Pisa '71
Dalek, I was the nav in the 5th aircraft in the stream of 6, the last 3 as you may recall did not get airborne due to late arrival of their Italian paras.
I do not recall any cloud at all, but I think there was a hint of sea fog drifting in at that ungodly hour.
We took off on RW04(?) and made a right turn onto the initial track of about 240, not left as that would have taken us over city. As soon as we were established on track and with the first turning point, an island,rock solid on my CCWR, I stood up to lean on the back of the co's seat when there was this big red flash in our 11o'clock. Geoff, my skipper screamed someone has flown into a hill, negative I said there's the nearest rock 20 miles ahead on the radar.
No 4 saw it too and made a report to the streamleader, and subsequent radio check revealed No 3 missing.
I'm still in touch with the nav from No4 and the skipper from No6, and saw my skipper in France in 2006.
Memory does play tricks (in fact I witnessed a road accident last week and only 6 days later I'm thinking which was first the bang or the sight of the collision between the 2 cars),another frequent poster on pprune has said that the Andover weather ship said wx was unsuitable. There was no Andover involvement on that detachment to Pisa in Nov '71.
We the crews involved had our theory as to what had happened, and the idiotic idea to have the most difficult sortie, ie night 9 ship formation, as the first of the detachment, instead of a gentle build up starting with day singletons leading in to day 3 ships,must have had quite a role in what happened!
Waffle over, back as OD said to the original thread intention.
BW