In the early hours of Saturday 10th April 1943 Lancaster ED823 belonging to 1661 Heavy Conversion Unit (HCU) took off from RAF Winthorpe, near Newark for a night navigation training flight. At 01.25 shortly after take-off, the aircraft crashed in Halam, just off School Lane, eight miles from the airfield.

1661 HCU at RAF Winthorpe was a unit set up to train aircrews to fly heavy bombers such as the Manchester and Lancaster. The six week course was designed to transition crews from flying lighter twin engine aircraft to larger, heavier planes with four engines. The final part of the training course was night navigational exercises, such as the flight ED823 was making when it crashed.

The crash site is about 1/2 mile from the centre of the village of Halam. It is on the west facing slope of a gentle hill; in 1943 the field was pasture, today it is part of Norwood Park Golf Course.

All seven crew members were killed.

The cause (s) of this disaster will probably never be known and a measure of disagreement exists amongst experts. ED 823 was certainly not the worn out 'old hack' unfit for operational flying sometimes popularly associated with HCU training. It had only 12 hours flight time on the airframe and the Merlin XXVIII engines had between 12 and 22.25 hours running time only. All four engines had been installed on the aircraft 26/03/1943. The crash occured 10/04/1943, just two weeks later. (rafcommands)

According to Bill Chorley ED 823 flew into "high tension wires" (Bomber Command Losses Volume 8 page 45). He offered no evidence but this claim was echoed by David Needham in 2008 ('Nottinghamshire Air Crashes' p. 154).

Squadron Leader W H Orchard’s contemporary (1945) report noted ‘the marks of impact showed that the aircraft struck the ground flat and on an even keel and that all engines were under power… From examination of the wreckage it was not possible to establish any contributory cause of the accident from a technical aspect.’ (rafcommands)

However, other versions of the accident raised the issue of engine failure without reaching a consensus. This aircraft was a Lancaster Mark III fitted with Merlin engines built under license in the United States by Packard. Some have suggested Packard Merlins were prone to overheating on take off, a tendency refuted by David Duxbury. In fact,“in certain facets," Duxbry asserted, “Packard-built engines were more advanced (than Rolls engines), and RR adopted some of the Packard improvements” in their own designs. (rafcommands)

Lancasters were fitted with fire extinguishers, continued Duxbury, and even newly qualified pilots were trained to fly on three engines although he acknowledged that “at very low altitude… near maximum take off weight… failure of an engine was still potentially hugely problematic putting “the captain into a zone of maximum mental concentration, and all he had to fall back on were his experience and the drills he had learned by repetition.” (rafcommands)

In 2011, a stone memorial bearing a plate displaying the names of 7 airmen lost in the 1945 Halam crash was erected in a small garden on School Lane half a mile from the village centre. The site is now adorned with international and British tributes and includes a helpful information board provided by Nottinghamshire County Council.