On 14 July 1982 (I remember it because it was Bastille Day
), I was in a Bell 212 departing a drill ship 60 miles
north of Port Said with 2 crew, 13 passengers, 35 degrees celsius and light wind and just as I had lowered the nose and committed to departure, the number one engine ran slowly down to idle followed by the fire T handle illuminating, my heart beat increasing in inverse proportion to the Nr decrease and the anal sphincter being put under some strain
. My co-pilot immediately carried out the fire drill, pulling the T-handle, shutting down the engine and broadcasting a Mayday call whilst I was trying to fly away with the Nr somewhere around 82% decreasing, less than 20 knots and descending slightly through about 20 feet. At about this point the number 2 engine chip light illuminated, and the copilot assuming I was going to ditch, manually inflated the floats. Unfortunately as our Haskel booster was not working properly, the float bottle pressure was a bit low and the floats only partially inflated, but they did look very attractive fluttering in the breeze and made an already interesting day even more interesting
. Just after this, the number 1 engine fire warning again illuminated and the one remaining shot was discharged into the engine bay. Luckily, this worked and I eventually managed to gain enough airspeed and Nr to climbed to 1000 feet, though I was unable to cruise at more than 60 knots, so the flight to Port Said, El Gamil airport left plenty of time to carry out the after take-off checks and 'subsequent actions', reflecting that the whole incident had been something out of Gerard Hoffnung's monologue, 'The Bricklayer's Story'
. Heli-Onion kindly scrambled their Alouette 3 from El Gamil and we were relieved to hear the cheery voice of Guy who arrived to escort us in and assure us that there did not appear to be any major damage, though there was paint missing.
After safely landing, for some inexplicable reason, I slipped whilst disembarking and ended up sitting on my bruised bum on the taxi-way with lots of chalk dust from the floats on my trousers! One of our Newfie passengers produced a bottle of Seagram's VO and poured a large slug into my coffee to help revive my spirits
. That evening, being Bastille Day I attended a party at the Forasol base manager's apartment, where after imbibing plenty of celebratory draughts of deliciously refreshing Cypriot Keo Othello red wine, then moving on to the slightly less refreshing Retsina and ouzo, our host revealed his tour de force; a case of French champagne, his sabre à champagne and educated us in the art of opening the bottles by sabrage
. It took me some days to recover my composure
.
However, I digress. There was obvious fire damage to the aircraft, with paint having burnt off the engine and gearbox cowlings. It was subsequently discovered that the locking nut on the engine oil filler cap had sheared off its thread and the filler cap at some stage during the take off had come off. The lack of lubrication caused the engine to run down and shortly after, the oil on the outside of the combustion chamber must have reached its flash point. Evidently, although the first shot of the fire bottle had extinguished the initial fire, there was still enough oil to start a second fire.
I've always treated engine fire warnings seriously since then
. One excellent outcome was being presented with a beautiful engraved silver tankard tankard by Alan Bristow, which made the whole episode most worthwhile
