Strubby
I have just reincarnated myself to this user name, as my rather inept initial registration landed me with an unintelligible string of characters. (Starting with f11367c2926 etc.)
My instructor at the School of Refresher Flying at Stubby was Colin Lamont. however I have no record of what he got up to after I left.
Finding this site inspired me to get a copy of 'Meteor Eject' by Nick Carter.
Before this I was begining to wonder if some of my memories were a figment of my imagination as they seemed so unlikely by modern day standards.
The story of the the meteor that collided with a fish train on the appraoach to Full Sutton airfield is of particular significance to me. The student in question was Lou Levitt who was a great friend of mine throughout nearly all my Meteor days. Poor Lou was extremely accident prone. While returning from the Canal Zone, after one of our regular detachments to 13Sqn, he had a mid air collison over the Med causing the other pilot eject and spend some hours in his dinghy before being recsued by a ship heading for Bizerte. Lou managed to land at Istres in th eSouth of France with a bit of tailplane protruding from his nose cone. Both pilots were relatively unscahthed.
By coincidence they both arrived back on the squadron on the same day, but Lou had scars all over his face. He was cycling back to Istres in the dark after a visit to the town when he hit a pile of gravel, sending him, over the handlebars headfirst into the gravel.
Later he crashed his car fracturing a few bones.
Sadly he did not survive his last accident in 1956 when he was the Meteor 7 display pilot at the Battle of Britain open day at Worksop Airfield. I understand that the horn balance on the elevator came adrift when pulling out of a loop, leaving him no elevator control. He plowed almost vertically into the ground in front of the crowd.
Lou was a sad loss, a more amiable chap you could not hope to meet.