Believe or not I can’t forget what a great time I had at Cranditz. I was there for 5 years:
first year spent learning how to get my hair cut and how to stand in a straight line – not much fun – except for the amazing friends I made – the guy whose uncle Harry was a famous rose grower (as if!), the chopped engineer who went GD(P) and had a long and successful career as a pilot, the big Scottish rugby player and the smart man about town who went onto Jags.
Even the chopped Nav who went into intelligence and did all sorts of fantastic jobs. Lots and lots of great characters. I remember the USAF major who taught us war studies – we called him the old grey fox.
During that year the whole entry was loaded onto a Britannia at Waddo and flown across the pond to Dulles airport where we were issued with in-flight rations – in tins!! Then we flew (hungrily) to the USAF Academy at Colorado Springs where we stayed with the student body for a couple of weeks; went to lectures, went skiing in Arapahoe Basin, went gliding over the Rockies, borrowed my cadet mentor’s Corvette Stingray to go on a blind date with a Mexican nurse in Denver!!
Then it was 3 years grind doing an engineering degree, but half way through we graduated, got commissioned as POs and moved down to the Student Officers Mess.
There we lived cheek by jowl with the various foreign Air Force studes and I remember when Idi Amin stopped paying the Ugandan studes. After that they used to hang around the door into the bar just in case anyone would buy them a pint. Gawd knows what happened to their tuition fees, but I suspect the RAF let them finish their courses.
Then it was the 12 month Applied Course where you learnt how to fill in an MT request form and a few other forms and once again I met some great characters, some of whom I’m still in touch with to this day.
I could go on but this is already too long for this thread.
Rgds SOS
Last edited by SOSL; 30th Dec 2012 at 12:46.
Reason: The passage of time