Dutch Sea Fury Crash, Surrey 1951.

My wife found this article on the Facebook page "Peeks From The Past" a site showing archive images from the Farnham Herald in Surrey. The site covers all subjects but occasionally throws up aviation related articles. I contacted the site owner, coincidentally a past Air Britain member who sent me the files to pop on this forum. 

Chris Beards


Dutch Sea Fury Crash – Kings Farm, Binsted

Friday 19th October 1951

Report from Alton Mail of Friday October 26th 1951:

Plane down in field

Force landing at Binsted

A single engine fighter plane ploughed a “runway” some 36 feet in width, through a field of kale belonging to Mr E J Longman, of Kings Farm, Binsted, and came to a halt within a few yards of a steep drop down into the road, when the pilot was forced to crash-land at midday on Friday.

The plane was an ex-Naval Sea Fury, owned by the Ministry of Supply, and was in the process of being overhauled prior to sale to the Dutch Navy, whose colours it already bore. It was piloted by a civilian test pilot and was on routine test flight from the Hawker Aircraft Ltd works at Langley, Bucks. The engine failed, and the pilot was compelled to make a forced landing in Mr Longman;s kale, the height of which, and his own clever handling of the plane, prevented a more serious mishap.

A damaged under-carriage and buckled propeller were the extent of the effect on the plane, and the pilot was quite unharmed and readily sat down to a large if belated lunch provided by Mrs Longman. He afterwards told a Binsted resident that such landings were all in the day’s work, but when a plane “went up in smoke” he really started to worry!

Guards were posted throughout the weekend, and on Tuesday lorries and a crane manned by the Royal Navy and Hawker Aircraft personnel arrived to remove the Sea Fury.

Mr Longman estimates that “Operation Sea Fury” has lost him about an acre of kale, turnips, swedes and sprouts.

Photographs taken on 23rd October show the Sea Fury to have been Kon Marine 16.5.