The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

A Ministry of Defence investigation is under way after an artillery shell exploded 980ft (300m) from a railway line near a Wiltshire village.

All live firing has been suspended on Salisbury Plain, after a round left a 6ft (1.8m) wide crater in a field in Patney near Devizes on Wednesday.

Farmer Andrew Snook said the shell landed on his farm.

An MoD spokesman confirmed the incident was being investigated, the Western Daily Press reported.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-26511743

Now that's a serious error. I've just looked up the range on Google Maps and a round landing 300m from the railway line puts it way outside the range boundaries. See: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Pat ... 2da2ed8d50

The highlighted white area is Patney (well, according to Google it is). The dark green line running east-west is the railway line. The range itself is to the south.

Incidentally, I see both the BBC and the Western Daily Press are trying to p**f up the "could have killed millions of innocents travelling on the railway" angle even though the round landed a fair way away from the line.

But don't you just love the accuracy of the report...

The Beeb wrote:And on Wednesday, an AS90 self-propelled gun capable of firing shells with nearly half a tonnes of explosives up to 15 miles (24 km), was due to be operating in Tilshead, Chitterne and Shrewton triangle.

All I can say is, crikey - how they've grown! And if they're suggesting that half a ton of HE would leave a mousehole like the one pictured, well... :roll:

Did they have a competency card?
Tony

Just the latest in many stray rounds over the years... there are one or two outside the range every decade or so. IIRC in the past they've actually managed to hit something (a 5.5" into a farm building?).

Quite a hard feat these days, since guns normally use the short-range low charges. Hence my accomplishment (rather, my ultimate responsibility as CPO/GPO) was dropping a 105mm round about 20m behind the OP party that was directing the fire...


(It turned out that one of the gun No1s was deaf as a post, and he had been mis-hearing the elevation commands from the Command Post. As the guns in this particular shoot were dispersed somewhat, it wasn't possible to do the normal GPO's (gun position officer) safety visual check to see that all the gun barrels were aimed in parallel with each other.

As the guilty gun could not be detected by a visual check, the Battery Commander in the OP took the brave method of ordering "Battery right" - firing the guns one by one on the same data until another rogue shell landed. Sure enough, another shell dropped just a few metres behind the OP party.... LOL I doubt they'd be allowed to use that risky method today, but at the time it was just considered normal regimental "panache" to call fire on oneself in this manner!)

With platforms like the AS90 delivering niceness to the enemy up to at least 30km in my recollection its not too surprising that a miss calculation can send a round someway off course. However this is the first incident I am aware of and although there are presumably a few more, I'd be surprised if its a serious problem, both in scale or in any threat posed.

Local rumour appears to narrow the blame down to either 4th, 19th or 7th RHA.
Is it a 105mm shell scrape or a 155mm??

The jury is still out, but as a mate said to me this afternoon, "that's an interview without coffee!"

I can't wait to see some anti-gun nerd pop up out of the woodwork and demand that such weapons are banned from public ownership!
ukrifleman.

These things do happen.

I remember many years ago one of the Canadian artillery batteries destroyed a cottage on Black Bay in Northern Ontario when a round left the Defence Area. Turned somebody who was supposed to remove two charge bags missed doing so on one round, and it fired on Charge 7 instead of Charge 5! Fortunately no casualties.

Maybe it was part of the badger cull?

*orders in some heavy duty kevlar umbrellas*