A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL
This picture of VZ 965 is interesting in many respects. If you look closely you will see that it is being tracked by the old flag into the rotors game that was always a laugh and full of exciting possibilities!
This aircraft was in the Station Flight hangar at Culdrose when I was the SAR pilot,(WW7s, 1966), and just sat there unused. It was in superb condition almost as though it had been restored for a show. Tony Thurstan was the boss of the flight and when I suggested that we dragged it out and played with it he agreed. He had flown Dragonflies in the distant past and so once we had it up and running he checked me out to go solo on it I am still not sure as to the legality of that check out! I was the last person to qualify (?) solo on a Dragonfly in the FAA.
I remember that it had some interesting traits like trying to roll onto its left side on take off as it had no built in cross coupling in roll as you raised the collective, and landings were equally affected.
At one stage a tail rotor driveshaft bearing got a bit wobbly and of course there were no spares, but the FAA Museum came up trumps and we did a straight swap with the museum aircraft.
I used to use the aircraft for fun going out to the Scillies in very early spring and collecting bunches and bunches of early daffodils which we the sold back at Culdrose to beef up our party fund. The landlord of the pub in St Marys came out to he airfield to collect us, resplendent in our two piece grey goonsuits, and treated us to lunch but of course no beer
.(oh dear, not a good way to start the New Year!). We also used to collect those big orange fishing markers that broke loose in the storms and sell them back to the fishermen at a knock down price for the same reason. As an aside, using a Whirlwind, we found a very smart yacht dinghy floating off Looe Bar in a bit of an onshore gale. I lowered the diver into it on the winch and he tied a line to it and going backwards, as the wind was too strong to turn around in the hover, managed to tow it and surf it up the beach on the back of a big wave. It had a pot of paint and a paintbrush in it but no markings. We reported it to the Coastguard but no one claimed it and it became ours a big party that year!
Eventually the Dragonfly met a sad end. We foolishly let someone else fly it and it had an oil leak with lots of smoke at Preddannack and an incident signal was raised. All hell was let loose as the Command at Yeovilton did not know the aircraft existed, in a time of big cutbacks, and off it went on a lorry. It ended up believe it or not as a cropsprayer in Cyprus!
Happy days, David.
