CHAPTER EIGHT

Slow Trip in a Fast Jet

While I was at West Raynham another Hunter squadron, No. 92, had been deployed to Leconfield to join Nos 19 and 46 (a Javelin outfit). No. 92 Squadron was currently the RAF’s formation aerobatic display team¹ One of its flight commanders, Richard Calvert, had been selected to be the commanding officer of No. 20 Squadron. When I met him he was enjoying the double pleasure of promotion and the prospect of a superlative assignment. We had both got the good news about our postings at roughly the same time and we used our last few weeks at Leconfield to become acquainted.

Six other pilots from the Leconfield Hunter squadrons had also been selected for 20 Squadron: Jim Farquharson and Don Marshall from 19, and George Aylett, Chips Carpenter, Derek Gill and Jerry Seavers from 92. Jim was an easy-going, good-natured South African who could be relied upon to take on any task thrown at him, and I knew he would be an asset on the new outfit; Don, similarly. I hoped that the other four, who had all been members of the 92 Squadron aerobatic team, would be able to accept that their spell in the heady atmosphere of display flying was over, and that they would be able to settle willingly back to normal squadron life – and do so under a Boss who had been on the squadron with them but not on the team.

Boss Calvert and I set off together from Leconfield, driving first to London to have a briefing at the Overseas Department of the Air Ministry, and then on to St Athan, a RAF Maintenance Unit near Cardiff. At that point 20 Squadron existed only as an Air Ministry intention, a laid-up Squadron Standard and, in a RAF depository somewhere, a collection of silver and other memorabilia of the squadron’s service in locations as diverse as France in the First World War, the North West Frontier of India in the 1920s, and Germany in the post World War Two era. It had to be recreated from scratch and we were to begin the process at the Maintenance Unit.

The RAF Command we were to be under, Far East Air Force, was being reinforced as part of a policy change dictated by growing concern over the stability of the countries of the former French Indo-China and of Thailand, and by a perceived requirement to be able to reinforce as far as Australia if the need arose. This was, after all, the era of belief in the so-called Chinese ‘salami’ strategy – the slicing off from western influence, through communist-led insurrections, of one East Asian country after another. No. 20 Squadron was to be an element of the reinforcements now being positioned on the fringes of possible trouble spots. Specifically it was to be on hand as a mobile and readily available British contribution to the South East Asia Treaty Organisation² should anything nasty threaten.

Our aircraft were to be Hunter FGA Mark 9s. These were, essentially Mark 6s, currently being refurbished by the Maintenance Unit, and being fitted with mounting points for two 230-gallon drop tanks, a braking parachute, a Marconi AD722 radio-compass, a third oxygen bottle to give the aircraft 3.5 hours’ endurance, and an extra mass flow of air for air-conditioning. The Mark 9s would be marginally heavier than the Mark 6s but their performance was expected to be essentially the same. No. 20 Squadron’s aircraft were scheduled to come off the Maintenance Unit floor in a steady trickle over the next three months. Dickie Calvert’s instructions were to get the squadron to Singapore and to a fully operational status there as quickly as possible.

Within hours of our arriving at St Athan it had become depressingly clear that the first part of this task wasn’t going to be easy. St Athan was geared to provide nothing but the bare aircraft. We were going to have to identify, and order from various elements of the RAF supply system, the wide range of items that we would need for the deployment. For example we would have to obtain Mae Wests and the emergency gear that would go in them; we would have to decide what survival gear we ought to have in our dinghy packs for the journey; and we would have to order maps and charts and details of all the airfields we would use, or might use as diversions. The list seemed endless, and we were unsure where to begin, as neither of us knew – or had thought we would ever need to know – a great deal about the RAF supply system.

We would also have to liaise with personnel staffs to arrange to get the pilots who had been nominated for the squadron to St Athan at the right time for the departure dates that we would have to plan for them. And we would have to arrange, among other things, to have them tested and certified as competent to undertake turn-round servicing on their aircraft, jabbed against cholera, yellow fever, and tetanus and, finally, checked out on dual sorties just before coming to us.

In the event it took us a little over a month to get everything organised and, on 21 August, we were ready for departure. We handed over a fully functioning ferry launch-pad to Flight Lieutenant John (Moose) David, the other appointed flight commander and, full of eager anticipation for what lay ahead, we climbed into our aircraft, shorts and khaki shirts under our flying-overalls and our scant kit for the journey stuffed into the radio bays of our aircraft. The Boss and I were each leading a pair, the two most junior pilots nominated to join the squadron, Flying Officer Barry Highgate and Flying Officer John Smith, flying as our number twos.

