Late on Christmas Eve 1975, at the Glenforsa Hotel on the Isle of Mull, one guest – Norman Peter Gibbs – flabbergasted everyone when he announced he was going to try a night circuit, from the adjacent unlit airstrip, in his little Cessna-150 aircraft.
Gibbs – slight, zestful, an RAF war veteran, a brilliant professional musician, deft businessman and on the eve of his 54th birthday – would brook no argument. He was informing management out of courtesy, he rapped – he did not need their permission.
Out he and his clever, willowy girlfriend – Dr Felicity Grainger, 32 – sallied into the night. Folk crowded into the upstairs bar of the Glenforsa for a view of this dare: someone turned off the lights.
After odd delay, vague movements in the shadows – Grainger bobbing cheap torches for guidance – and much revving of the engine, G-AVTN finally took off, curling south and disappearing behind trees and hill.
Peter Gibbs was never seen alive again. His aeroplane has never been definitively found. And, had our tale ended there – with disappearance entire – we would assume plane and pilot were tragically lost in the Hebridean sea.
Of course the alarm was soon raised – though, as there were no ferries to Mull till Boxing Day, skilled personnel took a while to arrive – and, amidst vile wintry weather, hills were searched, woods probed and beaches combed.
It was one of the biggest search-and-rescue operations ever mounted in Scotland and ruined a lot of people’s holidays: nothing was found. And, as days passed, hopes that Gibbs had made safe landing anywhere else – and would call shortly to reassure everyone, and especially his partner – bleakly faded.
Then, on April 21, 1976, in craggy woods about 360 feet above sea-level and just over a mile from the Glenforsa airstrip, a sturdy young shepherd – Donald MacKinnon – found a man’s decomposing body slumped over the trunk of a fallen larch.
RAF war veteran Norman Peter Gibbs, who was never seen alive again after taking off for a Christmas Eve flight
The body was facing north – as if he had been walking uphill, away from lights and warmth and shelter. Local police proved unblushable about an area they had professedly searched: from Christmas, they said stiffly, they had been looking for an aircraft, not a corpse.
David Howitt, whose parents ran the Glenforsa, identified the body at a glance as Gibbs – the heavy flying-boots; the navy jumper – and this was duly confirmed from dental records.
But there was nowhere, anywhere – despite another huge search, with an RAF Leuchars helicopter, a 25-strong mountain-rescue team and thirty Strathclyde Police cadets – a trace of that plane.
Aspects of the investigation that followed are, by today’s lights, eyebrow-raising. The locale was not secured. There was no erection of a forensic tent; no immediate fingertip-search of the area.
The police surgeon retained by Strathclyde Police – Dr W D S McLay – was not swept to Mull to inspect the body in situ and, with some soupy unpleasantness, it was removed from the scene and borne to Glasgow for McLay’s autopsy.
Considering the scenario, the corpse was signally free of injury: one fractured tiny bone – a bone you have probably never heard of – and a shallow 3-inch cut, a scratch really, on Peter Gibbs’s right shin.
Nor was there any trace of salt water in the clothing, nor microscopic marine life – nor, were the background not known, anything that would have suggested escape from a crashed plane.
A Fatal Accident Inquiry was duly convened in Oban on Thursday 24 June 1976, and the jury duly concluded that, after his nocturnal take-off, Peter Gibbs ‘did not return; that he died on or about December 25 of exposure; that in April his body was found not far from the airstrip, uninjured and in a condition consistent with its having lain there for four months; and that no trace has been found of the aircraft.’
Gibbs’s uninjured but decomposed body was discovered, without the plane, on a hillside near the airfield four months later
All assumed that the Cessna-150 had come down in the Sound of Mull, that Gibbs had escaped, managed to swim ashore – and, quite disorientated, become hopelessly lost and succumbed to the cold.
There were but two other developments. On October 5, 1976, the partially inflated tyre and inner tube of a small aircraft was found on the shore a mile and a half north of the Glenforsa airstrip.
It could have been from G-AVTN, but there was no way of proving it. Then, a decade later – brothers Richard and John Grieve, out diving for clams – spotted a small plane sunk in the outer estuary of the River Forsa, practically at the eastern threshold of the airstrip.
The aircraft was never raised and subsequent photographs are few and fuzzy: we know only that it was a Cessna, and that both doors were shut and the windscreen was missing.
Not minded to fully investigate, the divers did not try and locate the cockpit clock – electrically powered, it would have stopped at the moment of the crash – or ascertain if the pilot’s seatbelt was still buckled.
No human remains would have survived, for a body dissolves completely, teeth and all, in seawater within three years or so – but that buckle would have told us a lot.
Up to a point. In fact, there are all sorts of lost, submerged planes off the West Highland coast – at least three crashed on tiny St Kilda alone during Hitler’s war, which gives you some idea of the scale of this – and, after years or decades of marine-growth, they tend to look very alike.
One discovered off Oban in 2004 – excitedly assumed by many to be Gibbs’s aircraft – was in time confirmed as yet another war-time casualty, a Catalina flying boat.
