Re Derwent failures.
I must be the unlucky one as I had two with the 7, one where the donk just wound down all by itself----now that is scary as you sit there and wonder why it has and if the other one is going to do the same thing and the other one I was sitting minding my own business with the stude trying to fly on limited panel when there was a big bang and the top of the starboard cowling looked as though it had been sliced round with a saw. The turbine blades had decided to part company with the disc and had exited from the cowling. The turbine blades on the Derwent were welded onto the root that was in the turbine disc and were liable to part company if it was a bum weld (there, I learnt something in my three years at Halton!!) whereas on the Vampire’s Goblin the blade and root were machined out of a solid lump.
Having said that and changing aircraft, I had a Goblin wind down once flying from Merrifield over 8/8ths., duly called Mayday and went through the nausea of transmitting for a fix so that the Sub-Centre at Gloucester (manual homer days) could get a fix, to be told you are over Plymouth and the airfield is North East of the city and they gave me steers. Fine until I broke cloud and saw the airfield which was tiny and grass and I wondered about the sanity of Gloucester. Fortunately I had enough height to make Exeter and a proper runway; that was a bonus as I got a ride in a Mosquito from the FRADU bunch that were there.
Happy days (just think BEagle was wearing short pants and watched us idiots from Merrifield!!)