Punching out of Oakington on a solo IF detail I arrived over Gravely, our relief landing ground, at about 20k and asked for a cloudbreak descent (QGH). I spiralled down with the controller doing the usual heading checks and then he seemed to dry up. I carried on and at about 10k I was told to abort the procedure and return to Oakington.
A mate of mine, and still is, was doing circuit continuation training and had just commenced an overshoot. At that point his trusty Goblin decided to have a major impellor failure and in so doing departed the shaft and dived into the fuselage fuel tank. The response from the fuel tank was as expected so my mate, at about 150 ft. on overshoot had a load of decibels plus a brightly lit rear view mirror.
He wisely decide to leave the aeroplane to its own devices; pulled off the canopy and ejected. His altitude, 150 ft. against a 200ft./90 knots seat was compensated by being in a climb and his speed was OK. He arrived on the runway and was relatively unscathed but his aeroplane, by this time resembling a ball of flame with two wingtips sticking out had decided to carry out a Kamikaze attack on the control tower, which was why my QGH had dried up.
It arrived in the signals square and swamped the tower, fire truck and ambulance with incandescent Avtag. There was a pause whilst the fire crew extinguished the fire on the fire truck and ambulance before they could attend to the scenes of the accident.
My mate, despite the efforts of Huntington hospital was OK and he got his MB tie.
Years later FED went to Gravely to do some helicopter work for the film 'Robbery'. That was the film about the Great Train Robbers of the sixties. The film's hideout was the tower at Gravely and if you follow the Whirlwind helicopter supposedly looking for them you will see a young FED in the cockpit.
Walking around the old signals square I pulled out some old Vampire control wires that had been there all those years.
Last edited by Fareastdriver; 4th May 2017 at 18:17.