Looking Back with Eric Leaver

THIRTY years ago, the world was in awe at man's first landing on the moon.

But just nine weeks later, it was the 17-minute flight of a light aircraft and its touchdown in town that was acclaimed as more momentous for Burnley.

For though it, too, was hailed as a first - of a plane putting down in the borough - it was seen as the start of something much bigger . . . Burnley getting its own "airport."

This was the long-standing dream of one of the aircraft's passengers, 69-year-old Alderman Joseph Herbert.

For years, he had banged on about Burnley needing an airstrip to lure business and airborne executives to the town. He had also backed idea of a municipal heliport and even got a site for one set aside at The Ridge.

But first, the adventurous alderman, who in his 40 years on the council was to steer through many big changes in Burnley, needed to prove that his airstrip project could fly.

"If you are going to sell ice cream, you have to let people taste it," he declared. Alderman Herbert applied to the County Council for official permission for a plane to make a landing in Burnley and two days after getting it in September, 1969, he was aboard the pioneer flight - taking off from Squires Gate, Blackpool, and destined to descend on a field at Netherwoods Farm behind Burnley's Heasandford Estate.

At the controls of the hired plane was flying enthusiast David Pye, a foreman technician, of Burnley and also aboard was local nightclubs boss Brian Tattersall, who intended to help the alderman in the formation of a company to develop the airstrip.

"I'm sure it can be a viable operation," said Alderman Herbert. "It will be used for light aircraft and weather conditions here should be suitable for landing for a minimum of half the year."

But whether or not one landing showed the project's viability, it had certainly proved that those arriving there by air would need plenty of pluck - as pilot Pye lost count of the number of his attempts to land.

"I had to make several approaches because the wind kept us floating too long and after we touched down, it was very difficult to pull up from 80mph in the limited length of the field," he said. But the project never took off and, though it was hailed as a pioneering landing, it wasn't the first. The maiden touchdown of an aeroplane in Burnley was by early aviation ace Gustav Hamel in a Blriot monoplane at the flying display he staged at the Griffin Grounds at Rossendale Road, Rosegrove on Saturday, November 12, 1912 - which he followed up with another at the cricket field at Turf Moor the following Tuesday.

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