on the above pilot and incident, the only details I can find is his aircraft crashed at Thorpe Nottinghamshire 16 March 1944. " The pilot, 2nd Lieutenant Robert L Wells, was seriously injured and taken to a military hospital. He recovered sufficiently to tell the subsequent inquest that everything appeared to be in order on his test flight – until “all of a sudden, it developed engine trouble and swerved violently. It went into a spin and then went into a vertical dive. Bits started to fly off the machine. I got ready to make a parachute jump and was pulled out by the suction. It was like a whirlpool.”
The coroner, J B Norman, said: “It is quite clear the machine developed some mechanical defect. The pilot did his utmost to right the plane and stayed in it longer than he should have done. I find therefore that the death of Mr George Stansall was due to heart failure due to shock caused by extensive burns sustained when the plane crashed into the house. It was Death by Misadventure.” George is not recorded as a civilian casualty by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission."

From my past searches, the CWGC will only list civilians killed by crashes of enemy aircraft. If they were killed by Allied aircraft, they were apprently not considered as war victims. But it is only from some cases, I don't know if this is a rule applying to all cases.