Originally Posted by 1746 View Post
Some of my memories are of watching in awe as the Illawarra target towing Mustangs where powering up and taking off......
I remember talking to the pilot one day, and he told me that after one sortie he couldn't wind the cable all the way in, and later, on inspection, found it had been nicked by one of the bullets aimed at the target ! Stuff that.
That above episode brought back a memory or two, but it was at Townsville, not Bankstown. In 1953 I was flying a target towing Mustang A68-113 in formation on a Lincoln about 100 yards out. The target was a canvas drogue attached to a long wire trailing a hundred yards behind the Mustang and attached to its starboard wing near the wing tip. The three gunners, nose, mid-upper and tail took turns in blasting away at the drogue. Each set of guns had their bullets tipped with various colours of paint and on landing you could count who had hit the drogue by the colour stain left by the bullets.
The mid-upper gunner, W/O Wally Mayo who was about to retire, asked me flying the Mustang to get in real close so he could get a final good gunnery score before leaving the RAAF. Due to the 100 yards length of the wire behind the Mustang, the pilot had to pull ahead of the Lincoln while holding a parallel course. The Lincoln pilot would call on R/T to the Mustang pilot when the drogue was fluttering dead abeam the Lincoln. Because of the drag caused by the drogue and wire being near the wing tip, the Mustang needed almost full rudder trim to keep in balanced flight.
The Lincoln pilot would then give clearance for his gunners to open fire at the drogue. Naturally the Mustang pilot would not feel the bullets going though the drogue so he would blissfully hold his Mustang on a steady speed and course although the Lincoln was out of his field of vision behind him.
Without warning the Mustang suddenly skidded and rolled and my first thought was someone had shot at the tail of the Mustang. I pulled up and away from the Lincoln and demanded to know what was going on as I had to wind off yards of rudder trim that had been needed for balanced flight.
The Lincoln pilot reported that the cable holding the drogue had been cut by a cannon shell from the mid-upper 20mm cannons fired by Wally Mayo and the drogue and rest of the cable had fallen into the sea near Rattle Snake Island our gunnery range. Today we worry about fish swallowing plastic bags. I wonder if a shark got a mouthful of drogue because it was never found.
Wally Mayo was really upset because there was no proof of the number of hits he made on the drogue and that meant he couldn't collect on the bets he had made at the Sergeants Mess that he would beat the squadron record.
Normally on return to land at Townsville the Mustang would fly low and slow along the runway to release the drogue which would then be checked for coloured spots to indicate which gunner had hit it. As it turned out, that was to be the last drogue sortie flown by the Mustang as there were no more drogues left in the store. It was good fun for me (the Mustang pilot) while it lasted.
Now back to Bankstown memories again