The morning we left St Athan we were talking to the crew-members of a Twin Pioneer, a slow short-range piston-engined aircraft designed for use on short landing strips. They were also about to depart for Singapore. We laughed when the navigator mentioned that they would be doing the journey in short hops, refuelling at thirty-five airfields en route, and taking a fortnight for the journey. With the 230-gallon tanks on the Hunter inboard pylons, and two 100-gallon tanks on the outboard ones, we had planned for just seven stops: Luqa, Nicosia, Tehran, Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta and Bangkok. And we expected to do the trip in eighteen flying hours spread over four days. We should not have laughed.

Our timing was thrown out from the first day. Instead of a simple hop of just over 50 nm to RAF Lyneham to clear Customs, we had to divert to the Naval Air Station at Yeovilton when Lyneham’s runway was closed by an aircraft emergency as we approached to land. As a result we didn’t get there until the following morning. However, day two went without a hitch and we got to Nicosia by the late afternoon. We set off for Tehran on day three, John Smith and I leaving as planned twenty minutes after the Boss’s pair.

About twenty minutes into the trip I spotted two contrails approaching us on a reciprocal heading and, as they got closer, was somewhat surprised to identify the aircraft making them as Hunters. This was such an unlikely event in that part of the world that it was a fair assumption that it was our first pair. As they flashed past above us I pressed the transmit button and asked what was wrong, as something obviously was. The answer was enigmatic: ‘We have had internal trouble; wait for us at Tehran. ’We had to wait until the following morning for enlightenment when they caught up with us. Barry had had a bad attack of ‘the runs’ and, as Nicosia was the last RAF source of possible succour and supplies before we reached Singapore, the Boss had decided to return there and get him and his ejection seat some new kit.

Someone in the Air Ministry had decided that the cheapest way to support 20 Squadron on its ferry trip to Singapore would be to contract with the British Overseas Airways Corporation to refuel us at our various stops and to give us any servicing assistance that we might need. In support of this arrangement Hunter servicing manuals had been supplied to the BOAC resident engineers at each of our planned stops, and supplies of AVPIN had been pre-positioned (with great difficulty, as few carriers wanted to take the risk of handling this extremely volatile fuel). The weakness in the arrangement with BOAC showed up very quickly when the Boss’s pair could not be refuelled on arrival at Tehran, but had to wait for an incoming BOAC aircraft to be dealt with first. That, and some difficulty in getting flight clearance for the leg to Karachi forced us to spend the night in Tehran – a second consecutive night in the same dismal hotel that I had stayed in on the Indian ferry trip, this time made even less pleasant by the presence of ‘hostesses’ in the bar in the evening, and by the tedious need to respond to the question ‘You no like Irani girls?’ Actually, many Iranian girls are strikingly attractive, but the ones in the brothel, and in our hotel on this trip, were decidedly not so.

The following morning Dickie Calvert’s aircraft would not start. The resident BOAC engineer, trying to be helpful, but not having paused to see if there was any guidance in the servicing manuals, exacerbated the problem by running the starter turbine on mine in a vain attempt to determine from this what might be wrong with the Boss’s; the result was that eventually my turbine refused to function as well. That led to yet another night in Tehran and, by the morning our number twos had both gone down with a bad attack of food poisoning. ‘Don’t eat anything in Tehran but well-grilled chicken,’ was the post hoc advice of the doctor summoned for us by our Air Attaché. In the end, after two days of ineffectual attempts to get the engines going, Nicosia was prevailed upon to fly up a technician. Arriving as the sole passenger on a Hastings transport aircraft he cured the problem within minutes by the simple expedient of getting some boiling water and pouring it on the nozzle that fed the AVPIN fuel into the starter turbine. He explained that the system could be expected to give trouble at Tehran’s altitude but was unable to say quite how boiling water cured it.

Finally, on the seventh day after setting out from St Athan, engines fixed and the poisoned number twos feeling well enough to climb into their cockpits, we were more than ready to leave Tehran with its discomforts and slight and constant undercurrent of menace. The Boss’s pair started successfully watched by a large group of US servicemen who had been off-loaded from a transport plane nearby while it was being refuelled. Then, just as it looked as if the pair was going to get away in good style the braking parachute burst from the tail of the Boss’s aircraft, raising a round of laughter and applause from the onlookers. He had inadvertently put the three-position brake ’chute switch to ‘deploy’ instead of to ‘test’ on his round of pre-taxi checks. I was so determined not to spend any more time in Tehran that I rather brusquely suggested that he and his number two stay in their cockpits while I grabbed the ’chute, stretched it out on the ground, repacked it as well as I could, and stuffed it into the small space available for it. When they started up again I kept my fingers tightly crossed until I saw them leave the ground and climb away.

