Forgotten pilots or flights...

[Undried Plum]

Never flew Andovers.

Plankwing to flingwing is a long story.

You're gonna hafta swing that lamp and I'm gonna hafta do a long essay on Notepad offline.

I may be some time.

[PHXPhlyer]

Lamp is swinging.
Waiting to hear.

PP

[Undried Plum]

The only aircraft I flew of the German lady's flying club were Chippies, JPs, Gnats, Bassets and Hercs.

The helicochopter thing came much later, entirely by an accident of Fate. Explaining how that came about will involve me writing almost an autobiography, and I'm far too young to be doing that as I've got so much of my life yet to live.

Very extremely briefly, I was head-hunted by Tom Price, then the CP of BA Helicopters, and was taken on by Oxy to run helicopter ops in the big bit of the North Sea between Forties and Brent. I did most of my job from the left-hand seat of BEAS, later Bristows, 212s and from the left-seat of North Scottish Bo105s. I didn't learn how to fly flingwings on titchy things like Enstroms and Robbies and work my way up. I did it the other way around. I first soloed on a Jetbanger, a type I'd never flown before, a coupla years later in Iran in 1979 when there was much Shi'ite hitting many fans. Long story.

I really ought to write some of that stuff down and tell it here as there are so many people here who will understand what I'm talking about.

I don't know where to start as the beginning is rather humdrum and not very interesting or memorable.

I'm going inside now, inside my head, and may be some time.

[PHXPhlyer]

Just don't get lost in there.

PP

[Boac]

"Chippies, JPs, Gnats, Bassets and Herc" - oi! Do hurry up inside there

[Undried Plum]

My puerile ambition as a schoolboy was to become an F4 'toom pilot. I imagined that my adulthood would be comprised of dashing around the German countryside at M2.0 at 150' agl, plinking Russky tanks and dropping bridges, and zooming up to FL500 to whack MiGs like a two-legged Douglas Bader. I'd no idea the the 'toom can't fly at even M1.0 with underwing stores or that the **** thing handles like a wet towel at low level. Never mind. My mind was made up and that was what I thought I was going to do with my life.

As a boy in the ATC (the kidettes, not the traffic confuser type) I won a Flying Scholarship. That involved Selection at Biggin Hill, which subsequently made Selection for GD (Flying) an absolute breeze as I'd done it all before.

On Gnats at Valley I was quite correctly assessed as being bloody good at low level stuff and equally good at high energy manoeuvring in upper air work, but lacked the aggression and combative personal nature which is required of a fighter pilot. I was recommended for the Vulcan. I was judged to be the solid reliable type who would get the bomber to the target on time and bring it and my crew home in a recyclable condition.

There being far too many of us waiting in that queue at a time of savage defence cuts, I was shunted sideways to the Herc.

It was an utterly shite posting. We had a ration of nine hours flying per month. On the Herc, usually hauling pork and beans to RAFG, that was nothing. The boss was on the same ration, so you can guess who did the takeoffs and the landings! Muggins here, in the righthand seat, got to handle the bit between cruise-climb and switch-on of the autopilot. Not very exciting. The throttles were handled by the bloke over my right shoulder who had a wee quadrant beside that shoulderblade, and there was a direction adviser over on my port quarter who told me what Hdg to dial in to the wee twisty thing. A complete waste of a Flying Badge. It had cost the wee German wumman nigh on a million quid to teach me how to do that job. So I quit.

I have got one flying story of those days though. We were the crew who famously dropped an entire squadron, 64 guys I think, of SAS troopers very exactly 100km away from where they wanted to be in an Exercise Cold Winter in Northern Norway. The boss and the direction advisor and I were required to attend a meeting with the AVM to explain ourselves. Hats on, no coffee, heels together, thumbs down the seams of trousers, all that sort of thing. Fortunately we still had our copy of the Order telex which had the two letters of the grid square. It was the telex which was wrong, not us. A coupla years later, when I was a Catman, one of my Battman NCOs was one of the troopers who we'd dropped in the ****. He told me that they'd subsequently travelled to their objective and took the defending force by surprise as everybody had presumed that the Brit special forces would simply give up when they found that they were 60 miles from where they'd expected to be. That history cost me two entire cases of Tusker and a flagon of G-10 (Pongo equivalent of navy Rum) and there were only four battmen and two of us catmen.

Somebody's got to swing that lamp a bit more, 'cos I've not even started on the interesting bits of my lengthy yarn.

[PHXPhlyer]

It is swinging.
Arm's getting tired.

