For Des McLindon, August 1968 is “just a haze”. Yet as his mind spools back half a century, there are pictures, pieces of memory of a particular day, which emerge from that haze. It was the day he learned of the plane crash in Germany that claimed his sister’s life.
Friday, August 9 was the day in question. Maureen, his 20-year-old sibling, a student nurse at Liverpool’s Broadgreen Hospital, had departed from Heathrow airport that morning on a flight bound for Innsbruck. It was her first-ever flight and she was travelling with her cousin, Mary Fletcher, and six fellow members of the Liverpool Catholic Ramblers’ Association, all looking forward to a walking holiday in Austria.
