Saturday, March 23, 2019

Flying in the Vulcan


Snapshot File - Flying in the Vulcan

Flying as a rear crew member in a Vulcan was both frightening and uncomfortable.  The discomfort started when you got dressed.  There were several options as to what to wear, depending on the time of year and the task you were undertaking.  For flying in the airfield circuit you might get away with wearing your underpants, a green tee shirt (everything was green), aircrew socks, boots and a flying suit.  The flying suit was light and comfortable and composed mainly of pockets and zips. If you were, for instance, flying low level over the United States, then you would wear over your tee shirt and under your flying suit, a white cotton air ventilated suit.  This was a mass of little tubes and was connected to the aircraft cooling system.  The most uncomfortable option was also the most common.  If it was winter or if you were flying over the sea, you wore an immersion suit.  Under the immersion suit you wore a green (of course) bunny suit.  This was a one piece suit with a nice warm fluffy inside.  The immersion suit was of rubber and covered you from neck to toe and out to your wrists.  At the neck and wrists were thin tubes of rubber that the Flying Clothing people cut the fit very tightly to stop the water getting in.  It also made it hard to breathe and to get blood through to your hands!

Next came the external gear.  First was your Mae West, or inflatable jacket.  Your parachute harness came next, and had to fit tightly, especially through your crutch.  Failure to get this right meant finding your balls behind your ears if you had to bail out.  On your back was your parachute, and hanging down behind your bum was a dinghy.  When you sat in your bare metal seat, these two items formed bone hard padding to lean back on and to sit on.  Then came your seat harness and you plugged yourself into the intercomm, oxygen and air conditioning.  And finally finally, there was line that armed your parachute as you left the aircraft.  The overall affect of this was that not only were you trussed like a chicken, but you had a curved spine.  After six years of flying in the Vulcan I had more or less permanent backache.  It took six months of not flying in the Vulcan for the backache to depart!  

The Vulcan cabin was pressurised to 10,000 feet.  You can live at this altitude without an oxygen supply, there is enough in the atmosphere.  For safety reasons, one pilot and one rear crew member were always on oxygen, which meant wearing a mask.  Down the back we were supposed to take turns, but I always volunteered to have mine on.  This was because the microphone was in the mask and the AEO had a lot of talking to do.  In addition, for my first three years the Nav Plotter, sitting next to me, was a guy with a stomach defect, which meant he was always airsick at low level.  Not many people know that air sickness is catching.

The rear crew sat down the back, in the dark, facing aft.  The pilots were several feet higher and in daylight.  They also had ejector seats.  For reasons of aircraft design and money, the rear crew didn’t have ejector seats.  Our seats did swivel though, to give us a slight chance of making the exit which was set into the floor just forward of our seats.  

In the event of having to bail out, the Nav Radar would open the door in the floor and would be first out, followed by the Nav Plotter.  Last of all would be the AEO - me.  There wouldn’t be time to disconnect the various tubes and cables you were hooked up to, so they were designed with “break” points.  The parachute line would arm the chute, stopping it opening till you were below 10,000 feet.  So, if you bailed out at 30,000 feet, you were supposed to free fall till 10,000, when your chute would open.  A possible problem was if the undercarriage was down (hydraulic failure?).  The nose wheel was aft of the hatch, so as you slid down the hatch with all your connections safely disconnecting, the first thing you saw was the nosewheel.  You leapt aft, grabbed the nose wheel strut and swung round it.  Likely story!  A final point about the “break” points.  I was taking a Canadian air force major through the various safety drills once.  He slid down the door and the breaks didn’t break.  He hung upside down and then the leg of his nice Canadian flying suit tore off.  Luckily there was only about 4 feet to the ground.  He wasn’t very happy though.  I really must remember not to fall over when I am laughing.




Friday, March 15, 2019

Memories of Majunga

Snapshot File - Memories of Majunga.

Majunga is a town on the north western side of Madagascar, near the northern end of the island.  Madagascar was either the first island God made and he learnt from his mistakes - or the last one and he used all the bits left over.  Majunga was a ramshackle town sat on a river estuary.  It had many buildings that looked French provincial - not surprising considering it had been a French colony.  The French killed 70,000 people in 1947 and they were not very popular with the locals.  The locals spoke French, which was a problem because we didn’t - being English.  

Majunga had an airfield.  It wasn’t very big, although an Air France Boeing 707 came in once a week, which must have been a heart-stopping experience for its pilots.  The Shackleton was OK, as long as it wasn’t too hot.  With a full fuel load, its usual state, it took every inch of the runway to get airborne.  There were usually 2 Shackletons and 3 crews based at Majunga, and their task was to log all the tankers in the Mozambique Straits.  We would fly down the straits to the frigate stationed off Beira, drop their mail to them, and fly back, logging all tankers heading south west.  We did this because the UK government wanted to stop oil reaching Rhodesia, which was in a state of rebellion against the Crown.  We couldn’t stop tankers unloading at Beira because it was Portuguese.  But if they were identified, pressure could be brought to bear on the companies that owned them.  It was all futile, because oil entered Rhodesia via South Africa.

We did 3 or 4 sorties per crew each week.  The Shackleton heaved itself into the sky at about 8 am.  We couldn’t go earlier because the locals were in bed instead of in the tower.  One morning we actually took off without local air traffic control or the fire service (Huggis!) . We flew down to Beira and dropped things to the frigate, then flew back.  It was a good idea to land before it got dark, as the locals packed up early.  To drop things to the frigate we used a gear called Lindholme.  This consisted of canisters that floated. One Christmas we announced we had their Christmas mail including a cake.  We dropped the canister and it sank.  We had filled it with stones!  After they had recovered, we dropped the real mail canister.  

On another occasion, the Navy were lowering their whaler to recover the Lindholme when it stuck.  So they launched a rib, and it’s engine failed.  So they threw the ship’s diver over the side and he swam to the Lindholme.  Happy that all was well we departed, only to get a call.  They had lost sight of their rib, could we find it?  We did and departed on our way.  

Life in Majunga was pretty basic.  The officers lived down in the town centre, but the SNCOs and the airmen lived out on the edge of town.  The airmen were in an ex-French army encampment - called the Camp Britannique.   The SNCOs lived nearby in a big house owned by the Mayor.  Which was pretty basic.  We had beds but our lockers and things were made out of orange boxes etc.  The food was also grotty.  We often feasted on  food which had been in storage in Aden for many years.  The cook did his best, but he was  on a hiding to nothing.  

The Maison de Maire depended on a well in the grounds for its water.  The pump was broke, so the fire brigade came up occasionally and filled the tanks in the roof.  The chief night spots were Madame’s, a brothel, and a night club that was in a converted garage.  The toilets in the night club were appalling, so you just walked over the road and pee’d over a small cliff.  I was doing that one night, when the guy next to me tried to light his cigarette off a distant lighthouse.  He fell over the cliff down onto the beach.  It was only about 20 feet and as he was drunk he landed like a baby.

I did four months in Majunga.  Two months from Singapore and two from the UK.  None of it was enjoyable.  The place itself was a miserable shambles created by the French.  There were quite a lot of Frenchmen around and they were uniformly unpleasant.  No wonder the Malagache hated them. We on the other hand, were cheered as we drove out to the airfield for another 12 hour flight.

On my second visit one of the other signallers had a project as part of his university degree course.  He got a detailed map of Majunga and we spent many happy hours wandering round identifying the usage of lots of tin shacks.