Christopher Bland on Transport
Lisa: Chris, can I ask you where you were when you first heard that the accident had happened?
I was sitting with Mark Woodnutt who was the MP in the dining room here.
Lisa: So, did you have a telephone call then?
I had a telephone call saying the craft out of Ryde had turned over, so it was about 4 o’clock in the afternoon and we’d had a pretty good lunch and the MP and I, I don’t know where he’d got his bottle of brandy from but he got it somewhere, but it got delivered to Southsea and we whizzed down to Ryde and the second craft was there and the Senior Pilot at that time was a man called Tony Smith, an ex V Bomber pilot, and we went across to Southsea Terminal where by that time the … I don’t think they’d got the wreckage there then. It was still being towed towards the Terminal. And really history relates the rest. It was pretty chaotic.
The one thing I do remember was that the Fire Brigade tried … ‘cos they thought there were people in the Hovercraft which there were. There were bodies in there still. There were four altogether, drowned, but I don’t know where the other ones were.
I’m not sure … there probably may have been only one because we had a big problem with the number of bodies because there was a miscount at Ryde. In fact, we were looking for someone that didn’t exist for a long time.
But they also cut a hole … when the craft was upside down, they cut a whole in what they thought was a passenger cabin to get anyone out that was in there and in fact they chopped … they went in the wrong end of the Hovercraft and they chopped underneath the lift fan.
In other words, they chopped a hole in the wrong end because the bottom of the Hovercraft was … it wasn’t anything sophisticated, it was a very dense foam because the Hovercraft had to be very light so it was a very dense foam and quite I think moderately simple to cut through, but of course you’ve got to cut through the right place.
But I think as was said, I think by that time it was all over. We weren’t going to get anyone alive out of there and in the end there were four fatalities.
All very sad really.