Happy New Year! Fifty years ago, the three putative students lucky enough to have persuaded BUA, AST and the Ministry of Aviation of our suitability for investment in the form of a flying cadetship on Course 32 were spending our last few days with our families before the journey up to Scone for our report on January 5th, a Wednesday. In my case that would involve a night-sleeper train from London-Euston to Perth, followed by a bus ride to Scone village and a walk of nearly a mile, carrying my bags, to the aerodrome. I'd previously made a similar journey for the main selection interview/test in November.
Our course officially started the next day, as it did for two others on the course: Charles Jordan, an R/O (radio-officer) from Morton Air Services (part of the BUA group); and "Sandy" Morris, the younger son of a local farming family. Charles, who had been in Bomber Command at the end of WW2 and had a son of my age, had obtained a PPL and was being sponsored by Mortons: a generous gesture by Sammy Morton. The Herons he flew as nav-cum-R/O-cum-general dogsbody had recently been re-certificated as two-pilot a/c. Sandy was the family black-sheep: restless, uninterested in farming and looking to travel the world. He had flown at Scone with the aero-club, had a PPL, and was self-funding.
My two fellow BUA cadets, Mike (
aka Mick) Cross and Peter Leith-Smith, had PPLs. I was the only one of the five Brits with no flying hours (apart from about 40 mins with Cyril Sweetman on selection). Although we started on January 6th, we found that the remaining students on Course 32 - all foreign - had mostly started on December 13th for induction and language assessment (presumably).
So Course 32 was cosmopolitan, with 22 male students: a number gradually to be reduced by attrition. Here's an attempt at a start-list, in no particular order, with funding in brackets (MSA is Malaysia-Singapore Airlines), followed where known by his allocated-instructor's initials :
? Dias (MSA?) RF
W.K. Gui (MSA) AP
B.M. Abdul-Hamid (MSA)
J. Lau (MSA) EH
Musa (MSA?) AP
B.H. Ong (MSA) EH
A. de-Silva (MSA) CS
E.P. Soh (MSA) DK
Lt R.B. Karki (Nepalese Army Air Service) LH
Lt S.B. Malla (Nepalese Army Air Service) LH
? Pant (Nepalese Army Air Service) LH
Capt T.J. Thapa (Nepalese Army Air Service) LH
Ahmed (Sudan Airways?) * DK
T. El-Hassan (Sudan Airways) * TC
Ghafar (Sudan Airways?) * RF
S. Zulkifli (Sudan Airways) EH
M.B. Cross (BUA) DK
C. Scott (BUA) AP
P. Leith-Smith (BUA) RF
C.W. Jordan (Morton Air Services) CS
A.L. Morris (Private) TC
? Tittialetti (?) ?
- IIRC, we were all assigned to fly Cessna 150s, except (perhaps) Leith-Smith?
- Students annotated * had apparently flown about an hour's solo prior to starting the course, plus about 30 hrs dual.
- Most of the MSA guys seemed to be ethnic-Chinese from Singapore. They were all very bright.
- The Nepalese Army guys were all officers, and were to do a special course that would later involve much twin-engined flying at low level in mountainous areas the rest of us were forbidden to enter. They would not do the IR (Instrument Rating) course.
- The Sudan Airways guys may not have been planned for the IR course either, because I don't have any later record of them doing it. They found the English language very tough, and at least one (El Hassan) slipped to Course 33.
Further to my
previous list of all the flying instructors I flew with, our nominated course instructor (for mass flight-briefings and mentoring) was Terry Capon, and our allocated flying instructors initially were Terry Capon, Cyril Sweetman (CS), Alec Peddell (AP), Ray Foote (RF), D. Kirkpatrick (DK), "Ernie" Holmes (EH), Geoff(?) Chandler, Lew Hurrell (LH).
(Terry Capon had been an RAF pilot late in WW2. After being de-mobbed, he had had a long, successful career in business but had recently returned to his first love: flying. I later flew with him for the first time when he was a skipper on Heralds in BUIA, and we both became VC10 co-pilots in 1971 (BCAL). The vagaries of seniority prevented him from getting a command again before retirement.)