Paul’s a good friend, my regular partner when researching, visiting and photographing old plane crash sites. Apart from the African Princess who once e-mailed me to borrow some money in order to enable her to get her millions out of the despotic republic in which she was being held captive, Paul is the only friend I ha… Read more

Paul’s a good friend, my regular partner when researching, visiting and photographing old plane crash sites. Apart from the African Princess who once e-mailed me to borrow some money in order to enable her to get her millions out of the despotic republic in which she was being held captive, Paul is the only friend I have on the internet. And since sending a postal order for one thousand dollars, I haven’t heard a peep from Princess Beyonce, so I am assuming the worst there. Paul and I first met at a lonely car park on the moors one Saturday afternoon, and he was very gentle with me. No, no. I promised myself I wouldn’t write that. Start again. Paul got in touch with me nearly two years ago, asking for the coordinates for a wreck site near his home. By the time I replied, he had gone up there and found it himself (search his stream for USAAF B24 42-50668) This was no fluke; time and again when out looking for just that one fragment of crash debris that confirms the record, it is Paul who finds it. The one crash site that we can really lay claim to having rediscovered ourselves is that of Handley Page Heyford K6900 near Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire. I wouldn’t have found it on my own, it was Paul’s intuition / recollection of an account he’d read that led us to finding the few scraps the proved we had the right spot. A couple of metres out one way or the other and we’d have missed it. And on our most recent search, by the snow covered flanks of Striding Edge in the Lake District, I was just calling out to Paul that I thought we had the location about right, when he replied to show me the fragment of debris which he had spotted and recovered from an iced over Red Tarn. This was the only bit we found at that site. Or, if not locating the evidence of a crash site, then the most interesting bits of wreckage – a bullet, the tip from an antenna mast, an emergency door release handle – are nearly always found by Paul and not me (bastard). I’d be sick to death of him, but he’s such good company. I’m not going to do any more grovelling, except to say that I am chuffed to know him and his family. Top bloke, top research, top photography. Ian D B, December 2010