Message posted by Frank McAvennie (Member since 09/13/2011) on September 23, 2022 at 0:02:47 PST:
I worked at West Drayton a couple of years after the Boscombe incident. West Drayton back then was the London Area Control Centre, and dealt with all the airways traffic in the London FIR. I first heard the C-5 story from an Air Traffic Assistant who was working on the sector at the time. The guy was knowledgeable about aircraft (it was after all his job), but he wasn’t a black projects or conspiracy freak. The aircraft had filed from the US to Germany, presumably Ramstein but I don’t remember for sure. As the aircraft flew eastbound over Wales, along the air route Upper Golf One, it announced it wished to divert to Boscombe Down, which is adjacent to the air route and located around 85 miles southwest of London. This was most unusual, as the normal diversion airfield for any MAC flight would have been the US base at Mildenhall. Nonetheless, permission was granted and the flight diverted to Boscombe. This was a clever way to get the C-5 onto the ground at Boscombe as there was no paper trail. The flight plan received at West Drayton was bound for Germany, and the act of diverting the aircraft would generate no hard copy of the occurrence beyond a paper flight progress strip which would be discarded (with tens of thousands of others) after a few months storage. As for the return flight, I was told in a matter of fact manner by the same assistant that the C-5 had flight planned EGDM direct to KPMD. Maybe some retired anorak has a copy of this stashed away somewhere, as this would be the only tangible hard proof that this event actually happened.
In Reply to: Re: One black night at Boscombe Down in 1994 - rumors, evidence, posted by quellish on September 22, 2022 at 17:53:45 PST:
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