Can’t complain about VC10’s across the Pacific - bloody luxury – when I were a lad…………
Waddington June 69, and an exercise to RAAF Butterworth, Malaysia, with 8 Vulcans and then down to Darwin for exercises with more Aussie Mirages. I’m pretty sure this was a Sunday morning again. Breakfast and then wander out to the airfield to board our expected VC10, and there it was, very effectively disguised as a C-130! String parachute seats, some sort of Elsan bog perched on the ramp, four day old sandwiches in cardboard boxes, the full works. Did their Air Ships really expect us to travel 6,000+ miles in a C-130, the noisiest most uncomfortable piece of kit since Stephenson’s Rocket. Yes – they did! And me married for all of 8 days! (Try getting that past ’em these days!)
We took off and headed South East; clunk, change of mind then South West to Lyneham. Fix whatever problem it was, with us all still on board, and off we go again. 12 hours later we landed at Bahrein – that’s twelve hours!
45 minutes later, I kid you not, we were airborne again for Gan. 30 minutes into the flight a note from the Nav comes around. Due to favourable winds we were now able to forget Gan and go direct Butterworth. Favourable winds! In my dictionary favourable means beneficial. This meant another 12 hours 30 minutes on a C-130.
When we landed at Butterworth we staggered off the aircraft, all in a pretty bad way, no joke. We were deaf, could barely stand straight, and were thoroughly p-ssed off and shell shocked. No one was capable of safely touching a Vulcan for the next four days.
As I was getting out of the C-130’s rear door I saw, ahead of me, a serious hat, with a full set of gold braid on the peak. Pointing at me? - luckily no, but at the sergeant engine fitter ahead of me. ‘Sergeant’, said the Strike Command hat, ‘My office 9 o’clock tomorrow morning. You and I are flying down to Singapore. I’d like you to tell XYZ Transport at Changi how you feel after this idiotic journey and whether or not you’ll be capable of fixing Vulcans in the next week or two’.
XYZ was the boss of FEAF Transport and, significantly, one rank below the hat. After the exercises we returned home on – guess what?
There’s a rather winsome photograph of me at Butterworth two days after the trip – at Andy Leitch’s excellent Vulcan site;
http://www.avrovulcan.org.uk/vulcan_...utterworth.htm
I weighed fifteen stone when we left Waddington. Can’t speak for the other guy but if you look at the two apparent geriatrics, centre, you’ll see something of the problem.