The 12 days of Christmas are generally thought to run from the 26th of December to the 6th of January and is an important period of religious celebration or for those of us who observe Christmas in a more secular manner, it’s more likely to be a traditional time of recovery following our holiday excesses and to welcome in the New Year. Of course, those of us in the Aviation industry often remember dates by events that occurred on a particular day and the most memorable are often the most tragic.  With that in mind I present the 12 crashes of Christmas.   The TU144   Earthrise from Apollo 8   The Lockheed A-12 Oxcart   The C-130   The Avro Ten   The Vickers Wellington   The Handley Page O   The captured bomber   Gustav Hamel and Eleanor Trehawke Davies   Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man   The Flying Machine   The Convair 440 Metropolitan airliner   Amelia Mary Earhart   Earhart's Electra   Amy Johnson     A Finnish Fokker   Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Michel Gilliand, NASA, the USAF, State Library of Queensland, the RAF, US National Archives, the Rijksmuseum, Luc Viatour, SDASM,and those images within the Public Domain.