We shifted time zone again last night, advancing the clocks by one hour (‘flog clox 1 hour’ as they put it), to make the evenings a bit lighter, as much as anything, putting us only two hours behind UK time, or, possibly, three or one hour, as I’m not quite sure which zone Britain is in at the moment, but we are two hours behind Zulu time (the UK alternates between Zulu and Alpha).
We have heard a bit more about the Sea Harrier incident yesterday, and it seems that things were in fact quite serious, as a small flap broke off the engine intake (these are small square aluminium flaps which live in square holes encircling the engine intake, easily seen on any picture of a Harrier) and was ingested into the engine, causing considerable damage. The engine could have stopped at literally any moment, so everyone was very relieved that the aircraft was as close to the ship as it was, as a longer distance to cover would have greatly increased the risk of a failure. All the aircraft are now being looked at very carefully to see if this was an isolated failure, or if we have some sort of major defect to sort out.
It was nobbly knees time again today, with tropical rig the rig of the day from 0400, though I don’t think anyone actually got up at that time just to get into it. By 0800, we were about 500 miles due south of Recife, and it really was hot. Today is a maintenance day, so there is no planned flying, and a lot of people took advantage of the fact to get up on the Flight Deck to sunbathe. I didn’t, because I think it’s a total waste of time, and in any case I know what even the gentle British sun can do to me in a very short time with my pale complexion, and the idea of getting fried alive did not appeal in the slightest.
There was a fairly bad Walt Disney film on ITV this evening, so Peter the Gasman and I played a moderately hilarious game of bridge against Paul Harvey and one of the pilots, Keith Denby. It was hilarious principally because the other three have only just started, so we ended up in some pretty odd contracts, but a good time was had by all, and we finally packed up at about 0130.