'It was awfully low. I have always worried one would come down'

It's where tourists come to stare at Scotland at its most dramatic, but yesterday afternoon near the Rest and Be Thankful beauty spot in Argyll, the ugly task of picking over the remains of the crashed Tornado F3 began on a hillside at Glen Kinglass.

All afternoon under a muggy, sluggish sky, a long line of rescue vehicles headed up the A83 Arrochar to Inveraray road towards the scene.

First, just over two hours after the fast jet hit the hill at 11.45am, five cars from RAF Mountain Rescue arrived, followed by a Strathclyde Fire Brigade major incident unit, a Strathclyde Police unit vehicle, and finally another four cars from RAF Mountain Rescue, their drivers hitting the accelerators hard.

A few minutes later, watched by the brotherhood of mountains above him - Ben Narnain, Ben Ime and Beinn An Lochain - Squadron Leader Paul Lipscombe from the RAF tried to piece together the few facts he had.

"It was a two-aircraft mission; the other aircraft returned safely to Leuchars," he said.

The one that didn't get home crashed just across the road from here, although the hillside itself seemed to have shrugged it off: from the closest reporters were allowed to get, all that could be seen was what appeared to be small bits of wreckage and some scorching on the hillside.

That may have been caused by the blaze, which two firefighters were airlifted to the scene to control. All afternoon, access to the site was only by helicopter.

Witnesses down in the valley were reported as saying they were surprised at how low the two jets had been flying just before the incident, but Squadron Leader Lipscombe said it had been a routine flight; routine that is until two people were killed.

The plane had not been flying supersonic, he said, and there had been no weapons on board.

The Tornado came down on the south-facing, sun-drenched side of the hill, about a third to half-way up.

Looking down the valley towards the Cobbler, Tim Sugars of RAF Mountain Rescue said he had two teams up on the hillside, one from RAF Leuchars, the other from Kinloss. "A military fast jet has crashed at speed," he said, "and as with most things that crash at speed, the wreckage is spread over a wide area."

Sergeant Sugars said he had men on the hillside assessing whether there were any other potential hazards from the fuselage that would need to be controlled.

Will Smith, barman at the Village Inn, Arrochar, said he had seen the RAF planes "chasing" each other on exercise yesterday morning.

Mr Smith said: "I saw them, they were right outside my window. They were flying round the village, over the loch, they were chasing each other - but that's what they do, they follow each other. They were very low, they did seem a bit lower than normal, not far off the water."

He said he understood the accident had happened further to the west, after the planes had climbed higher. Mr Smith added that there are regular flying exercises in the area.

Lauri Thorndyke, who works in the marketing department at Loch Fyne Oysters Restaurant, near Cairndow, said the training exercise had been heard there too. She said: "There was a lot of activity over the loch earlier, it was obviously an exercise, they were doing a lot of practising. They just did a few fly-bys. They fly quite low here."

She said that although the training exercise had been "quite noisy", staff had not heard anything that indicated there had been a crash Edna McGauley, who lives in Arrocher, said the plane was flying so low just seconds before the crash that it had startled her.

"When I saw the plane I thought it was flying awfully low. It came right between my house and the house next door.

I have always worried that one would come down. They regularly fly low through here. They come so fast they break the sound barrier and it makes me jump. It was heading right for the mountains, across the loch towards Ben Arthur and Glen Croe.'' The crash brought back memories for Oban solicitor David Preston of a similar incident in the mid-1990s, when an RAF Tornado crashed into a hillside at the top of Glen Ogle, killing the pilot and his assistant.

Mr Preston said: "That happened exactly a mile from Lix Toll, up the hill towards the top of Glen Ogle, which is over the hill (from the latest crash) as the crow flies - ten to fifteen seconds away in a Tornado.

"That was a Tornado, and the whole hillside had just exploded over the road. I got there ten or fifteen minutes after it happened, I was the fifth or sixth car in the queue. It was absolutely horrifying, there were bits of plane lying all over the road and the ground."

At the height of yesterday's incident, there were three roadblocks in place, each with police officers pointing drivers the other way: the first at Tarbet, Loch Lomond, the second at Arrochar and a third at Rest and Be Thankful.

Despite this, as the afternoon wound on, a few tourist buses still crawling up the hill, before chugging all the way down again. Then finally, as the sun seemed to be cooling, the last of the emergency vehicles arrived: a big, warm red truck sent by the Salvation Army.

Inside it were cups of hot coffee, bags of food and bottles of water for those on the hillside, the men and women picking their way through the wreckage, and taking the first few steps to finding out what happened here.