No cause for the crash has been found while only 34 bodies of the 99 on board were recovered
THE 50TH anniversary of an air crash which claimed 99 lives off the west coast is due to be marked in Galway today.
Galway City Council is holding a commemorative ceremony at Bohermore cemetery to mark the loss of 91 passengers and eight crew on board the KLM Super Constellation flight Hugo de Grooton August 14th, 1958.
The crash of the Amsterdam- New York flight was regarded as one of western Europe's worst civilian air casualties of the mid-20th century. Wreckage was located by RAF aircraft some 90 miles off the Galway coast, hours after its last radio broadcast to Shannon air traffic control. No distress signal had been issued and the cause has still not been fully established.
The flight had stopped to refuel and to take on six more passengers at Shannon in the early hours of August 14th. The six were five Irish-Americans and a US social worker.
The flight also carried a United Arab Republic fencing team, along with Dutch, Britain, US, Polish and Israeli nationals. It took off again at 4am and its last radio broadcast was 35 minutes later.
RAF and Air Corps searches were assisted by the Aran island ferry Naomh Éanna, lifeboats from the Aran Islands and Fenit, Co Kerry, several cargo ships and fishing vessels, the Naval Service corvette Machaand the Italian sail training ship, Amerigo Vespucci.
A French fishing vessel from Lorient, General Leclerc, was the first vessel to locate wreckage, bodies and partially inflated liferafts, after the initial RAF sighting. Only 34 bodies were recovered, one of a 14-month-old baby who also lost her parents in the crash.
A large, silent crowd witnessed the transfer of the bodies ashore at Galway docks. All through the night, postmortems were carried out at Galway Regional Hospital.
Breda Madden was an 18-year-old student nurse at the time. She says neither she nor her 24 colleagues then would ever forget it.
"We had never seen any pictures of a disaster so it was quite a shock. There was no medical treatment we could give, because there were no survivors, but we were allowed to go to the morgue. I don't think anything could have prepared us for it.
She adds: "When they were leaving the hospital for the funeral, all of us stood and formed a guard of honour. Galway will hopefully never see anything like that again."
Twelve of the 34 bodies were identified and 11 were repatriated.
Religious services were held for six denominations at the hospital and a joint funeral took place on August 19th, 1958. All businesses closed down. The cortege was described as the largest seen in living memory in the city, with a burial at Bohermore cemetery.
The five-hour inquest in the Great Southern hotel ballroom in Galway agreed a verdict of death from multiple injuries, haemorrhages and fractures due to violent impact - with no evidence of the cause of impact.
The Irish Timesof August 15th, 1958, reported it as the "biggest air crash" in either Ireland or Britain. The worst civilian air crash on record at that time had occurred in the US over the Grand Canyon in Arizona in June 1956, when two aircraft collided, killing 128 people.
Some 78 passengers and five crew died in a crash in Glamorgan, Wales, in March 1950, following a rugby match in Belfast between Wales and Ireland. In September 1954, another KLM Super Constellation crashed in the Shannon estuary, with the deaths of 27 of the 56 on board.
Today's ceremony in New Cemetery, Bohermore, is at 4pm and the public is invited to attend.