John Smith and I started up twenty minutes later, and with the engines running, I called him for the standard radio check. He didn’t answer but indicated visually that he could hear me. As conditions were good at Karachi, and forecast to remain so, I decided that it might be better to go rather than to risk stopping the engines again. I asked him if he would be happy to come with me without the ability to transmit. He gave a ‘thumbs up’, and we went.

I should have known not to push my luck – again. We got off the ground without problem, climbed to height and settled down for the leg to Karachi. Everything looked good, but within ten minutes my relief at getting away from Tehran was undone by a mini-drama. Looking up from dialling in the Ishfahan radio-compass beacon I saw John’s aircraft coming fast towards me from the extended battle formation position he had been in a moment or two before. As he came close I could see his fingers scratching furiously at the rime ice that totally covered the inside of his cockpit canopy, trying to keep a small hole clear. His cockpit heating was obviously not working, and I wondered if he might also have lost some cabin pressurisation. His fingers pointed furiously downwards but I already had the message. There was nothing for it but to descend fast, burn off fuel, and return to Tehran. We levelled off at about 1,000 feet agl and buzzed around for nearly thirty minutes getting down to landing-weight. My unfortunate number two, briefly exposed at height to a temperature that was dropping rapidly towards the outside air figure of –46ºC, got nicely cooked for a spell at low level at +35. I later discovered (with the help of the manuals, but not of the resident BOAC engineer) that the problem with John’s aircraft had been caused by nothing more than a popped circuit-breaker – but it took me the rest of the day to find that out as the Hunter had a myriad of circuit-breakers hidden in various boxes in a variety of nooks and crannies. Oddly, his radio set worked perfectly after landing, and neither it nor the offending circuit breaker gave any further trouble for the rest of the journey to Singapore.

Fate smiled on us the following morning and we got away without any hitches, reaching Karachi in two and a half hours’ flying. Visibility all the way was perfect and I had another exceptionally clear and extensive view of the totally inhospitable terrain that characterised most of that part of the world. However, our good fortune didn’t last. We found the other pair still at Karachi, thwarted by foul weather at our next intended stop, Palam, New Delhi’s international airport. We had come up against the effects of the south-west monsoon and had no option but to stay put.

The weather the following morning was only slightly better but, as we had already been delayed so much, the Boss decided to have a go at getting into Palam. With a full fuel load the Hunter Mark 9 had a range of a little over 1,400 nm and thus we could fly the 550 nm to Delhi and, as long as we remained at height, come back comfortably as far as Karachi if we needed to. The weather at Karachi was forecast to remain good. As usual John and I took off twenty minutes after the first pair and had an easy ride for the first 200 nm. Then we ran into very severe turbulence and electrical activity in the tops of closely packed thunderclouds, and John Smith had to earn his pay hanging on to my wing.

I contacted Palam ATC at an estimated 100 nm range and was given the information that it was not raining heavily and that the cloud-base was better than 500 feet agl. As this was reasonably encouraging, and we had heard the first pair reporting the beginning of their descent, we forged on. Unfortunately the electrical activity in the storm clouds all around us rendered our radio-compasses almost useless as homing devices, our DMEs had packed in sometime after Nicosia (only the Boss’s had continued to work this far), and Palam was resolutely ignoring my requests for a DF check for overhead. However, I was reasonably confident that we were on an accurate course and timing for overhead Delhi as the forecast winds that we had been given for the climb out of Karachi and for the height we were to fly at were very light (15 to 20 knots). Moreover, I expected to be able to ease below cloud safely across a wide swathe around Delhi, and was happy that, once in sight of the ground the Yamuna (or Jumna) river and the tributary that joined it just south of Delhi, the Hunan, would provide unmistakable features that could be used to pinpoint our position. I deliberately flew for a couple of minutes – 18 nm – beyond the calculated overhead time just to make it a little more probable that we were past the overhead and could therefore make the final stage of our let-down more slowly and delicately than normal. I called Palam for clearance to descend and began a normal high rate of descent on a heading reciprocal to the runway in use. I levelled out briefly when we got to 2,000 feet, still in cloud, and then began to ease down gently looking for a sight of the ground. We broke out of the main cloud-base at 500 feet agl with about half-cover below, not to see the expected rivers but to see instead a vast flooded area that effectively disguised the rivers’ where abouts and made nonsense of any attempt to map read. That was disconcerting and all I could do was to continue in the direction in which I felt Palam ought to lie, and hope for the best.

Five minutes later – a very long time at low level in a Hunter when not entirely confident about position, and the fuel for a climb and return to a decent diversion is burning down rapidly – I spotted a civil airliner about 10 nm ahead, a Tupolev 104, not far off the ground and climbing. It was more than a fair assumption that it had taken off from Palam, so we were home and, despite the prevailing conditions, dry.

