Retrospective Diary
One of the most frequently asked question, if not THE most asked question is what became of Donald. We now know enough to answer that question and put most of the theories to bed once and for all. We not only have masses of our own data, we also have the original divers report from 1967 and the help of one of the dive team. Add to this that we have the wreck including the cockpit we can explain exactly what happened to Donald. There are also lots of dives to tell of that we conducted over the winter in the most dreadful conditions.
One of the most fascinating and at times, haunting aspects of this project has been determining the exact sequence and nature of events in the crash. It's easy to see the whole thing as one single explosive event but in reality it was quite complex. What makes it haunting is that there was a living breathing human being in the midst of it all and putting the cockpit back together was a harrowing experience.
What happened to Donald Campbell? there have been all sorts of theories over the years.
Was he in the boat at all?
Did he go up the air intakes?
Did he end up beneath the boat when it settled into the mud?
Was his body shattered into pieces that were easily missed by the divers?
Did the divers simply fail to find the right area?
The fact that the divers were unable to find him has resulted in one of the most enduring mysteries but we can safely discount much of the speculation at this stage.
Firstly, he definitely didn't go up the air intakes, in fact the air intakes are smashed shut, it's difficult to get your hand in there. Even if they were fully open we know that the engine was not under power at the time of the crash so there was no sucking going on. Donald was actually sat well below the air intakes with his back to the rear spar where it passed through the cockpit. It would have been virtually impossible for him to get near the air intakes.
He certainly wasn't in the crater left by the boat when it came out of the mud and he was nowhere near the main hull. We carried out a very thorough inspection of the hole using both divers and ROV's. There was nothing in there.
I think that it's only the conspiracy theorists that enjoy the idea that Donald was somehow not in the boat on the return trip. As for the remaining two possibilities, they'll take a bit more explaining.
Was Donald smashed to pieces? It's easy to use this theory to explain the fact that he was never found but think about it in the light of these facts.
Firstly, how many pieces are we talking about? The human body is an incredibly strong and resilient piece of engineering. We have carried out extensive research into what happens to people who come to a sudden stop from high speeds. There is one unknown quantity in all of this and that is what damage would be done by a body crashing through the boat's structure. All our assumptions are based on a body hitting smooth water.
In order to achieve fragmentation of a body we need a force well in excess of 300g. In order to achieve 300g from a speed of 300mph we need a stopping distance of virtually zero. You'll have to wait for the book if you want all the sums but to cut a long story short, Bluebird was travelling at considerably less than 300mph when she hit the water and the stopping distance was in excess of 3m. What this means is that disregarding the problem of crashing through the boat's structure, there was nowhere near enough force to smash a body into fragments.
If there had been loads of bits spread over a large area then surely one of them would have been found?? and yet there was never a trace. This supports the idea that Donald's body remained intact. These questions were carefully researched with the help of one of the RAF's most eminent pathologists who works alongside the AAIB so I assume that the conclusions reached are essentially correct.
If we assume that he arrived at the bottom in one piece that leaves us with the assumption that the divers just failed to locate him. This is both the most likely scenario and the most difficult to explain to non divers. I'll have a go later in the week.
We are working on the assumption that Donald left his boat more or less in one piece. As I say, we cannot account for "secondary injuries" that's the term used by the RAF pathologists to describe what happens to you when you leave through a piece of structure at very high speed. All assumtions are based on mathematical calculations that relate to stopping distances and speed.
Another term to which they introduced me was "getting undressed" this is when your socks, shoes, gloves, helmet etc etc come off. Sound familliar? It's quite normal in impacts with water.
We can safely discount the fragmentation theory for two reasons. Firstly the sums don't add up and secondly, if there were lots of bits then some of them would have been found.
I had to smile when I read the original report compiled by Commander John Futcher in 1967. He states,
"Mr Campbell would either be at the point of impact or in the main wreckage or somewhere in between those two points"
He must have stayed up all night thinking about that one! Seriously though, there proved to be a considerable distance between the impact site and the main wreckage and that's without the extra 130m travelled by the front spar. Worse than that, the debris distribution made no sense at all sometimes. It would be easy to write those words after you'd seen the results of the crash lying on the lakebed.
