THE people involved in the Adver’s biggest story this week in 2006 were lucky to be alive.

Three senior Swindon Town figures were aboard a Cessna 310 aircraft which crashed in a wooded area near a Buckinghamshire golf course

Chief executive Mark Devlin, director Bill Power and marketing manager Mike Sullivan, along with Mr Devlin’s young son, had been on their way back from Town’s first league game of the season, a victory at Hartlepool.

They, along with the pilot of the private aircraft, were taken to hospital with broken bones.

Mr Sullivan was the first to be allowed home and told us: “I’m grateful, we didn’t really have time to think, ‘God, I’m going to die.’

“I remember Mark sitting facing me and I looked out of the window to the left hand side and saw the runway. I said that we were nearly home and at that point there was a bang.

“Alarm bells rang and all of a sudden the propeller, which had been going, came to a stop.”

The Air Accident Investigation Branch would later determine that the right engine of the two-engined craft had run out of fuel.

All of those hurt went on to recover.

Another major story that week a dozen years ago was about an attempt to turn the 545-acre Science Museum storage area into what would have been the largest museum of its kind in Europe.

Called the National Collection Centre, the £48m venue - funding was being sought from a Big Lottery Fund’s project called Living Landmarks: the People’s Millions - would have almost certainly attracted millions of visitors annually.

We said: “It will bring together 250,000 objects from the stored collections of national museums, from Hoovers to hovercraft, radios to rockets and telescopes to trams.

“The state-of-the-art building will allow public access to these former hidden treasures, provide educational opportunities and generate leisure activities - while keeping running costs to a minimum.”

The National Collection Centre plan, we added, had been shortlisted. The following year, a committee would decide which of the competing bids across the country would go to a public vote.

Sadly, the Wroughton bid would be eliminated before the vote, although hopes remain that a way of displaying at least the stored Science Museum objects to the public will be found.

The eventual winners of the cash were parkland and environmental projects in Cornwall, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

In Purton, a living landmark of a different kind was counting a set of birthday cards which included a seventh from the Queen.

Mabel Goodings, born during the reign of Her Majesty’s great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, turned 106.

Mrs Goodings shared a home in Purton with one of her four sons, 74-year-old Ken. She was happy to share some tips for a long life with an Adver reporter.

“Hard work is the secret,” she said. “That and a drop of gin.”

Admitting that at her age it was easy to forget birthdays, she added: “It’s a shame age only goes forwards, never back.”

Mrs Goodings died at the age of 107, not long after giving up her daily treat of one or two cigarettes.

Back in Swindon, a man called Reg Mullis was nearly four decades younger than Mrs Goodings, but even 67 is an age when many people prefer gentle exercise to more strenuous varieties.

Not one to abide by convention, Mr Mullis decided he wasn’t happy with what he described as a flabby stomach, and that he’d trade it in for a six-pack.

Mr Mullis, a grandfather of five who lived in Covingham, had last been a gym member 18 years earlier, but he headed for Fitness First in Eldene Drive.

He said: “I’ve always looked at the gym as I drove past but I didn’t ever really want to go in.

“I thought it would be full of young trendy types who all knew what they were doing.

“But I was wrong because that’s not what it’s like at all. There are actually quite a lot of elderly people who come down.”

Mr Mullis soon acquired a personal trainer, lost a stone and was well on the way to acquiring his six-pack.

Another grandparent in the local news, albeit in unhappy circumstances, was Ingrid Austin, 63, who lived near Shrivenham.

Taking a photo of three-year-old grandson Nile as he played on a coin-operated car ride at the Brunel Centre, she and her daughter were approached by an angry security guard who told her that all photography was forbidden.

Bewildered by what she described as his rudeness and aggression, she told us: “Had we been taking photos of a sensitive military organisation I could appreciate this type of reaction, but but of a child in a shopping centre is, in our opinion, pathetic.”

Centre director Nick Beaumont-Jones said there was no blanket ban on taking photographs there, and that the officer in question had been given a stern talking-to.