I called Palam to announce our exact position and got permission to make a straight-in approach to land. As we turned off the runway we were directed to a dispersal occupied by two squadrons-worth of Hunters belonging to the Indian Air Force and to a warm welcome from a bunch of IAF pilots. ‘You have rewritten Noel Coward!’ one of them cried out in greeting. ‘How’s that?’ I asked. ‘Well only mad dogs and Englishmen would fly fighters during the monsoon. We do not.’

We were at Delhi for five days, kept on the ground by incessant heavy rainstorms and low cloud both there and at Dum Dum, Calcutta, our next intended stop. This was no great hardship as we were housed in an excellent hotel, the Ashoka, whose air-conditioned comfort enabled us to escape from the oppressive heat and humidity of the monsoon each evening – after a relaxing afternoon cooling off in the British High Commission’s swimming pool, very conveniently situated just across the road from the hotel. The only pain was journeying out to the airport each morning, complete with our kit, in the hope that we might find a sufficient improvement in the weather to allow us to get away. Every morning we spoke with the same Met forecaster, and every morning got the same bleak picture: closely packed cumulo-nimbus to 50,000 feet. ‘Don’t you ever change your forecast chart?’ asked the Boss. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘not until the monsoon is over.’ There was nothing we could do until the weather improved, and it was somewhat exasperating to get a signal on the third day from HQ 224 Group in Singapore, via the High Commission, rather waspishly ordering the Boss to get amoveon.

We got away from Palam at last, fifteen days after setting out from St Athan, bouncing along in considerable turbulence and electrical activity in virulent storm clouds all the way to Calcutta. My unfortunate number two had to hang on grimly on my wing yet again, this time for nearly two hours. The cloud-base at Dum Dum was only 400 feet above the surface but the flatness of the vast Ganges delta was an advantage as far as easing down and out of cloud was concerned and, thankfully, I had less of a problem finding the airfield than I had at Delhi.

One of the two booster pumps situated in the main fuselage tank had failed on the Boss’s aircraft during the flight to Dum Dum. This necessitated him switching off the working pump and accepting the fuel feed provided by tank pressurisation and gravity. Normally a booster pump failure represented no great problem. Pilot’s Notes recommended that the engine be throttled back to about 80% of maximum engine rpm and this was fine for level flight below 20,000 feet. It was a bit dicey for overshooting from a baulked approach, and was certainly not good enough for take-off – that last 20% of engine speed represented an important slice of power. So we bedded the four aircraft down for the night and set off in a bus, courtesy of the BOAC staff, for the Great Eastern Hotel in what was, coincidentally, a very dramatically flooded Calcutta.

As soon as we had checked in we used the hotel teleprinter to request a replacement booster pump from Singapore. This was delivered overnight by civil air and the following day, with the help of the local BOAC engineer, and a band of workers carrying away and dumping the 240 gallons of fuel that had first to be drained from the main fuselage tank, I managed to take off the failed pump and put on the new. This was well outside the authorisation that my simple servicing certificate gave me so it was perhaps just as well that the Boss got safely off the ground on his next take-off.

We got to Don Muang, Bangkok, without further drama on the seventeenth day after leaving St Athan, and reached Singapore on the nineteenth, stepping out of our cockpits into an atmosphere that was so moist that one could almost drink it. We were met by the Station Commander, Group Captain Tom Pierce, a rotund, bustlingly forceful man who, having welcomed us, conducted us straight away to the air-conditioned splendour of Tengah’s recently completed V-force facility. This was very obviously under-utilised and, apart from the odd practice dispersal by elements of the V-force, was likely to remain so short of the outbreak of World War Three. We were grateful for the coolness inside it, and glad to sit down and enjoy a welcoming beer in it but, when the Group Captain, anxious to make some use of this splendid building, tried to sell it to us as the place to keep our flying-kit, we were presented with a dilemma. The hutted accommodation and dispersal that had been allocated to 20 Squadron were, as we were now discovering, almost a mile away. As the squadron would be flying the usual fighter programme of shortish sorties once we had established ourselves, perhaps up to three times for each pilot per day, we felt that we would be likely to waste a lot of time before and after each flight travelling between the two locations. However, as we didn’t want to start off at Tengah on the wrong foot with the management the Boss agreed to give the Station Commander’s scheme a try.

The rest of the squadron, another ten Mark 9s (two of which were to be Command spares) and a T7, coming out after the monsoon had run its course, made much better time than we had and, by 6 November, all aircraft had safely reached Singapore. A Javelin squadron, No. 60, deploying concurrently from the United Kingdom to Tengah, lost an aircraft on approach to Dum Dum during the monsoon so I suppose we first four could count ourselves lucky to have got through it with little more than a few nervous moments.