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Old 2nd Mar 2013, 02:05
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Andu
 
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During Suez a Canberra got a QDM from its target.
Re Pontius Nav's comment about the Canberras asking for a DF in '56: in my youth in the RAAF, we had an ex-RAF Canberra driver who'd transferred to the RAAF who told us he'd been on the squadron involved. It was bar talk, so the tale had possibly grown in the telling, (maybe quite a lot), but I heard the man (whose name I still recall) tell the story myself. The way he told it, approaching the target, (I can't recall whether Egyptian ATC challenged them or they called ATC), but whatever, they asked for DF and were given one, then they dropped their bombs.

As I said, it was bar talk, but bar talk from a man who was there. As I recall it, the way he told it, the poor bloody Egyptian ATC bloke was really happy, even eager, to help.

Possibly destroying the credibility of my source, the same bloke told us an hilarious story about when the RAF was converting both Israeli and Egyptian pilots onto Spitfires in the mid to late '50s - at the same base! They quickly learned that it was not a good idea to have both groups airborne at the same time, or World War Three would break out above the base. He said that one Egyptian pilot, a close relative of King Farouk, had crashed four Spits, each loss a clear cut case of pilot error with nothing at all wrong with the aircraft, but he was unsackable - the King just kept paying for a replacement aircraft after each crash - until he suffered a genuine problem in a fifth Spit, where he couldn't get the undercarriage down. He circled the field, saying nothing and ignoring all calls from ATC and not asking for assistance or advice, until he ran out of fuel.

The same bloke said that senior instructors used to insist that a trainee should maintain strict 'straight and level' for 30 seconds after every aerobatic manoeuvre. A succession of junior instructors would ask "why not teach them a sequence like we all learned on pilot's course, where they transition smoothly from one manoeuver to the next?" to be told "No way; we'll be fighting these bastards in the not too distant future. Insist on 30 seconds straight and level after every manoeuvre."

Those were the days before anyone had heard of Political Correctness.
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