The Salalah ACR 7:
Why did "Sunny Salalah" need an ACR 7 you may wonder? Well, the thing is that Salalah was not always sunny. In fact, from late May until early September the surrounding coastal plain suffered from a local monsoon or "khareef" as the locals called it. I believe this was caused by a very moist southerly airflow coming over the thermal equator and then meeting the relatively cold sea south of the airfield. A further complication was the range of hills which rose up steeply from the coastal plain to a height of about 3,000 feet just a few miles north of the airfield (which hills then formed the plateau which ran north to the airfield at Thumrait - also known as Midway in those days).
The main effect of all of this was a lot of low cloud and drizzle (I don't remember rain being a particular problem but everything used to go green). Some days the general cloudbase might not go much above 200 feet even at 2 o'clock in the afternoon.
The airfield consisted of two sand runways (35/17 and 22/04) about 5,000 feet long. Because of the surrounding terrain, during the khareef the only safe approach possible was to runway 35. Now having a PAR (Precision Approach Radar) would have been a God send but Mrs Windsor could only afford to let us have an ACR 7 (Airfield Control Radar). For those of you who are not familiar with such things, PAR gives precise indications of aircraft position on centre line AND glide path wheras ACR 7 was centre line only and the aircraft had to make up its own glide path. For that reason the minima for the ACR 7 approach was somewhere around 350 - 400 feet.
Now some of you might be way ahead of me here but the next complication was that with a southerly monsoon blowing and runway 35 in use, then there was going to be about a 15 knot tailwind on touchdown so there was no time to bugger about when and if you found the 35 threshold.
The lack of a PAR was more than made up for by the two Air Trafficers at Salalah. (One was called Colin but I am mortified to say that I can't remember the other one's name). They were both brilliant and even with their ancient equipment, I had total faith in them. I never had a missed approach.
Colin and his mate would talk us down to 350 - 400 feet and by then we would usually have come out of the main cloud base over a fairly angry sea with the beach in sight. The trouble was that the airfield would as often as not still be obscured with thin layers of low cloud. There was no approach lighting and I think the runway edge lighting consisted of glim lamps. Not to worry, local ingenuity had risen to the task. A couple of pits had been dug into the sand, one almost at the threshold and another just a few hundred yards short. In each was a 44 gallon drum full of scrap jet fuel etc. When the conditions were particularly bad, both drums would be lit.
So, although we could not see the runway at minima, the boys would keep going with heading changes (advisory, of course) and we would usually be able to see at least the first orange glow if not both of them. We did not usually go into Salalah at night but sometimes "exigencies of the service" made it necessary. One night I finally got the numbers at about 150 feet. Not bad for an old ACR 7 and a couple of consumate professional operators.
Mind you, they had a vested interest in getting us down for we had their mail, food, beer, cigarettes, ammunition, newspapers and, from time to time, "the technical documents" on board. (The latter were black and white adult movies).