"On the thirtieth of January 1962 Peter Hearn, Snowy and myself were on a liaison visit to Boscombe Down. It was a pretty gloomy January afternoon, with the cloud base down to about fifteen hundred feet. Before returning to PTS later that afternoon, we heard rumours of a parachute fatality in the area, involving the SAS team. There was simultaneously a complete news blackout from Hereford and it was not until two days later that the facts emerged. A team of eight SAS jumpers had taken off in a Handley Page Dart Herald from Boscombe to attempt a new British altitude record. Under the leadership of Dare Wilson, they left the aircraft at a height of 34,350 feet, with personal oxygen bottles, jumping on to Imber DZ. Problems arose with icing of goggles and altimeters and Keith Norry, who had over two hundred descents at the time, failed to arrive at the RV. He was found on the ground shortly afterwards, with neither his main nor his reserve handle pulled. The Board of Inquiry was unable to establish any specific cause of the accident, whilst the rest of the parachuting world could only surmise the factors involved. I knew Keith from his course at Abingdon, he now lies at rest in Tidworth military cemetery and each year I join his remaining teammates there in a brief remembrance ceremony. There was, in fact, an ironic connection between these two accidents in that Colonel Wilson took over from Mike Reilly as BPA Chairman and was himself to prove a highly influential figure in the organisation and development of the sport between 1962 and 1966."

Submitted by George Roberts