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Read more about the article Fatal Meteor jet crash at Williamtown, NSW, 1957
Gloster Meteor jet fighters on service with the RAAF in Korea.

Fatal Meteor jet crash at Williamtown, NSW, 1957

Recently, while I was visiting old acquaintances Doug and Peggy Paton, Doug mentioned a terrible plane crash he said he witnessed while he was a member of the Royal Australian Air Force, working at Williamtown fighter base north of Newcastle. Doug said the plane crashed while landing at the base, and he feared at one point that it might have smashed into the building where he was working. It was around meal time, he said, and there were few people around. Doug Paton in his RAAF uniform in the 1950s. He showed me some photos he…

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Read more about the article Shot down over North Korea: Ron Guthrie’s story
Ron Guthrie in a Meteor in Korea

Shot down over North Korea: Ron Guthrie’s story

THE Royal Australian Air Force was just cutting its teeth on jet fighters when the Korean War broke out. Ron Guthrie was one of a handful of Australian pilots with experience flying Vampire jets out of Williamtown RAAF base - near Newcastle, NSW - so he was an obvious choice to join the United Nations campaign against North Korea. It was a fateful posting that led to the young warrant officer becoming the first Australian jet fighter pilot to be shot down in the Korean War. Ron Guthrie, fighter pilot Guthrie had joined the RAAF in 1943 at…

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Plane wreck a monument to a war hero and an ill-starred venture

Stand by your glasses steady, for each man who takes off and flies. Here’s to the dead already; three cheers for the next man who dies. Toast proposed by British World War 2 aircrew following the death of a comrade. Doug Swain DFC at Camden in about 1948. Photo by John Laming. In the foothills of the Barrington Tops, in NSW, pieces of a wrecked Lockheed Hudson aircraft are a lonely monument to the three men who died in the 1954 crash, including World War 2 bomber pilot Doug Swain DFC. The wreckage is also a…

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