The brother-in-law of Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood was tragically killed after his light aircraft crashed into a mountain in Spain during thick fog, an inquest has heard. Simon Moores, 62, was killed when the plane went down in northern Spain near to Errezil in January 2019.
The father-of-two was the brother of Alex, 56, who had previously been married to the Great British Bake Off judge Paul, 56. The couple divorced in 2019.
An inquest on Thursday at Maidstone in Kent heard that the likelihood of the plane landing safely would have been "remote" in the awful conditions. The hearing also heard that it would have been likely that there was reduced vision when the flight took off, the Mirror reports.
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Coroner Joanne Andrews commented in the inquest that it was impossible to deduce if Mr Moore and his passenger David Hockings were being "naive or optimistic" when they made the decision to take off.
The hearing also heard that it was not known what system they had used to determine conditions. Nonetheless, Mrs Andrews said: "Given these weather conditions, the possibility of [landing] the plane was quite frankly remote."
Mr Moores and Mr Hockings were killed in a Piper Arrow III which was en route from the Portuguese town of Cascais to San Sebastian before it crashed into Mount Hernio.
The inquest heard Mr Moores was not aware of how close he was to the mountains and so did not know of the danger they were in until it was too late. Such deaths are known as "controlled flight into terrain".
A verdict of accidental death was recorded by Mrs Andrews as she explained the details around the plane journey. Statements from the authorities in Spain, witness accounts and a post-mortem by Dr Andrew Wild were read out by the Coroner.
No evidence was found there were any issues with either Mr Moores’ ability to fly the plane or with the aircraft itself. The inquest heard how the aircraft being piloted by Mr Moores, whose Certificate of Airworthiness had last been renewed in 2018, left Cascais at 8.30am local time and crashed at 1.55pm.
Signal was lost between 12.20pm and 12.30pm, before police were informed. Emergency services had to use ropes to climb almost 1,000 metres to reach the scene.
Mrs Andrews said: "This flight would have been expected to have taken three hours and 42 minutes. The evidence I have is the flight went as expected until around 12.30pm that day."
Concluding the inquest, she added: "In this case, having considered the evidence, I am satisfied that one [a conclusion] of accident can be applied."
The Coroner also passed her condolences on to Mr Moores’ two children and his wife. Simon had served as a Conservative councillor on Thanet District Council in Kent for several years from 2007.
He ran a blog called thanetlife.co.uk, on which he posted aerial shots of the Kent coast. He was also a lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University. Mr Moores, who lived in Westgate-On-Sea, Kent, shared pictures from the plane - captioned "Mountains of mid Spain" - prior to the crash on January 9, 2019.
A previous inquest, held in September 2019, had concluded that the circumstances behind Mr Moores' death would never be known.
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