VICTOR TANKER TALES CH 4.

By Ed Duke.Airframes.


57 Sqn ground crew 1972


We four new boys now made our way to 57 Sqn's flight-line which was quite a long way from a standard cluster of hangers and other technical support sections. The flight-line consisted of assorted office accommodation, storage units and adequate hard standing for the Sqn's aircraft. After a flurry of introductions and the inevitable rounds of "I remember you from Halton /Changi/Aden, etc." we were taken under the wing of the 'Chief of Crew Chiefs', Ken Richards, who was nearing the end of his five year tour and was a grand mentor; however he was quite mystified to find out how young most of us were.

Ken drummed a lot of very good advice into us and one of his earliest mantras was "Get a small sturdy note book and always write down in it everything that happens to you." - this was stressed endlessly time and again down the years and proved its worth. He also issued us with the Victor Crew Chief's tool kit which consisted of an air bottle key, a cabin door key, a set of Dzus fastener keys and a pair of padlocks. A good indicator of how important these mundane items became to us is pretty evident as I still have the sturdy - if sweated through - note book which has stored in it all my ASC history, and - quite stunningly - I still have most of the tool kit!

Ken's next move was to place us each with a more experienced Crew Chief and let us absorb the day to day routines which are at the core of most well run RAF sections - from the station farm to the CO's office. There was a lot to learn and time was short as a major exercise was in the offing and - as rumour proved - it would be to the Far East. I would have laughed at that time if anyone had suggested that in the next two years I would only be at Marham for the equivalent of one of them - a ratio that did improve after that period. Thrown into this very steep learning curve we all became aware that there were undercurrents, if not of a serious or significant dimension, that really boiled down to the fact that, to many, the Crew Chief was seen as a sort of 'Aircraft Scape Goat'; I write this many years after the event but at that time the Crew Chief system seemed to be a way for the RAF to get, for just half a crown a day, a tradesmen who could take the blame for everything that went wrong. The resultant steady stream of Crew Chiefs marched into the Station Commander's office to be dressed down and hit with a £200 fine was a great sapper of moral. This fly in our collective ointment was addressed soon after our arrival by a fund created from contributions paid by all the station's Crew Chiefs which paid any fines incurred by their comrades; all very naughty - and the stuff on which Courts Martial are built - but it was also an indicator of how very angry a lot of very senior SNCOs had become. The fact that most of us on our course were babes in arms compared with previous intakes was easy to understand when one took into account all the early retirements that had taken place: some on medical grounds, such as nervous breakdowns, and some who had bought themselves out . . . etc. etc. It had at last filtered through to someone that asking 50-ish years old airframe and engine SNCOs - who had probably done their fitter's courses whilst on five year tours at Quetta, in India, and had cut their teeth on Westland Wapitis - to become Crew Chiefs was not really fair on them, and a really bad idea all round. It's easy to be critical so long after that time, armed with the amount of history available to us now, but still worth looking back at.

Our Crew Chief course was really over when we had each put 86,000 lbs of fuel into the right places, briefed an aircrew, seen them into the aircraft, carried out all the pre-flight checks, removed the nose leg locking pin, seen the aircraft off, seen it in again, re-fitted the nose leg pin and carried out an after-flight debrief with the crew.

Nothing to it and another half-crown in the bank account.