When her Royal Navy pilot father’s plane disappeared, Melanie Leschallas searched for answers

Melanie Leschallas, 55, has no memories of her father. All she can do is conjure them from pictures. ‘I have a photo of him holding me as a baby. I feel the touch of his tweed jacket, his arms cradling me, the quality of his smile, a sense that all was right with the world.’ 

A test pilot for the Royal Navy, he went missing in a plane crash in 1967, at the height of the Cold War, when she was 14 months old. Despite – or maybe because of – his abrupt disappearance, he has always been a glamorous and enigmatic presence in her life. A presence she has spent over 50 years trying to make peace with. ‘His body was never found and the subject was taboo in my family as I was growing up.’ 

What she does know is this: her father, Lieutenant Commander David Barry Knowles, aged 35, and his co-pilot were lost in an air accident over the Irish Sea when their Sea Vixen plane crashed. The plane wreckage was later recovered seven miles off the Copeland Islands. As no bodies were found and because of conflicting eyewitness stories plus reports about the private lives of the dead men, the story quickly becomes murky. There is a rumour that a parachute was found. Melanie has always wondered if this means her father managed to eject from the plane. Then there is the revelation that her father had a mistress. ‘My father and his co-pilot were rumoured to be having affairs so some people thought they had faked their own deaths.’ 

The rumour and doubt were enough to make Melanie grow up believing her father could walk through the door any day. As a child she overheard whispered snippets. 

‘I imagined my father on a picture-book desert island with a palm tree, or as a dark shape appearing behind the cracked stained-glass door of the flat we’d moved to in Croydon so my mum could find a job.’

Melanie’s story has eerie parallels with that of actress Kristin Scott Thomas, whose father was also killed in an accident just a year earlier when his Sea Vixen plane crashed into the sea off the Dorset coast. His death was similarly shrouded in secrecy for years. 

The Sea Vixen was in the vanguard of a new generation of high-speed jets. The elite fighter pilots who flew them were considered the Top Guns of their time. ‘They were rock stars,’ says Melanie. 

Melanie’s father David as a young naval college graduate in 1954. As no bodies were found and because of conflicting eyewitness stories plus reports about the private lives of the dead men, the story quickly becomes murky

But the Sea Vixen also has a notorious history. Of the 145 built, 54 were lost in accidents and 55 crew members were killed during the plane’s 13 years of frontline service with the Fleet Air Arm from 1959 to 1972. 

Scott Thomas, who was five when it happened, has said poignantly: ‘I can still remember him. It’s like having a little film playing in your head. I can still remember his smell; it’s really weird. The thing that breaks my heart is the smell of engine oil.’ 

For Melanie, however, there are no memories or sensory triggers – and that has made it hard to mourn. ‘Because there was no body, we could never gather around a grave and let go of him.’ 

To add to the pain of her father’s disappearance, Melanie’s mother (27 at the time of the accident) refused to discuss it. When she received the telegram telling her that her husband was missing, presumed dead, she was staying with her parents in Hampshire. Because of David’s infidelity, she had already separated from him, taking baby Melanie and her brother Alastair, three, with her. ‘She was incredibly strong and brought up two children on her own.’ 

Melanie’s parents had once been a real love match. ‘Mum met him when she was 19 and Dad was married with a daughter. Her own father was a submarine captain in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, and Dad flew for the Fleet Air Arm under him. To break up their relationship, my grandparents sent Mum to South Africa. But she came back and married him. Then, when she was pregnant with me, he was sent off for a tour of duty in the Far East and that’s when he started his next affair.’ 

After that, Melanie’s mother edited him out of her story. ‘My brother and I knew not to speak about him. In stark contrast, however, Melanie’s grandmother (her father’s mother) never accepted her son had died. ‘She thought he’d been taken by the Russians. Everyone was paranoid because it was the Cold War. There was a story that she’d received a strange long-distance phone call, and heard him breathing before the phone went dead.’ 

As a teenager, Melanie suffered recurrent nightmares about dying. ‘I would try to imagine my way into my dad’s final moments. And I feared my mum might die so I had to keep an eye on her.’ 

Melanie’s parents on their wedding day, 1964. Melanie’s mother’s parents had been unhappy at the match and had sent their daughter to South Africa to stop them marrying 

She clung to her first boyfriend, who she was with from 16 to 29, even though she knew the relationship wasn’t right. ‘He was like this tree I was leaning against.’ 

