Technical failure blamed for air crash

Bertie Fisher and his son Mark died after crash

The inquest into the deaths of rally driver Bertie Fisher and his son and daughter has blamed the accident on technical failure.

An inquest into the deaths of the Fermanagh man and his two children in the air accident took place on Tuesday.

The jury in Enniskillen concluded there had been a technical failure which made the aircraft difficult to control.

The coroner expressed his sympathy to the Fisher family that such a tragedy should have occurred to them.

Bertie Fisher: "A household name"

Mr Fisher's daughter Emma, 25, and son Mark, 27, died in the accident near their Ballinamallard home in County Fermanagh in January 2001.

The 51-year-old businessman died of his injuries later in hospital.

His wife Gladys, 51, and another son Roy, 24, were seriously injured in the crash.

Earlier on Tuesday, the jury heard that an RAF helicopter pilot postponed flying because of poor weather conditions on the day of the crash.

A statement read to the court by the RAF captain stationed at Enniskillen said he had been scheduled to fly out at 1130 GMT, but conditions were so poor he postponed the flight until after 1500 GMT.

Soon after he was airborne, he was asked to go and investigate reports of an air crash in poorer weather to the north.

He said shortly after that he came across the crash scene.

Radio transmissions

The inquest also heard from Ron Patten, the man who taught Bertie Fisher to fly.

He was in the control room at Enniskillen airport on the day of the crash.

He said Mark Fisher had phoned ahead to see what the weather conditions were like at the airfield and was told they were not good.

Mr Patten said that in the radio transmissions Bertie Fisher was "trying to pick his way through the clouds".

Mr Fisher was only qualified for "visual flight rules" which meant he had to stay within visibility of the ground at all times and must never fly into cloud.

He said at one point during the radio transmissions he heard an alarm sound - probably to warn that the hydraulics had failed.

Mr Patten said if that had happened it may have taken the aircraft into cloud and it would have been extremely difficult - if not impossible - to control it.

'Warning horn'

Last year, an air accident investigation into the crash concluded that a button had been depressed in the cockpit which would have caused an alarm to sound and may have led to a technical failure.

They found no evidence of such a failure, but even the sound of the alarm, combined with flying in cloud, would have added to a pilot's stress levels

That combination and a technical failure would have made the chances of recovery for a relatively inexperienced pilot remote.

Witnesses described a warning horn sounding in the moments before the helicopter came down.

The family had been returning from a celebration to mark Mrs Fisher's birthday at Ashford Castle in County Mayo.