THE ADVENTURES OF AN OLD HALTONIAN

By David Blake.Instruments

On leaving Halton I went to a 'V' bomber station, RAF Marham; I did a year in the 'gin palace' - calibration lab. - then did a complete round of courses so as to bring me up to date on current technology. That is to say the latest autopilots and avionics equipment related to my trade of Nav Inst. I got promoted and was posted to 207 Sqn with Valiants. It all seemed so seamless, and then a year later I was posted to Singapore!

I was posted to 205 Sqn with its Shackleton Mk1 'tail draggers!' These aircraft were so old - circa 1947 - that they had already completed their allotted flying hours. They had spent several years parked on a remote part of the airfield at Ballykelly and largely been forgotten about. Then some bright spark in the Air Ministry said "Let's give them a main spar check, send them to Singapore and scare the living daylights out of Dave Blake." The avionics were so old that Halton was still teaching it; the navigators were WW2 vintage and had taken part in the Berlin airlift. They looked to me to be about sixty years old, though I don't suppose that was possible; I think they were on the inventory and came with the aircraft! Well, sadly, the wings hadn't fallen off in transit as I could see them there in front of me.

Initially I was quite excited about the prospects; I was up to date - technically speaking that is - with what was in service, all I would need was aircraft familiarisation. Pride as they say comes before a fall.

Every time there was a heavy downfall of rain - which was frequent - there was a chance the flight instruments would read so the pilot's ASI would possibly be telling him that he could 'rotate' and the altimeter that he could level off. On the engineer's panel the engine instruments sometimes resembled spirit levels as rain water had ingressed. Looking at the back of the engineer's panel the insulation had shrunk up the cables, due to age I imagine, and the intense heat and humidity. I thought "OMG! This has to be a bad dream," but worse was to come.

I was interviewed on arrival by the Engineering Officer:

"I notice that you're Nav Inst," he said. I nodded, "Well from now on you're also Gen Inst!"

The thought went through my head that it took three years at Halton to be one of those, and I've just become qualified in five minutes. It was my introduction to the real world; after Singapore I was never to work in a Nav Inst capacity during the rest of my career, so what on earth were those three years all about?

Stranger things were yet to happen; I'm just going to relate one that was so surreal I never quite came to terms with it, Halton most certainly had not prepared me for this; I was handed a WW2 vintage rifle, a tin hat and 50 rounds of live ammunition and then flown to an obscure part of the planet to help win a war! Fifty years later I found out that I had earned a medal that fortunately wasn't posthumous - now how surreal was that?

Our CO, prior to this, had called us together and said that we were to inform our wives and loved ones that, at some time in the near future, we would not be coming home for a while. He went on to say that it was not in our interest to know where we were going.

I recall walking down the line of aircraft early one morning - I was usually the first to arrive - and saw what appeared to be a strange and rather large object parked right in the middle of the taxi way. As I drew closer it began to take shape, it was a jungle green back pack complete with spade and other accoutrements. Surely I thought it's too large for anyone to carry, for it was about 4ft tall. It then levitated a few inches off the ground and rather jerkily moved ahead of me. It was strapped to the back of a Ghurkha! His weapon of choice was decidedly more up to date and sophisticated than mine; "OMG!" I thought, "We're going to war." - but where exactly?

Within two days we had moved out, flying with our own aircraft, to an airfield called Labuan in the state of Sabah, Brunei. I was sleeping in a two-man tent a stone's throw away from one of our aircraft, only there was something different about it. It took me a while to realise what it was; they had fitted cannons in the nose turret! I don't think they had fitted them just to frighten me, it was only then that I realised just how serious this was.

Labuan, before all this upheaval, had been a small provincial airport; it boasted a tower and had one Fokker Friendship flight a week. The poor occupants must now have been in a state of shock, for there were aircraft littered all over the place. Most of which, I should add, were in a state of disrepair as, for instance, the Canberra missing a wing tip - presumably for flying too low over the jungle terrain. Well, I was just about to add to this, later that evening, when I saw off our first reconnaissance Shackleton. It was going to patrol the Malacca Straits looking for insurgents, in the shape of destroyers, possibly bringing in reinforcements from Indonesia, under the cover of darkness.

