On a miserable winter’s night, Thursday 10th January 1952, Ireland suffered its first ever national air disaster. The Saint Kevin along with a sister-ship became embroiled in ‘the perfect storm’ whilst travelling the valleys and hills of Snowdonia in North Wales. Aer Lingus was then in her 16th year of operations and had only recently been declared the world’s safest airline.

The story of the loss of the Saint Kevin has never been told before. ‘Shamrock 165 Volume I – The Unknown Crash’  looks back at the events of that evening. What brought these persons to that specific point in the continuum of time and space. What were the true causal factors that predicated the disaster – a systematic chain of unlucky events that were to prove to be unpropitious for the then-newest airship in the National Airline’s fleet. This is the first volume in a series of three from The Saint Kevin Project, exploring what really unfolded on that horrific night in the skies above the majestic Snowdonia National Park.

Over many years of in-depth research, the author has conducted approximately 10,000 interviews and sourced in excess of 12,000 bona-fide legal documents, images, letters, etc. – pertinent to the day-to-day running of the airline, to the Saint Kevin itself and in particular lives tragically lost in this air disaster.

This first volume of the story is generously interspersed with an abundance of genuine photographs that were acquired over the past number of years.