MEM25583 - Air crash site between Liscombe Farm and Tarr Steps (Monument)

A pupil pilot under instruction took off from RAF Weston Zoyland near Bridgewater, Somerset, on the 9th February 1953. The planned route for the training flight was to head out to Exmoor before commencing a series of training exercises. Low cloud cover over Exmoor was predicted, a cause of multiple previous air disasters in the area. [1] Witnesses described the aircraft as performing a series of manoeuvres, climbing steeply and then passing out of sight above the clouds. After a short while the plane emerged, descending at speed, and crashed between Liscombe Farm and Tarr Steps. [2] The pupil pilot was Pilot Officer Raymond Woods, and the instructor was Sergeant Frederick Stockley. Neither survived the impact, and their bodies were found seeparately, some distance from the final resting place of the Meteor itself. The Gloster Meteor was the first British jet fighter, and the only class of jet aircraft to engage in combat operations during the Second World War on the Allied side. It became largely obsolete by the late 1950s.[3]