Flight planning for the 10-year-old in 1951
SENIOR Pruners will remember the stubby bottle containing one-third of a pint of milk and given to every British child each morning. Khormaksar’s supply of the familiar little bottles that I had seen in Lincolnshire only three weeks previously arrives from the RAF’s own dairy farm at Steamer Point in crates which in the heat are reeking of sour milk, something which turns my 10-year-old stomach.
Our headmaster is Laurence Acheson, and on my second day this kindly man does his best to make me feel at ease. “Drink up your milk, son, it’s good for you”, he says. “Please sir, it makes me sick, I’d rather not have it”.
It is not good to miss one’s milk, he warns, and nobody gets sick through drinking it. Reluctantly I take a gulp before spraying it and my breakfast all over Sir’s spotless white shorts as he stands at point-blank range before my desk. This feat earns me great peer respect, I gain immediate membership of the Khormaksar Kids who terrorise the camp, and nobody offers me milk again.
My class teacher Miss Buckle swiftly spots her new pupil’s weakness in arithmetic; I shall find that many teachers in the UK could not care less about Service children because they’ll soon be posted away. I’m obsessed with aircraft (and still will be, 60+ years later) and when Miss Buckle asks each pupil to recite something from memory a couple of pupils recite poems, someone else gives a few lines of prose, and I contribute the takeoff checklist for the Avro Lancaster which I have learned in readiness for the aircraft I’m going to buy once I grow up. Dad says Lancasters were ten a penny a few years ago so I’m sure I’ll have no problem finding one. Miss Buckle shakes her head sadly but a couple of days later gives me a sheet of handwritten problems.
Your Avro Lancaster carries 2000 gallons of petrol, its four engines each consume 60 gallons an hour, and it cruises at 200 mph. How far can you fly before the tanks run dry? Your Lancaster cruises at 200 mph. It is 900 miles from Khormaksar to Khartoum. How much fuel will you need ? This is great, I think. Totally absorbed, it’s the only time I fail to lead the rush home when school ends at lunchtime, and a faintly smiling Miss Buckle checks my flight plan.
“Oh dear. I don’t know much about flying, but on these figures you’re going to come down in the Red Sea. And what do we have in the Red Sea?” “Sharks, Miss Buckle”. “Exactly. Now I’d like you to take this home and recalculate your flights for tomorrow. Until you improve I’m afraid I would not fly anywhere if you are the pilot, I don’t want to be eaten”. Mortified, I slink off home and fall for her cunning plan hook, line and sinker. More flying problems follow and by the end of the next term we have explored every possibility of Lancaster operation, and I have at last learned some arithmetic.
Many years later my father told me that Miss Buckle had been waiting at Flying Wing one morning when it opened at 0700. There she had asked questions about the Lancaster and the basics of navigation so that she could set my problems. She told my father that she feared his child was totally obsessed, but she would teach him maths if it was the last thing she did.
A quarter of a century later I would have both pilot’s and engineering licences as well as my own aircraft, sadly not a Lancaster. No small part of these achievements was down to dear, dedicated Miss Buckle in her sweltering classroom at RAF Khormaksar.
COMING SOON: Pray join us at the RAF Khormaksar Church Parade, a solemn and reverential event on the Stations of the 1950s.