Meteor WD650 near Healey.

On 23rd March 1955 seventy five minutes into a night time cross-country training flight this aircraft was making its way back to base and was to make a ground controlled approach to land at Leeming airfield. Four miles from the airfield the pilot was instructed to break off from his landing run because another aircraft was having to make an emergency landing at base. The pilot then reported he suspected his compass to be faulty. The crew were radioed a course to steer but nothing more was heard from the crew. At 02.04hrs the aircraft crashed into high ground to the west of Masham killing the two crew members, at the time of the crash thick fog was reported by local people to be covering the area and it was likely that the crew did not realise they were flying towards the rising ground before the crash. Trees were planted over the crash site in the years after it occurred, small fragments are known it exist in the woodland as historians Ken Reast, Albert Pritchard and Eric Barton located the site having received permission and directions from the landowner in 2005.

Pilot - P/O Peter Frederick Barrow-Bentley RAF (1812385), aged 29. Buried St.Swithuns Cemetery, Lincoln (grave 113).

Navigator - F/O Anthony Arthur Burrows RAF (4110353), aged 21. Buried London Road Cemetery, Kettering, Northamptonshire (grave 5315).

Peter Barrow-Bentley was born on 30th October 1925 at Crouch End, Middlesex and was probably the son of William Edwin and Doris Annie (nee Ford) Barrow-Bentley. When the 1939 Register was compiled he was living with another family at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. He received a commission to the rank of P/O on probation on 16th September 1953 (with his period of service to count from 20th May 1953), he was confirmed in the rank of P/O on 16th September 1954. He married Lois Ellen Bonnett in Lincoln in 1953. His widow remarried in the 1970s.
Anthony Burrows was born on 17th September 1933 at Kettering, Northamptonshire and was the son of Arthur and Ivy (nee Goosey) Burrows. He received a commission to the rank of P/O on probation on 4th February 1953 (with his period of service to count from 24th September 1952), he was confirmed in the rank of P/O on 16th December 1953 and rose to F/O on 24th December 1954.