At 0600 the next morning I rang the tower to see if there was any news about the possible ETA of 'Foxtrot'.

The voice that answered said, "Do you mean the Shackleton?"

I answered "Yes."

"Thank God you phoned." he said.

A little alarmed I asked "Why, is there something wrong?"

"We haven't heard from them for about eleven hours." he replied.

I told him not to be unduly concerned as it could stay up for fourteen hours, and the crew would, I imagined, be keeping radio silence. I understood his concern though as a Friendship would have fallen out of the sky several times over.

The Shackleton came in an hour or so later and it was obvious that something serious had in fact happened. The crew got out and one member was in a terrible state, but then none of them looked too bright. They staggered down the steps without communicating with me; usually I'd get some form of debrief. I went aboard to do an after-flight and it was in a state of chaos; the navigator's maps were strewn all over the place. I knew where the aircraft had been but something obviously had gone wrong, for I could smell it; this may seem a strange choice of words but I could genuinely smell 'fear'.

They had picked up a trace on the radar and homed on to it; the pilot had then fired a couple of flares to see what it was - the pilot could operate a flare pistol that was mounted on the cabin roof above his head. This not only revealed a destroyer but also the aircraft's location; they were raked with gunfire that went right down the aircraft. The captain, I imagine, asked for feedback relating to injuries and any possible damage; seemingly none was found so they continued with their mission. Investigation later revealed that the flares had 'shot down' the two HF aerials that stretched from attachment points just forward of his position to the top of the two rudders; they had 'whip-lashed' down the aircraft fuselage giving the impression of gunfire.

Then something quite fortuitous happened; I was to be flown back to Singapore. What was it that was deemed more important than the war? I was overdue for repatriation! I was flying back to Changi in one of our own aircraft so, being a seasoned traveller by then, after boarding I installed myself in the bottom of the two bunks - the two bunks were for a co-pilot and an additional navigator on long sorties. The flight would take somewhere, I reckoned, between four and six hours - cruising at about 220 knots - so it was an opportunity to get in some much needed sleep.

I woke up with a start, my heart pounding and my mind racing; the engines were labouring, the cabin was full of smoke, and there were explosions happening forward of me. I rolled over and looked out of one of the observation windows; we were wave- hopping, so low that I could see the individual crests. I thought, for a moment, that we were going in. Then, just to show that things could in fact get worse, I suddenly felt something hot on my right leg. I instinctively felt the leg and it was damp - "OMG!" I thought, "I've been shot!"

When the smoke, and the frightening noises, eventually ceased, I could see the elderly navigator - ex WW2 - sitting on the back of his seat smoking a pipe, totally unfazed by everything that had been happening around him - just how cool was that? The 'explosions' were, in fact, created by the cannons being fired; it transpired that we were not being attacked, or about to ditch, but we just happened to have an over- zealous pilot who wasn't going to waste an opportunity to hone the skills of his crew now that we were at war. As to the hot spot on my leg: the chap in the top bunk had been drinking coffee and the shock of the cannons being fired had frightened the living day lights out of him and he'd spilt it. If I'd been in the USAF I would possibly have been entitled to a 'purple heart'

After 'repat' I was posted to 74 Sqn - Lightnings - and this was the final insult; a Nav Inst man posted to a fighter Squadron; I must have upset someone high up. However, something was to evolve out of this which was to eventually put everything to rights, and explain where a lot of those like me were going: I found myself on a course that was to last fifteen months!

As a direct result of that course, and several years later, I was asked to undertake a task that required travelling in civilian clothing, with my name tags removed - I was a Chief Tech. by then - accompanied by an explosives expert in a foreign military aircraft that had flown in expressly to pick us up; the task necessitated flying over a certain country's airspace that was prohibited to the UK. The two of us later found ourselves embroiled in an international incident that went up to Government level and involved my speaking by satellite, via 'scrambler', from one of our Middle Eastern embassies, but that, as they say, is another story.

(NB Painting by David himself - awaiting his repatriation alongside a Shackleton Mk1 of 205 Sqn; I knew the aircraft well from my time in Changi's ASF hangar. Brian.)