The murmurations of La Merlyn could be wondrous to behold and a veritable assault upon the eardrums!
No doubt her ability to completely transliterate English prose into something she wished to hear and that only she could understand came from her days of studying for The Bar. She once laboured under the illusion that the Chief Pilot had written CAP 371. Never quite so generous would he have been?
She could be really quite explosive when it came to protecting Suckling baby; deranged even and very often totally and incomprehensibly wrong. However, although it took a strong man to stand up to her and a devious and courageous one to get around her foibles, I never knew her to carry a grudge much beyond the end of the tantrum.
The Sucklings gave a lot of first time starters their jobs and have made a very significant contribution to aviaton in England. In fact, in my never so humble, Roy, Merlyn and their airline have put more into aviation in this grey little country than most. For their services they deserve gongs far more than some of those who have received titles for doing nothing much more for flying than raising shareholder's expectations and their own pension portfolios.
I well remember the unsolicited and unprofessional vituperative comments that used to come over the ether up and down the east coast from other pilots in other airlines who had flown for Suckling in the past. Those aviators would not be where they are now had not the 'Cambridge Caligulas' given them work in the first place.
I must admit that the bludgeoned gnomes in operations at Cambridge might have had a rather harder time of it of a dark winter's night but quite frankly, having seen at first hand what some of the aforementionedly challenged people could get up to of their own volition -
.
There were and for aught I know still are, some very fine people working for Suckling and some very fine training was made available, albeit vicariously, to those who to some might have seemed untrainable at times. It was a fine place to cut some teeth !
A few words on Scot Air? Thanks to Brian Souter's funding the airline was able to proceed with its acquisition of the Do 328 fleet. A more sophisticated turbo prop would be hard to find. Certainly there was a great deal of taxing taxying to and fro (RIP. John), but at the end of the day I would warrant that there are many who now sit proud and tall in their Airbuses who are damned glad that they had the opportunity to fly five television screens and two propellors around the airwaves for the Sucklings.
I don't know that I'd much want to see Roy in the House of Lords although Merlyn might liven things up a bit for Labour's prospective pig swillers, but if the likes of Bishop and Branson can pull knighthoods out of their hobbies (?) I certainly do not see that the Sucklings do not deserve similar accolades for their life's work and their contribution to that of others.