Imagine having to find a body in the middle of an area the size of three football fields on the blackest night, with no moonlight, in the thickest fog you ever saw. All you've got is a tiny pen light torch, you've been dropped somewhere in the middle of the field but you don't know where and you can't see more than a couple of metres. It's so cold that your fingers turn numb almost immediately and you've had about 5 pints in the pub to create the effect of breathing compressed air at 41metres underwater. Nitrogen is narcotic at these depths. You've got 15 minutes to do it in and after that you'll be pulled out of there and that's it for the day. Despite only having 15 minutes, you can't move fast to cover more ground because if you do, the swirling fog will reduce your visibility to zero. Don't forget that if you don't do it right you could die at any moment.
Unless Commander Futcher's divers had been incredibly lucky or Donald had remained with his boat, they didn't really stand a chance of ever finding him and although we have far superior diving equipment than that which existed in 67, we are still just human beings in rubber suits. Our eyes can't see any better, we get just as cold, Inert gases are still narcotic (although we get round this by using helium). We can get the bends just the same and we know how to experience terror down there. That's why this job required the application of some serious technology.
Well, what can I say, we successfully recovered a body at the weekend. It's identity is still subject to offical confirmation but the team have no doubt. Our survey has become increasingly detailed. We've long had excellent evidence that Donald left his boat almost immediately it hit the water. He certainly damaged the inside of the cockpit before the cockpit separated from the boat and that event was pretty instantaneous. In a nutshell, the front of the boat was punched about 3m under the water, Donald pulled his harness out at three of the four fixing points, the one remaining was the left shoulder strap which was cut through later by the Navy to recover the still locked harness. He then crashed out through the front of the cockpit and the dash panel. He hit the water almost at Bluebird's point of impact and the boat carried on without him. He most likely sank straight down and landed on his back 41metres below. There was never any possibility of surviving the crash.
Actually, if you study the crash footage carefully enough it's easy enough to work most of this out. After the boat hits the water there is a huge eruption of water but by the time she re-appears out of the maelstrom, it's perfectly obvious that the whole front end is missing. There was nothing that flew out of the crash that really resembled a body except perhaps the front spar which departed to the North but this was located and eliminated as a possibility at the time. Apart from that, there was nothing so Donald had to have been lost in that first impact.
That was our theory and it proved correct but it took a bit of proving. Our side scan survey last September revealed dozens of targets arranged in a trail to the South West of the main wreck. Our high resolution scanning sonar survey revealed hundreds! Each one had to be checked and if it belonged to the wreck it was lifted by the divers. By starting at the Northern end of the crash site where the main wreck lay we were able to recover the heaviest pieces of wreckage first and make our way back to the point of impact. When bits of cockpit canopy and lengths of wiring harness began to appear, we knew that we were close. We then had to combine our short range sonar tripod, very slow scanning rate on the sonar for maximum resolution, extremely precise navigation and boat positioning, and hours of painstaking ROV work to eliminate every fragment down there. One of Mr Connacher's fabulously annoying habits (he has a few but we love him really) is to roll crisp packets over with his ROV thrusters and read the sell by date. Good practice but as I said, fabulously annoying!
As we approached the fifth target in one of our search grids we spotted a small piece of blue cloth poking from a slightly uneven piece of lake bed. All the crisp packet blowing came into use as Graeme expertly blew the mud away from the cloth to reveal a fastened trouser belt. There was just stunned silence on the boat. We went out on deck. The smokers smoked with trembling fingers, the rest of the team stood and stared at nothing. The ROV sat parked on the lake bed looking at the piece of cloth. When we played the footage back, there was 40 minutes of that cloth. I have no idea where that time went.
Strange things happen to the human body when it is left alone in cold deep fresh water. It is often assumed that a body will return to the surface but this mecchanism is dependent upon gas forming as a product of decomposition. For most of the year it is 4 degrees centigrade at the bottom of the lake. At this temperature, water is at its most dense and so it sinks. That is why ice floats and why it forms at the surface. At that temperature decomposition is very slow and so is the formation of gas. At 41 metres depth there is five times atmospheric pressure on a body. For a body to float, it must displace its own mass of water. When gas forms it increases the volume which causes the body displace more water and therefore to float. At five times atmospheric pressure, it would require production of five times the MASS of gas to achieve the same volume. At a slow decomposition rate any gas formed could be dissolved straight into the water and so provide no lift. Even if sufficient gas was formed, it still needs to be trapped somewhere. If there are any holes that it can bubble away through then it's a waste of time anyway.