Gibb’s Cessna-150 aircraft, G-AVTN. The remains of the plane have never been formally identified
To assume that a submerged plane (of light construction, given its day-job) will remain below the point of impact with the briny is naïve. Even setting aside powerful currents – the flood-tide surges into the Sound of Mull at both ends; and the outflow of the River Forsa can be formidable – trawlers and clam-dredgers often drag wreckage no mean distance.
But the combination of a lost plane and Peter Gibbs’s indubitable corpse makes the Great Mull Air Mystery the most baffling Scottish puzzle since the war.
There have been four books, umpteen documentaries, and many YouTube woo-spooky expositions blaming everything from supernatural ‘portals’ to Viking gods.
The Great Mull Air Mystery makes no sense whatever and two other possibilities can be dismissed. Gibbs could not have been wearing a parachute – in the tiny cockpit, it would have blocked the control column – and it is impossible to open the door of a Cessna-150 in the slipstream of flight. He neither bailed out nor jumped.
It’s like a ship-in-a-bottle with masts-raising stringing all wrong, muddied hopelessly by a Fatal Accident Inquiry that failed to inquire – starting off with a widely publicised hypothesis (a BBC Scotland Current Account documentary was broadcast before it even met) and positively determined to discount any suggestion of criminality or foul play.
This is despite the fact there is hard, prima facie evidence that Peter Gibbs may have been murdered. And some of the questions never actually put to the FAI are astonishing.
At no point was Dr McLay asked, for instance, if any trace of salt water was found in Gibbs’s lungs. Of a flight to Skye, earlier that Christmas Eve, Felicity Grainger was never asked what it was for and where they had been. Incredibly, the inquiry never even asked if Peter Gibbs could actually swim: about 40 per cent of the population cannot.
To say nothing of blithe incuriosity as to other aspects of the case. Gibbs had managed to hire the little Cessna from a noted local nob – Ian Hamilton QC, famed for a feat precisely a quarter-century earlier, ‘liberating’ the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey – without furnishing proof he was a qualified pilot.
Glenforsa Hotel, where Gibbs had been a guest prior to his disappearance
Actually, Gibbs’s license had lapsed. Nor had he recently sat an obligatory re-test. Nor had Dr Grainger ever seen him wearing, in the cockpit, the prescription-glasses he had been decreed to wear for flight – not to mention carrying a spare pair at all times.
Yet Hamilton was expressly told he need not answer any question that might tend to incriminate him.
He was even allowed to cross-examine other witnesses. The inquiry never demanded to see the full records of his Connel Aeroplane Company or ask generally about its operation and, in a rider to their final verdict, the jury further declared that ‘Mr Ian Hamilton, Counsel, who chartered the Cessna to Mr Gibbs, was clear of negligence and blame of any description, either personally or in relation to his aircraft.’
Indeed, so terrified was David Howitt of this legal eagle that when, in 1985, he published his own account of the mystery, he did so under a pseudonym – Scott MacAdam.
In October I laid the known facts before Dr Robert Dickie, a retired but highly respected GP with a ton of letters after his name, much experience as a pathologist and with the advantage, for our purposes, that he had never heard of the Great Mull Air Mystery in all his puff.
‘A lot of things bother me about that report,’ says Dr Dickie.
‘In essence the shallow 3-inch cut is trivial in the context of any air accident trauma. With any air crash you get horrendous internal trauma, though not necessarily a lot to see externally, especially if you have RAF-type clothing – until you remove the clothing. You are looking at rapid deceleration, multiple mph to zero on impact, so bones and organs get badly traumatised.
‘The absence of an aircraft is odd. You’d expect something to be in the vicinity. I’m not too bothered about absence of salt water or marine life as that time of year would wash the occasional shrimp out of clothing, if any were there. But sand, seaweed – not so likely. Absence of salt is neither here nor there, because of rain etc…’
A number of light civilian aircraft at Glenforsa Airfield in 2021
But Dr Dickie is most bothered by a detail in Dr McLay’s evidence at the Oban FAI – determinedly downplayed in proceedings; no one alerting the jury to its significance.
Peter Gibbs’s hyoid bone was broken. It is a tiny bone in the neck, important for speech and for swallowing, and unique in that it is the only bone in our body not attached to another one.
And its fracture is an immediate code-red to any medical examiner, for the usual cause is strangulation – or the windpipe-crusher blow of a trained killer.
‘Fractured hyoid really sounds odd,’ says Dr Dickie. ‘Needs explanation. It’s possible to accidentally fracture a hyoid during autopsy, especially in an older person. Ham-fisted dissection could still do it – and once again, you would want to think about microscopy to show whether bleeding had occurred, which would indicate during life or during the process of dying.
‘Certainly neck compression would have to be considered, such as you suggest. In the absence of a rope, death by hanging could presumably be ruled out…
‘So, aircraft-related death really doesn’t sound realistic. Exposure – could be, though it’s dreadfully hard to be conclusive about that. And you have to explain why he took off in a plane – if he did, and not somebody else – and no sign of [a] plane in the vicinity.
