Old Comrades
I enjoyed this short attachment at St. Athan. I was invited to fly with a Squadron Leader pilot in the new Mosquito aircraft while at St. Athan, and found it quite marvellous. It would afterwards supersede the Beaufighter to some extent, and although built largely of plywood, it had good firepower and was incredibly fast, due of course to its low weight.
One slight mishap in a Beaufighter at St. Athan was almost a very serious crash. Coming in to land one day, after the usual test flight lasting a little over an hour, I was just above the landing field and about to touch down, when the port wing (the left side) dropped violently, and I thought we were about to cartwheel. I corrected mightily with the right rudder, throwing open the throttle of the port engine to make the wing pick up. I thought momentarily about going round again, but decided to land straight ahead, as we regained a normal attitude. I touched down successfully, although a little roughly, and we taxied back to the hangar with a very shaken Sergeant technician in the back seat.
It was just as well I hadn't gone round again! We found that the left wing tip had been damaged, because it had actually touched the grass field when the wing dropped. We also discovered something much more serious. The pitot head (a tube device that measures airspeed by means of the airflow) was stuffed with grass and earth. I had been very close to disaster with the dropped wing, and if I had attempted to fly off and go round again, I would have had little idea of my speed for the next landing attempt.
The trouble found, was due to a blockage in the fuel flow. Fuel for the engines had been drained from the right wing's outer tank, without any being drawn from the left wing. The result was an overloaded left wing, which consequently dropped as soon as we reached stalling speed for the landing.
One day I had the opportunity to take up a Tiger Moth for some sort of test. I picked the appropriate spot in the sky not too far away to practise aerobatics, made my way back to the airfield, and finding myself with too mch altitude, I side-slipped into the approach and made a nice landing. Back at the Flight Office I met an Air Transport Auxiliary male who rudely said, “You can’t side-slip a Tiger Moth into a landing”. He was the first male ATA member I had met; all the others were lovely young women, I’m pleased to say. “Mate” I said to him, “if I didn’t side-slip, what would you call it?”
When I returned to 219 Squadron with a healthy total of Beaufighter hours to my credit, I was put on night patrols. This was not an exciting routine, and consisted of "stooging" backwards and forwards along the coast line, between radar marker beacons, waiting for intruder aircraft to arrive from across the Channel. Preparation for this was made by sitting around from mid-afternooon until dark wearing strong sun-glasses to ensure night vision remained the best.
As soon as "bandits" were spotted by Ground Control - usually when hey were quite a long distance away, rookie pilots like me were recalled to Base, and an experienced pilot (e.g. Squadron Leader Wight-Boycott) was hastily "scrambled" and vectored to the enemy aircraft. I didn't have to endure the boring patrols too long, however. I hadn't been back on the squadron more than three or four weeks, when the news came that Bob Hessey and Iwere posted overseas, to the Middle East along with another 14 two-men crews from Church Fenton OTU, all of whom had been so expensively trained for the night fighter duties.