" Then reports of a crash in south Wales began to come in and the rest of that night was just a nightmare . I was driven by the C-in-C of the aerodrome Defford , a man called King , and winding through these lanes near Ross-on-Wye searching for this wreckage , and then the field with the burnt-out Halifax , and of course it was wartime , there was no time for emotions , our first duties were to search for the precious highly-secret equipment , and collect the bits-and-pieces of it . " - Bernard Lovell . After the RAF investigative board completed its report on the Halifax crash on 1 July 1942 , it was distributed to a restricted list of approved recipients , but not publicly divulged . In the interests of wartime secrecy , the announcement of Blumlein 's death was not made for another three years . The investigative board , headed by AIB Chief Inspector Vernon Brown – who later also investigated the post-war '' Star Tiger '' and '' Star Ariel '' disappearances – and assisted by Rolls-Royce , who had made the Halifax 's Merlin engines , found that the crash was caused by engine fire , attributed to the unscrewing of a tappet nut on the starboard outer engine , which had been improperly tightened by an RAF engine fitter while inspecting the engine some three hours prior to the crash
Star Tiger
BSAA Star Tiger disappearance
Alan Blumlein