After studying French and Italian at Bristol University (‘my father spoke fluent French’), she tried to carve out a career as a performer. ‘I didn’t have the resilience because of what had happened with my dad.’ 

By now Melanie was drinking heavily and messing her boyfriend around. ‘He was lovely but I was a bitch to him. I behaved like my father. It’s amazing what we do subconsciously to get in touch with our parents.’ 

She went backpacking and was involved in a ferry accident in Malaysia where three people died. ‘I jumped into the water. I had my father’s survival instinct. But I definitely experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. My anxiety got worse and I couldn’t hold down a job after the accident. I got depressed and spent a lot of time hanging around the flat I shared with my boyfriend in Notting Hill in my dressing gown feeling utterly lost, lonely and empty. 

Melanie with her elder brother Alastair and their father shortly before his disappearance in 1967

‘When we split up a few years later, the image of a drowned woman being brought into the police station in Malaysia, wrapped in newspaper, her rings being pulled off her swollen fingers and given to her husband, had always haunted me and it began to precipitate panic attacks.’ The shock of her boyfriend then meeting someone else, she says, ‘opened the floodgates to all the feelings I’d hidden away since childhood’. 

Aged 29, Melanie had a nervous breakdown. ‘I wanted to die. My mother took care of me. We didn’t talk much but we went for long walks in the hills. The dam broke. I pieced myself back together with yoga, writing and therapy.’ 

Later Melanie took an MA in drama and movement therapy and set up a training company (clients included EasyJet and the NHS). Her mother never remarried. ‘I think she felt men weren’t worth bothering with. She’d made this bold move, striking out with my father, and that was enough for her.’ 

Melanie assumed she would stay single, too. But she met her husband Craig, who was running an events company, on a holiday in Egypt in 1999. ‘At the time I’d just been sacked and decided to spend my £500 pay-off on a yoga retreat. I should have saved it. But I thought: “What would my dad do? He’d go on the retreat.”’ 

Today the couple have a son, 19, and daughter, 18, ‘both wonderful young people. And because Craig and I come from broken families, we’re determined to stay together.’ 

However, there’s still a bit of daredevil in Melanie. In 2008, during the financial crash, both their businesses (Melanie’s training company and Craig’s events company) went under. ‘We were in massive financial trouble and had to sell our house in Brighton,’ she says. 

It left them just enough money to buy a finca in Spain’s Malaga mountains, from which they now host wellness and writing retreats. ‘I see it as my base camp. Like my dad, I like to explore.’ Her first novel has just been published and she lives more fiercely and takes risks because her father did. ‘It’s given me more bandwidth to be who I want to be. My father taught me: “Life is a grand adventure or nothing at all.”’ 

In 2017, around the 50th anniversary of her dad’s death, Melanie began digging for clues in earnest. ‘When I was younger, I thought he was a cad. It was my mother’s version of the story, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve realised he lived his life fully.’ 

She put a message on the Lost at Sea website. ‘An engineer who had worked on his plane got in contact. He told me Dad had been a daredevil who’d already had a near-miss while in service in Malaysia from flying too close to the water. He thought my dad had indeed “perished”.’ 

In a final twist to the story, in 2019 Melanie was sent a recording made by the general manager of the naval aircraft repair facility in Belfast employed at the time her dad disappeared. His daughter had kept it for 20 years. In the tape the man expresses his unease about the disappearance of the plane. ‘There are details about losing radio contact, the plane being spotted in a place it couldn’t possibly be by the co-pilot’s wife while she was hanging out the washing, the time on the clock being out of sync with what was written in the final report. At the end of the recording, he says: ‘I hope that one day someone will lay the Vixen ghost to rest.’ 

Shocked, Melanie posted a message on an online noticeboard for ex-Navy staff. ‘I received messages from people singing my father’s praises but no extra information.’ 

A few months ago, she wrote to the person in charge of the Fleet Air Arm church in Yeovilton, Somerset, requesting a plaque to be put up in honour of her dad and his co-pilot. ’I’m also planning a trip to Yeovilton to see what else I can discover in their museum.’ However, Melanie now realises that closure won’t come with new evidence, but through celebration of the spirit of adventure that her glamorous, enigmatic father left her

• Melanie’s novel Little Dancer is published by Unbound, price £10.99*. She will be leading ‘Tell Your Story’ retreats in Spain from April * 2023 (lunarlemonproductions.com)