Memories

Please let me introduce myself, my name is Robert Whittingham and I was the Steward on the Royal Air Force VC10 that flew the survivors, of this terrible crash, to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. I now presently reside in Swindon, Wiltshire. Here is my account:

It was the morning of 20 April 1972. After an uneventful night flight from Akrotiri, the last leg of an eleven-day Tengah shuttle trip, I was in the squadron crew room, checking my mail. I was approached by a member of 10 Squadron Ops. He informed me that a VC10 belonging to East African Airways had crashed attempting to take off in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The squadron was sending an aeromed flight to pick up survivors and bring them back to the UK. Even though I had been flying all night, and now on my three-day pass, he asked me if I would volunteer t…

I was on this flight with my mother Carole and my father, Erno Parany. I was 5 1/2 years old at the time.

My father died 10 days after the accident at RAF Halton. My mother and I were released from hospital some weeks later. We only returned to live in Kenya for a short time after the accident. My mother later remarried and we went to live in Northern Ireland until emigrating to Australia in 1982.

I have attached some records that my mother has kept from the time.

My Grandfather was a senior manager in the GPO / Post Office and after retiring he took up a UN Posting to Ethiopia to after a few months we all moved out after he had been 6 months in post.

My first memories really start there as I was around 4 at the time we moved out and we returned in Sep 1972. We lived in the two-story flat apartments in the Ghion hotel grounds (we were no 10 – upper level).

Memories come in flashes at that age, but some things are indelibly printed and some I suspect come from Mum, Gran and Grandpa talking about it and reliving it. It’s hard to separate which is which.

I clearly remember the door buzzer going and this strange man coming in who Mum, Gran and Grandpa knew. His clothes looked messy, and he had big blisters all over his hands.…

My family were living in Ethiopia from 1970 until 1972. For us ex-patriot children, it was a blissful life, although this was not the case for so many Ethiopians. The only blight for my family and many others, was that my two older sisters Jane and Caroline, went to boarding school in England and so we lived a life of joyous reunions, rapidly replaced by an ever increasing sense of dread, about their approaching departure.

On the 18th April, Jane was 14, Caroline 12 and I was eight. After an early morning ride on our horses; and their recording the goodbye message for us, that they traditionally did, we set off for the airport and waved them off onto the doomed plane.

My mother has written about what happened next and I spoke about it, in an interview for the BBC in April 2021. Jane was killed almost immediately, and…