PP

[Undried Plum]

I dunno what bit to tell next.

Chronologically would be a bit boring. Like a CV.

Let's have a video interlude instead.

I was a very raw prawn when I got my first (or second) job as a hydrographic surveyor when I grew out of the idea of poling aeroplanes as a way of earning a crust. I worked for Oxy on the original development of the Piper/Claymore pipeline landing project at Flotta.

A comedy movie was made about the situation, which had many of us characters very thinly disguised. The megalomaniac, big boss, Armand Hammer, had his name slightly changed to Arnold Happer. The then scrawny multilingual Scottish hydrographic surveyor had his name similarly slightly disguised, but that was moi.

So many of the people in that film are based on real people. If things had turned out differently, Lady P might have been the girl who is portrayed in the movie as the daughter of the old Hydrographer. I just know that I'm going to get a hefty kick in the ribs for saying that. Never mind. Here's the movie:

[Boac]

Great so far! Was the SAS drop the one that went into the canal, or was that Germany? What year Valley?

[FD2]

UP - Tom Price was my Base Manager at Aberdeen when I joined BAH in 1977 - great guy. He answered a request one winter's night from the BA Manager at Dyce as a Viscount had gone u/s. We flew the passengers (not quite a full load) up to Kirkwall - if memory serves correctly - we had about 30 in the back with an attendant as several were nippers in extended seat belts on parents' laps.

In a dull moment I counted up the landings on the Piper A - it was over 200! Slightly less for the Claymore so we must have spoken on the radio a few times. I even flew the weird man Hammer and his wife to Kirkwall from ABZ and then on to Flotta and back with Margaret Thatcher the next day, when he announced some great investment which caught her ear when she was talking to the Press. Don't know if it ever happened as he was full of bullsh*t. If you were P2 maybe we flew together in a BAH S61. It's a small world eh?

[FD2]

Here Maggie is curtseying to the little man. Excuse thread drift.

G-BFFK Flotta visit 1980.jpg (230.84 KiB) Viewed 1830 times

Waiting for the return of the VIPs. Maggie loathed flying in a BAH aircraft out of principle but we had the Oxy contract so too bad!

[Undried Plum]

Great so far! Was the SAS drop the one that went into the canal, or was that Germany? What year Valley?

We dropped our meatbombs into a Noggie valley, where we thought they belonged. Spot on the co-ords as written on the Telex.

We thought we'd done fraffly well.

I had to buy the beers and the other stuff as a consequence of having been the pink prawn in the right hand seat of the moment of the green on green on red on go anouncement. That was moi.

I have other confessions, which may follow.

[CharlieOneSix]

....Very extremely briefly, I was head-hunted by Tom Price, then the CP of BA Helicopters, and was taken on by Oxy to run helicopter ops in the big bit of the North Sea between Forties and Brent. I did most of my job from the left-hand seat of BEAS, later Bristows, 212s and from the left-seat of North Scottish Bo105s.

Goodness UP, haven't heard Tom Price's name in many a long year! I flew the 212 for BEAS for a short while (technically Oxford Heli-Services Ltd when I was there) but left before Bristow took them over. I wonder if we met then? Did you experience the dreadful conditions on the Treasure Finder in the ESB - what a dump that was! Life was so much better with the move to the Safe Gothia. However Shell were never the best client to work for IMHO. The infamous Johnny "G" flew the 212 for many years in the Brent for BEAS - he was a really close friend and I'm still saddened that he passed on in 2005 as we were due to have many more years of alcoholic fun together.

David Bond interviewed me in '74 for the Ops Manager's position at Strubby with Management Aviation, later North Scottish. He was interested because I had quite a few hours on the Bo105. I turned it down as I had a better offer but you and I would have met up in North Scottish no doubt if I had taken it.

[Undried Plum]

UP - Tom Price was my Base Manager at Aberdeen when I joined BAH in 1977 - great guy. He answered a request one winter's night from the BA Manager at Dyce as a Viscount had gone u/s. We flew the passengers (not quite a full load) up to Kirkwall - if memory serves correctly - we had about 30 in the back with an attendant as several were nippers in extended seat belts on parents' laps.

In a dull moment I counted up the landings on the Piper A - it was over 200! Slightly less for the Claymore so we must have spoken on the radio a few times. I even flew the weird man Hammer and his wife to Kirkwall from ABZ and then on to Flotta and back with Margaret Thatcher the next day, when he announced some great investment which caught her ear when she was talking to the Press. Don't know if it ever happened as he was full of bullsh*t.

