Beechcraft C-18S Expeditor G-AIYI at Sherburn in Elmet airfield.
On 24th August 1949 the pilot of this aircraft intended on flying from Croydon, London to a landing strip at Crosland Heath, Huddersfield where his employer and the aircraft's owner David Brown and Sons operated their aircraft from. He was on the return leg of a buisnesss flight having taken a number of the companies employees to London earlier in the day. It is worth saying that David Brown had just bought the Aston Martin car company as well as being a tractor manufacturer. The aircraft had landed at Sherburn in Elmet at 17.30hrs though the purpose for this is unclear as it appears to have refuelled. An hour later he attempted to take off from Sherburn to complete the flight to Crosland Heath but one engine failed just after it became airborne followed by the second soon after. It lost height and struck an empty wagon left in a siding near the Church Fenton to Selby railway line. The aircraft then struck the railway line and continued into the field next to the line where a fire broke out. The pilot appears to have been very lucky to survive, he was found in the wreckage conscious and was helped to walk back to the airfield's club house prior to being taken to hospital in Leeds.
The location of this crash site is very close, if not on top of the site where historians Ken Reast, Albert Pritchard and Eric Barton believed that they located fragments of Hudson FK537, with landowner consent, that had crashed there in December 1943. It isn't beyond the realms of possibility that they located fragments of Beechcraft G-AIYI as well. It was initially registered as 42-43477 in the USA, then passed to the RAF and serialled FR883, then sold to the civilian market and registered as G-AIYI.
Pilot - Mr Bob Jones DSO, aged 27. Injured.
I have attempted to piece together various tit-bits of information about who I believe to be the pilot. Bob Jones was an accomplished pilot. He appears to have been called Bob rather than Robert as would probably have been more common in the 1920s. He was awarded the DSO for service in the Second World War for service with 15 Squadron, Gazetted on 2nd February 1945. He flew civilian aircraft for a time after the war and had crashed Airspeed Consul G-AIIS at Normanton, Wakefield on 1st November 1949. At the time he was living with his family at Ogley Hall, Castle Hill, Huddersfield as a guest of W J Holland. He appears to have rejoined the RAF Auxilliary with 616 Squadron at Finningley where he later flew Meteors. During June 1953 he was returning from an air to ground exercise and flying at 3,000 feet at .76 Mach when the cockpit canopy disintergrated. He managed to land safely at Finningley. On 4th October 1953 he was flying a Meteor from Leauchars to Finningley when he sustained a bird strike which made a large hole in the leading edge of the starboard wing outboard of the engine nacelle, he was able to land safely at Finningley. On 31st October 1953 burst a tyre on take off from Finningley but managed to get airborne, after flying around to use fuel and also jettisoning his ventral tank he landed at Finningley without incident. On 8th May 1954 he landed a 616 Squadron Meteor at Carnaby after a bird strike damaged the canopy which injured his neck and required treatment in hospital. By March 1955 he was working as a test pilot for Rolls-Royce, he was the 32 year old pilot of Lancastrian VL970 that crashed at Hucknall on 29th March 1955 being used by Rolls-Royce as a test bed for Avon jet engines, sadly he and three others were killed in the accident.