Nice one Pontius Nav. ‘Were you sitting next to me or Keith Watson?’
I’m concerned that I can recall my seat in a VC10 some 38 years ago! Port side, forward, centre seat. Yes, the Nav did claim that the Saturday night dance had kept him awake. That’d be Cottesmore’s Horseshoe (?) Club, not the Raven, Waddo.
I seem to recall mention that when we’d gone Oceanic the Nav had set up the Steam Driven Doppler, which would fly a sort of great circle by kicking in a very small change of heading against ground miles covered. He’d put the changes in to increase heading, rather than decrease. The consequence was that we flew a right hand great circle curve rather than left. Not sure about this, and anyone could blow me out of the water.
I remember going Tech in Hawaii like it was yesterday. The reason for the memory? The problem was a fractured cold air bleed pipe on, I think, No 1 engine. I recall standing underneath the engine listening in to the proceedings. A Vulcan Chief Tech was explaining to the WingCo Tech that he could easily fix a mildly sick Conway with – get this – a coke can and a couple of Jubilee Clips. Now, here we were within spitting distance of Waikiki Beach, bikinis we’d only dreamt about, an overnighter beckoning, and good old Chiefy is looking at getting Mentioned in Despatches.
Had he succeeded there’s no doubt someone would have been mentioned in some formal paperwork. But wiser council won through and we stayed overnight while someone did a proper job on the pipe.
Guam. Where America’s Day Begins. I can still picture your ‘sullen line of troops filing through the duty free’, understandably sullen as they were bound for Viet Nam. They’d been congregated at the far end of the Arrival/Departure Hall with ‘us lot’ sat around either side of the exit area. A PA announcement broke through in a beautiful southern drawl – ‘Would Private Jesse James please report to the reception desk’. Now to get to the desk poor old Jesse had to walk the gauntlet between two lines of Limeys. The whistle started very quietly at one end of the gauntlet and ended with 100 pairs of lips pursed in unison as Jesse reached the desk – the theme tune to High Noon. Anyway Jesse, I hope you made it back in one piece.
Other vivid memories of Guam were the B-52’s which had just started bombing Hanoi. A second PA announcement called out, ‘Attention. Attention. Stand By for the Ball Game’. At this point two dozen matt-black Buffs taxied past the hall. The first one reached the end of the runway, throttles forward, clouds of black smoke, and the PA called out ‘Pictures Rolling for the Ball Game’. The cliff tops at the end of the runway are hundreds of feet above sea level. The B-52’s didn’t actually take off. They simply drove off the end and stuck the nose down, to reappear some time later climbing away. Hope y’all made it back in one piece too.
Ah Changi. That’s another story – but very briefly, years later, when Changi was closing down, I was living on Changi Road as a civilian. The start of 14 glorious years in Singapore. By that time we’d made many RAF friends and almost every night my wife and I would drive up to say goodbye to someone or other. I just wish I‘d recorded more of the events at that time.