The team had not been beaten for 11 matches. They also held the FA Charity Shield and had just advanced into their second successive European Cup semi-finals. Manchester United were aiming to become the third club to win three successive Football League titles they were six points behind league leaders Wolverhampton Wanderers with 14 games still to play. Thain was cleared in 1968, ten years after the incident. It was later established that the crash was caused by the slush on the runway, which slowed the plane too much to enable take-off. Fearing the aircraft too might explode, Thain began evacuating passengers while Manchester United goalkeeper Harry Gregg helped pull survivors from the wreckage.Īn investigation by West German airport authorities originally blamed Thain, saying he did not de-ice the aircraft's wings, despite eyewitness statements indicating that de-icing was unnecessary. The tail section broke off and hit a barn with a parked fuel truck in it, that caught fire and exploded. After hitting the slush, the aircraft ploughed through a fence beyond the end of the runway and the left wing was torn off when it struck a house. By that time, snow was falling, causing a layer of slush to form at the end of the runway. Fearing they would fall too far behind schedule, Captain Thain rejected an overnight stay in Munich in favour of a third take-off attempt.
After refuelling, pilots James Thain and Kenneth Rayment twice abandoned take-off because of boost surging in the left engine. The flight stopped to refuel in Munich because a non-stop flight from Belgrade to Manchester was beyond the range of the "Elizabethan"-class Airspeed Ambassador.
The team was returning from a European Cup match in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, having eliminated Red Star Belgrade to advance to the semi-finals of the competition. The injured, some unconscious, were taken to the Rechts der Isar Hospital in Munich where three more died, resulting in 23 fatalities with 21 survivors.
There were 44 people on board, 20 of whom died at the scene. The aircraft was carrying the Manchester United football team, nicknamed the " Busby Babes", along with supporters and journalists. The Munich air disaster occurred on 6 February 1958 when British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on its third attempt to take off from a slush-covered runway at Munich-Riem Airport, West Germany. An Airspeed Ambassador similar to the one involved in the crash
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