It is a strange thing, but although any form of School should be a mine of good stories, I remember remarkably little of my time as an Instructor at Shawbury. Whatever, all good things come to the end sooner or later, and in summer '67 it was time for the next step. With my usual luck, I was disappointed (but not surprised) to draw a third AFS out of the bran-tub - Leeming.
ATC in all AFS is very much the same, the student pilots and their QFIs know all the same good old ways of making a Controller's life a misery, and have devised new ones. There was another novelty: at my two previous AFS (Strubby and Linton), they'd used Meteors and Vampires, both types I'd flown, and with which I was familiar. Now they were using the JP (Mks III and V), which I'd never had anything to do with, and so was an unknown quantity. The first thing I had to learn was the point at which you started to get worried (40 min, IIRC), which was better than the 30 min of the Meteor (I can't remember what it was at Linton with the Vampire, perhaps we didn't worry at all - maybe an alumnus of those days can jog my memory ?).
And Leeming was a Master Airfield, so a 4-watch system was in force. Admittedly this gives you a useful amount of time off, but then every fourth night is a whole "night bind" (1800-0800), which upsets family life somewhat. After a year there I got a "Supervisor" rating, which made things easier (I'm not sure whether as a simple 9-5 "day job", or with someone else on a two-watch system), as a Watch Boss.
We had to say farewell to our little OMQ at High Ercall. Fortunately, Iris's mother (in Marton) was 30 miles from Leeming, which was quite a possible commuting distance. Shortly before the Christmas of '67, a quarter came up in the "Coppice" at Leeming. My most vivid memory of the place is the little, square, diabolical coke stove in the kitchen (CHW supply). In this, I spent most of one freezing December night before we marched in, trying to get the beastly thing going (and you must remember that I was a skilled and experienced boilerman - as we all needed to be - by that time). As I recall, it was first cousin to the little black horror I had in my hut in Driffield in February '50, where I was in "Clear and Present Danger" of death by Carbon Monoxide poisoning every night.
Although we settled ourselves comfortably enough in the Coppice, our thoughts turned to getting a place of our own. We'd now been paying rent, either in Quarters, Hirings or privately, for fifteen years; it was a mug's game; it had to stop. After scouting around a bit, we settled on a fairly new, large dormer bungalow in Thirsk. Building Society and Bank came up trumps. In June of '68 we were "in" (and I couldn't sleep at nights for thinking of the monstrous debt I'd saddled myself with for the next twenty years).
Back at the ranch, they seem to have immediately put me to work on Approach. The CA/DF hadn't changed a bit, and there was a wonderful newcomer on the panel - the ARC-52 set. For pilot and Controller alike, this was "the second best thing sinced sliced bread" (the best being the aforesaid CR-CA/DF). No longer did you have to count studs on the box and try to remember which frequency was which, now you just dialled up whatever you wanted.
At the other end of the control desk was a very new creature indeed. The happy, carefree days of the Truck Radars were over for good (more's the pity !) Now two big radar tubes sat one above the other. The lower was easily recognisable: it was more or less identical to the precision radar in the old CPN-4s I knew from Thorney and Geilenkirchen, with glide path and centreline displays on the same tube. Now it was called the "PAR", (the Precision Approach Radar).
But the "search" PPI tube of the old CPN-4 had been replaced by a new Radar, the AR-1, which was a thing of wonder to all who came upon it for the first time - for it was a "quantum leap" forward for Airfield Radar. And I shall say a lot more about it next time, for this is quite enough for one night.
Goodnight, all.
Danny42C.
The old order changeth, giving place to new.