Danny has a Life of Ease.
Strolling across the grass towards the CPN-4 Truck, you were greeted with the sound of - silence ! Or near silence, anyway. The original two-trailer set had, I was told, an Allison engine-driven generator, but the RAF couldn't afford it, so this was taken out; instead they tapped into the airfield mains power and put in a rotary converter to turn this into US current suitable for the equipment. This converter produced only a low and soothing hum. Vertical and horizontal sweeps of the PAR were electronic and noiseless. The Search antenna on top (15 rpm) was quiet, too. All in all, this was a restful environment.
Beside the working trailers, there was a small rest caravan, but for the life of me I can't remember a single thing about it. It is a curious thing that, although I can recall almost every detail of my first radar (MPN-1), the memory of the finer points of my later ones (two CPN-4s, an ACR7D and a MPN-11 PAR (in effect, a CPN-4 which had come in out of the cold) escape me.
As the CPN-4 was a fixture, it seemed that one of the mechs, a keen gardener, had taken the opportunity to dig out a small kitchen garden at the rear of the site; this bore a plaintive little notice with the plea: "Do not strain your greens on our cabbage patch". None of the truck radars had sanitary arrangements of any sort, and with the inordinate quantity of tea consumed, it was standard procedure, on occasion, to dodge behind (but well clear) of the truck onto the grass.
I don't think I had a Search Director at all, although of course we had F/Sgts as Local Controllers, and many of these would have had Director experience on the MPN-1s. The whole idea seemed to be to run GCA as a one-man operation. This is fine in low-intensity (and it would be hard to imagine any lower than Thorney), but it was a Master Airfield. ATC was still haunted by the memory of the "West Raynham" tragedy two years before (a botched, panicky multiple diversion ending in the loss of (IIRC) six Hunters and one pilot).
There was no reason in principle why a similar scenario should not develop again at Thorney one day, and how would we cope if we were on the receiving end ? The CPN-4 idea seemed to be that you would put another operator in seat 2, and yet another in seat 3, and Approach would sequence the rest, giving No.4 aircraft to seat 1 as No.1 a/c touched down, and so on. There was only one flaw in that arrangement - we only had one operator ! And it would require 3 discrete GCA frequencies, and coordinating three talkdowns (after all, you've only one runway) tricky indeed.
If you could find an ex-Director F/S, then he could have seat 2, he would take the PPI tube, I would keep the PAR one, we would operate as in days of yore. However, it seemed that Thorney had simply not thought about it at all, on the good old principle that "it'll never happen". Fortunately, it never did (at least in my time).
On arrival, (and I'm afraid all the names have gone now), SATCO greeted me warmly enough, but rather disconcerted me by telling me that he was immediately handing me over to a Flt/Lt "X" for instruction in my duties. This raised my hackles at once. I had known these 'leading man' arrangements before. "But only one Boss !", I barked back at him. It was essential to get the chain of command right from the start. "Not a lot of little Bosses !" To his credit, he saw the point immediately, and when I later met 'X', he turned out to be entirely helpful and reasonable: and we got on very well from then on.
The funny thing about Thorney was that we seemed to be never there. This showed in a simple way, Mrs D. never needed to be without the car all day, for I was always at home half of two of the four days in a watch cycle, and all day off on the other two. The only onerous bit was the full night's duty every fourth night, and weekends you could forget about. And I cannot imagine a single night when I didn't get a full night's sleep in, before returning home to a leisurely breakcast in the morning sun on our balcony, with sometimes the Queen Mary or Queen Elisabeth, en route to New York, sliding down the Solent before our eyes.
And there was sun. We would never forget the neverending summer of 1959: it would prove to be the Summer of the Century, just as '62/'63 was to be remembered as the Winter of the Century. I remember spotting a "Letter to the Editor" in some page of a Gardening Section of a paper. The writer had a small espalier peach, from which he normally gathered 15-20 fruit each year. This he would remember as "The Year of the Hundred Peaches".
Goodnight again,
Danny42C.
All right for some,