Venoms
A friend who was on 28 Sqn in 1952, flying Venoms from Sek Kong, told me about an accident involving two aircraft at that time. A pair were due to fly on an air-to-air gunnery detail, shooting at a banner towed by a DH Hornet from Kai Tak. The pilots were a flight commander and a very newly-arrived first tour pilot.
They lined up to take off, and at full throttle the leader nodded ‘brakes off’ and off they went. When they had reached about 50 knots a dog ran across the runway ahead of them and the leader closed the throttle and braked. Unfortunately his number 2 wasn’t quite so sharp and shot past him. Seeing him go past, and also seeing the dog depart the runway, the leader decided to save the lad’s face and so opened the throttle again. Simultaneously, the number 2 realised he had unforgivably overtaken his leader, and so he braked. This see-sawing went on with the result that both aircraft went off the end of the runway at speed and ended up in the rice paddy minus their undercarriages.
A couple of hours later, while the engineers were up to their knees in rice paddy trying to work out how to extricate what was left of two armed Venoms, a Hornet flew at low level down Sek Kong’s runway at high speed. It was towing a target banner, on which was written: ‘Beware of the Dog’.