‘Landing in water would be significant deceleration – a head-over-heels sinking – so once again, where’s the trauma?’
Interviewed in 2015 retirement for an vexingly flippant BBC Radio 4 documentary, Dr David McLay’s own unease was evident: not least that he had not viewed the remains on the scene before any disturbance.
Norman Gibbs’s detailed log book
‘He had been moved – yes. He was moved down to Glasgow for post mortem. He was clothed, and I just found this a very odd problem to be faced with.’
Why? ‘Well, it’s weird that the body didn’t turn up fairly quickly after the crash,’ murmured McLay.
‘That’s not very usual, and one would perhaps expect fairly major injuries coming out of a plane like that, but he had a minor limb injury. There was nothing to suggest that he had come out of a plane flying at any speed at all.’
Nor did anything suggest, McLay insisted, that Gibbs ‘had died in one place and been taken and put in another, which would have been homicidal.’ Tests for poison, drugs and alcohol (excluding alcohol naturally created by decay) had drawn a blank; months of drenching rainfall would account for the absence of salt.
But he was hesitant as to the cause of Gibbs’s death. ‘Well, in the absence of anything else, we were reduced to saying that he had died simply of exposure and the consequences of loss of heat; loss of will to struggle – because, where the body was, he was not far to a road…’
The long delay in discovery did not help. The phenomenon of post-mortem hypostasis – blood pools, fixed, vivid and purple, to the underside of any corpse soon after death, making it easy to ascertain if the stiff has subsequently been moved – vanishes in advanced decomposition.
As would petechial haemorrhage, bloody capillaries in the eyes immediately betraying a throttling.
The Great Mull Air Mystery makes no sense – no sense whatever – until you accept the courage of Dr Dickie’s logic and the overwhelming evidence that Peter Gibbs had not been in an air crash at all, nor had fought for his life in the sea.
And that, for all the prior pantomime – there was something decidedly theatrical about Peter Gibbs’s behaviour that night, alerting all and sundry to his daring jape – it was not he, but someone else, at the controls when G-AVTN finally took off in the inky Highland night.
The alternative, if you buy the official line, is that the Cessna-150 duly landed in the drink – when it almost certainly, given high-winged design and fixed undercarriage, would have somersaulted and disintegrated; that Peter Gibbs managed to get out – practically unscathed – and then, in zero visibility, flying-boots and all, swum unerringly in the right direction, made shore, and stomped across the coastal road but hundreds of yards from warmth, safety and Felicity.
In the dark, Gibbs found one of the very few points in a near-perpendicular rock-face where he might clamber uphill, and fought his way through all sorts of hazards to the spot where his body was finally found.
With nothing more to show for this protracted nightmare – a 54- year-old whose war-injuries included dodgy knees and two fused vertebrae – than one 3-inch scratch and a broken hyoid bone.
It is a heap of hooey – and we might add, on top of that, that there is scarcely any evidence that G-AVTN crashed at all. Several Oban folk, in the stillness of that Christmas Eve – in the local hospital; dispersing from a church service – clearly heard a small aircraft passing overhead.
After that, we can only speculate, especially now that so many key witnesses are gone. Donald MacKinnon died in 2014, David Howitt in 2017, Dr David McLay and Ian Hamilton in 2022, and Dr Felicity Grainger in December 2023.
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But Peter Gibbs seems to have been involved in something either nefarious or deep-State that called for a bit of fuss, stage-craft, a last-moment substitution and the very fact that it was Christmas – everyone distracted, most off-duty, and an inevitably tardy response to any alarm.
Given that it was only an hour away from Mull by plane and that 1975 was the bloodiest year of the Troubles, it may well have been something to do with Northern Ireland. Some islanders were very, very sympathetic to the Republican cause.
And that, having made himself scarce thereafter and as agreed – lurking in the woods awaiting G-AVTN’s return – others involved now ruthlessly silenced Peter Gibbs.
Some years ago Dr Allan J Organ, of no mean expertise in aviation and who has studied this mystery for years, tried to replicate the averred Peter Gibbs trek from the Sound of Mull to that tumbled larch-tree.
In broad daylight, even under the enthusiastic tow of his Siberian husky, Dr Organ had to turn back. The ascent was impossible.
Undaunted, in 2019 he paid for the services of Holdfast Marine Services Ltd to conduct full, deep, side-scan sonar where that sunken 1986 aircraft had been noted, in about 100 feet of water east of the threshold of the Glenforsa airstrip.
Andrew Watters, and his mates, found nothing.
Unnervingly, several other Glenforsa guests subsequently likewise quartered – in Room 14 – later perished in private-plane crashes, till the alarmed Howitts finally denied its use to any flying guests.
It was even quietly exorcised by a Catholic priest. Norman Peter Gibbs was laid to rest in Oban on May, 3, 1976, his subsequent headstone with one eerie epitaph – ‘Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight.’
