Mk 3 tales
Straight from ‘ATC Record of Service – Gliding Training’
4 Oct 59 Mk3 WT917 Self 4 min (624 Gliding School-Exeter Airport)
What is not recorded, is that our launches (by winch) were conducted around the take offs and landings of the DH Mosquitos of No 3 CAACU. They had priority.
A tiny digression. Shortly after this date, DH Vampires replaced the Mosquitos. At that time, one of the Gliding School vehicles was a wartime Bedford lorry (with canvas doors!) The lorry’s steering wheel was not fully connected to the steering column, and could be removed whilst driving. One of the young sons of an instructor used to drive this lorry, and one of his party tricks was to remove the steering wheel whilst driving around the peri-track and hand it to the front seat passenger and jokingly say,’here, you do the steering’.
Unfortunately, the Bedford was not over-endowed in the braking department, and one day, the inevitable happened. He handed the steering wheel over to a new cadet, and could not get it back on to the column before the lorry left the peri-track and careered into the side of one of the Vampires. As I recall, it was the Vampire COs favourite aircraft!