Danny, Rats, Goats, Kitehawks and stuck Liberators.
Before I start, I must correct a mistake. A week ago (#3024 p.151 12.9.12.) I airily said: "One of (now) my Vengeances flew in to pick me up". I 've just had a look at my log. It was AN832 - which I'd flown myself four days previously - with Freddie as a passenger! It was a 1580 Flight aircraft, so they must have kindly flown me over. (The pilot, W/O Waltham, surely had a few qualms when he saw what he'd got to land on at the other end !)
A point which I really should have included in my description of Cannanore (I have no truck with "Kannur") concerns the Laccacdive Islands, an archipelago lying about 150 miles West in the Arabian Sea. Geologically, they must be much the same as the Maldives, and it has always seemed to me that the Indian tourist organisation had missed a valuable commercial opportuniy in not developing them in the same way. (Wiki tells me that they have now made a start).
We knew they were there, of course, but it would have been criminally irresponsible to go out to take a look, as this would have involved a 300 mile trip over the sea in a single-engined aircraft; there was no airstrip there in our day and not much to see anyway. Now back to our "runway"............
Taking off over the cliff edge was rather like what take-off from a carrier must have been. We should have been wearing "Mae Wests", and sitting on K-class dingies, for there were no Air-Sea rescue boats; one day someone must finish up in the sea. It's strange, but for the life of me I can't remember whether we did wear life-jackets all the time. (I was the C.O., what was I doing about this ?) Were there no Station Flying Orders ? (come to that, I can't remember any S.F.O.s anywhere in India).
We certainly wore them sometimes, for I remember one trip down to Cochin - it was probably an airmen's pay run - but when I taxied up to the flight line there no marshaller was in sight. No matter, a big B-24 "Liberator" was right out at the end. I parked alongside not paying much attention to it. They were common enough, they flew long anti-submarine sorties over the Indian ocean from Ceylon, and often came up North.
I was disentangling myself from my harness and about to climb out, when the Duty Flight Corporal came dashing up indignantly in full Traffic Warden mode: "You can't leave that there 'ere !". I clearly remember shrugging my Mae West off one shoulder to show my rank cuff. It made little difference: "You can't leave that there 'ere, SIR !"
Why not ? For answer he pointed wordlessly at the Liberator, and I saw that the lower half of the main wheels had sunk through the tarmac. It was down to the axles already, and how they were ever going to get it out, Heaven only knows (like Fareastdriver's C5 at Honiara a few Posts ago).
It seemed that the local contractor who built the airfield had skimped on this patch, there was no foundation - nothing but sand under a thin skin of tarmac ! My Corporal was worried that the same might happen to me. I reassured him: it was very unlikely as I was only staying an hour or so, whereas the Lib had taken a night and a day to get into that state.
At lunch in the Mess, it was a major topic of conversation, and many were the solutions on offer. One of the better ones was: as the Far East war was over and it was a Lend-Lease aircraft, we should invite the Americans to come and take it away - if they could. Otherwise we'd put a low chain fence round it, leave it and declare it a War Memorial !
(In later years, I often used this story to add a bit of colour to my afternoon lectures on: "Load Classification Numbers" and "Runway Bearing Strengths"; for some reason, the subject always had a greater power to induce sleep in my ATC students)
But the point of this story is that we did wear Mae Wests, although our only danger point was the take-off. After that we would hug the shoreline all the way, there were plenty of empty beaches to force-land on if necessary. But we certainly didn't use dinghies. And I would have remembered that, for they were terribly uncomfortable to sit on, all hard and knobbly - there was one particularly nasty bump on top where the sadistic designer had chosen the very worst place to house the gas inflation bottle.
(The dinghies fitted on top of your chute in place of the usual sponge rubber seat cushion. It was just possible, if you extended the chute leg straps almost as far as they would go, to thread the groin loop through both the dinghy and a seat cushion as well, but then you wobbled about so precariously perched on top of that lot that it wasn't really safe).
I said that the runway was surfaced with crushed laterite (a soft volcanic rock). A colony of rats found this stuff much to their liking. It was soft enough to dig out for their burrows, and they went at it with a will. The ratholes were no problem, but the excavated mounds of spoil were a hazard. We regularly had to send a chap out with a shovel to fill them in. The rats would dig them out again the next night. Like moles in a lawn, we never could get rid of them.
And at any time you might find a herd of goats on the runway. These would scatter before an aircraft taking off, but before landing you had to "buzz" them off, and then fly a very quick circuit to get down before they drifted back. This animal-on-runway business was a hazard all over India, goats were no problem, but a water buffalo or an elephant would be more difficult to shift. Fortunately we didn't have any of those.
Then there was the constant flying hazard of "kitehawks" (their more polite name), a sort of small, scruffy vulture, all over the subcontinent. These birds were esteemed, and I believe protected by law, for their value as scavengers (the same service as our crows provide by cleaning up road kills). Valuable or not, they were a nuisance. They quickly got used to us, and would wait to the very last moment before hopping or flapping out of the way, much as our crows do on the roads today.
Some were too slow. Our Thunderbolt caught one on the side of a wheel while taking off, ripped a big piece of tyrewall rubber off, and was very lucky to land (very gently) without a blow-out. I got Group to put a Green Endorsement in the (South African) pilot's logbook (he was loaned to us with the aircraft). I was away on leave when this happened, but reproved my second-in-command gently when I got back, for not sending him off (he was full of fuel) to Yelahanka to do his worst there.
You'll remember they were running a T/Bolt conversion, they would have had all the spares and technicians to fix one if things went wrong on touchdown, and if they went very wrong, well, their crash facilities were far better than mine: he would stand a better chance of survival: they could clear the wreckage off their runway more easily than I could off mine. (I do not suppose they would see it quite that way, but there you go).
And one day I was charging down the runway on take-off, way past V1, when there was a heavy thud and a cloud of feathers flew out of the engine cowl gills and shot past my cockpit. I'd taken a bird in between the cylinders. The engine seemed not to notice, I flew a quick circuit and put it down. The bird was fished out (stone dead), and found to be nearly plucked (wind blast) and part-cooked (engine heat). But it wasn't drawn, and in any case inedible, so we couldn't take advantage of the windfall.
Goodnight everyone,
Danny42C.
All's well that ends well.
Last edited by Danny42C; 19th Sep 2012 at 21:52.