What a small world it is that we are blessed to inhabit, even here in our wee rabbit hole.

I mention a Jetbanger which was painted like a fukkin raspberry ripple on tall skids in a faraway place in Effrika-- and sumbdy posts a photo of it, and perhaps of of sumbdy who may or may not have been moi in by then unfashionable flared trousers.

I mention Piper and sumbdy looks up their logbook and recognises my callsign, Bredford Traffic.

Yes, that was my voice, 50:50 chance, anyway. My voice was the one with the BBC pronounced English. The other guy, on alternate fortnights, had a Geordie accent. His nickname was Bob Wrong. I dunno what my nickname was when I was ashore. When doing my job from above, I probably sounded like a wobbly throatmike person somewhat like the imitation of the goodmorning vietnam guy.

I didn't fly 61s. I merely talked to them, competently.

Tom P had written a paper explaining to Oxy that sqiullions of oodles of boodle were being wasted by sillinesses, such as flying a single box of fresh milk from one place to another on a 61 in the Piper/Claymore complexes while 80 guys were queuing up to fly from a floatel to a platform on a 212 or a Bo105. He proposed that a bloke who could cross-dress between offshore knowledge and aviation knowledge should be hired to fill the aerospacial gap between Bristow Forties and Brent Log. He wrote a spec which was subsequently filled by moi. Thus, I was sought and hired. I was already known to Oxy: see above fanciful movie. I was the scrawny guy, in those days.

Dunno how the Geordie guy got appointed. He and I merely swapped NCP carpark tickets on the helideck changeover every fortnight so that we paid a day's parking charge at Dyce instead of a fortnight's.

[PHXPhlyer]

He and I merely swapped NCP carpark tickets on the helideck changeover every fortnight so that we paid a day's parking charge at Dyce instead of a fortnight's.

Only pilots can work up stuff like this.

PP

[Undried Plum]

....Very extremely briefly, I was head-hunted by Tom Price, then the CP of BA Helicopters, and was taken on by Oxy to run helicopter ops in the big bit of the North Sea between Forties and Brent. I did most of my job from the left-hand seat of BEAS, later Bristows, 212s and from the left-seat of North Scottish Bo105s.

Goodness UP, haven't heard Tom Price's name in many a long year! I flew the 212 for BEAS for a short while (technically Oxford Heli-Services Ltd when I was there) but left before Bristow took them over. I wonder if we met then? Did you experience the dreadful conditions on the Treasure Finder in the ESB - what a dump that was! Life was so much better with the move to the Safe Gothia. However Shell were never the best client to work for IMHO. The infamous Johnny "G" flew the 212 for many years in the Brent for BEAS - he was a really close friend and I'm still saddened that he passed on in 2005 as we were due to have many more years of alcoholic fun together.

David Bond interviewed me in '74 for the Ops Manager's position at Strubby with Management Aviation, later North Scottish. He was interested because I had quite a few hours on the Bo105. I turned it down as I had a better offer but you and I would have met up in North Scottish no doubt if I had taken it.

****! We must have met. You wouldn't recognise me nowadays though. I now have disgracefully long strangly hair and a Father Crimbo grey beard.

I well remember when ManAv was of that name. I remember being allowed to do dirty dives off the helideck in the 105 into ground effect over the oggin and doing smoooth barrel rolls. It was a different era. Unthinkable nowadays, with or without pax. Happy days!

[Undried Plum]

I even flew the weird man Hammer and his wife to Kirkwall from ABZ and then on to Flotta and back with Margaret Thatcher the next day, when he announced some great investment which caught her ear when she was talking to the Press. Don't know if it ever happened as he was full of bullsh*t.?

That would be the piano thing. I think it got a mention in the movie.

I really ought to look at that film again.

[CharlieOneSix]

......****! We must have met.

We did meet - on the 1980 Government job in Rhodesia when you were flying Yankee Foxtrot. The only socialising was in our digs - remember those? Out of the 10 pilots there were five who I had never met before and as I never met them again their names, and yours is one of them, have been lost in the mists of time.

[TheGreenGoblin]

......****! We must have met.

We did meet - on the 1980 Government job in Rhodesia when you were flying Yankee Foxtrot. The only socialising was in our digs - remember those? Out of the 10 pilots there were five who I had never met before and as I never met them again their names, and yours is one of them, have been lost in the mists of time.

UP, the pilot that time forgot?

Never!

[Undried Plum]

UP, the pilot that time forgot?

A **** dinosaur! With long hair, though not much.