It is the British equivalent of Lost. A plane leaves the UK for Australia but never arrives. Weeks later its crew are rumoured to have been taken prisoner by bandits in Yugoslavia who hold them to ransom before selling the plane to the Israeli air force.
But, unlike the US television series currently gripping British audiences, the tale of what happened to flight G/AKPD is a true life mystery that threatened to become a major diplomatic incident in the Middle East.
Confidential documents, released to The Observer by the National Archives, show senior Foreign Office officials were taken in by a mysterious man whose claims helped shroud the truth of what may have happened to the plane.
The few undisputed facts that are known about flight G/AKPD are these: On 29 October, 1948, a Lockheed Lodestar, owned by paper merchants RA Brand set off from the old Croydon airport in south London for New South Wales, via Rome, where it was to pick up five passengers.
On board were four men: Captain Thornton Hall, navigator J Ash and two passengers, referred to in Foreign Office documents as Mr Wellman and Mr Morris, who both worked for an engineering company. The plane never made it to Rome; its last perfunctory radio contact came after it passed above Orly in France. Despite extensive investigations, no trace of a crashed plane was ever found.
Following the plane's disappearance, the owners launched a
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