St. Mawgan Station Flight:
I joined the Royal Observer Corps in Cornwall in 1957 and on New Years Day 1958 had my first flight in a RAF aircraft aboard a Shackleton MR.2 of 228 Sq., pilot was Wing Commander Graham and on May 14th we had a ROC Cluster Meeting at St. Mawgan and flew aboard Varsity WL670. This was the first of several flights I enjoyed with this aircraft, subsequent flights being mostly on a Wednesday afternoon arranged at short notice by my indomitable Chief Observer who had a wonderful habit of totally ignoring official channels,
We were almost always taken aloft by a Polish Master Pilot and invariably asked where do you want to go ! On subsequent Cluster Meeting flights at times the going got a little "interesting" and the reason was usually that my C/Obs was by then at the controls !
Happy days and thanks to the ROC and RAF I later got the opportunity to fly on all marks of Shack, Argosy, Anson, Comet 2, Hercules.