Assuming that a body remains in place in these conditions, it can very well undergo a process called soponification, this means quite literally "turn to soap" and the body turns into a substance called adipocere. It is a hard wax or chalk like material that becomes pretty much inert, and there it stays, it'll quite easily lie that way for many years.
Lieutenant Commander Futcher and his team must have come within inches of finding Donald back in 67. Reading his report it's clear that he did everything right, he did mostly what we did, arrived at the same conclusions and searched the same parts of the lake. they actually covered the area where Donald lay and they did it all against impossible odds that must have only just beaten them. It was always our theory that they had simply missed him. It would have been very easy to do so. Commander Futcher perhaps couldn't say this. In his report he offers this as a theory,
"when he himself struck the water he disintegrated. The heavier pieces sinking into the mud of the lake bed and the more buoyant pieces drifting over the silt out of the search area"
Unfortunately this doesn't work at all, firstly the disintegration idea doesn't stack up mathematically. Second, a human body is almost entirely composed of water and therefore it just barely sinks. If the pieces of metallic wreckage didn't sink out of sight into the mud (and the Navy saw enough of these), there was absolutely no way that pieces of a body ever would and finally, there is no current in the lake to cause anything to drift away, if there was that much current there would be no silt. We're really starting to sort the fact from the fiction at this stage.
One of our biggest fears when trying to locate Donald on the bottom of the lake was that the Police diving team would have to effect the recovery. I must make it very clear that I do not mean any disrespect to those guys because their idea of a day at the office is to be neck deep in effluent looking for firearms or pulling dead teenagers out of cars in the canal. We've worked with them before and they are a great bunch but 40 odd metres in a lake is not really their scene.
Using our mixed gases and rebreathers, we can spend longer down there with no narcotic effects and do more useful work. We can cut schedules for repetetive dives and above all, we've logged hundreds of dives in there so we really know what we're doing in that environment. All of our dives are watched over with sonar and ROV's so that the divers can assess their own performance later.
We had to make a deal with the Coroner. There were all sorts of other problems such as the fact that we did the whole thing at weekends with volunteers when the Coroner was at home with his feet up. We couldn't guarrantee to relocate a target once it was found so we had to able to move quickly, there wouldn't have been time to stay on station waiting for the authorities, especially with that fickle lake District weather. We needed a contingency plan that we could run at any time in the evnt that we found Donald and it was all arranged weeks ahead of our discovery. Our plan was as follows, we constructed it meticulously, ran it to the letter and it worked.
1. We gathered a couple of hours of ROV footage of the whole area where Donald lay so that all the divers had a very good understanding of the nature and extent of our discovery. Certain areas were blown clear of silt with the ROV thrusters.
2. Two kilowatts of floodlighting was assembled on the lake bed over the site to provide illumination.
3. Another video survey was conducted at greater range to get a better view of the task ahead.
4. Carl and Beanie took the casket to the bottom and positioned it alongside where Donald lay
5. Over the next couple of days we very carefully made the recovery into the casket and sealed the lid whilst it lay on the bottom. Several personal items were brought from the lake bed separately. All of this work was caught on video as evidence for the Coroner. Beanie, Carl and Bill made all the dives, Al Douglas was boat handler and sonar operator with Captain Connacher on the ROV controls.
6. On the morning of May 28th 2001 we lifted the casket to the surface and draped it with a flag. The lighting will remain down there for two reasons, firstly if the site ever needs to be re-visited it will be easy to locate it and secondly we planned to hang a plaque from it to mark where Donald lay for 34 years. That will be difficult now that we've promised Gina that we won't dive on the site again. We'll think of something, we always do. Sincere thanks to all the team for an absolutely outstanding bit of teamwork in extremely trying conditions, and thanks also to the Coroner, Mr Ian Smith who was brilliant throughout as were the Police officers. Thanks all. Bill
Due to the fact that the Coroner's car was delayed on its journey to Pier Cottage, we were called on the radio and asked to wait on the lake for a few moments. We really didn't know where to put ourselves. After all there was only the five core team members and Donald's coffin on the boat. Our emotions were all over the place and we tried to hold an impromptu service for him, it went OK. We took this picture by balancing the camera on the ROV case and seting it's timer. the exercise took our minds off our situation.