Ah, Memories (sigh)

[CFC_Conky]

 

Great story Woof!

[=CfC=BlueDog]

 

Woof, you are a legend - a dead-set LEGEND!!

[=CfC=Bounder]

Wonderful stuff from ye all BD,Conky and Woof!

I'm back home after escaping from Italy via the Simplon Pass and Chamonix. Managed to fool the border guards again with a passport photo of yester-year and two days later I find myself back in the Mess!

I spent the last two weeks with a very old flying friend from Jersey Airlines days (cc1967) and we talked a lot about things that happened. Unfortunately....many are not suitable for publication due to their "naughtiness" and the possibility of anyone that did not survive the 60's reading them.

However, MVS (initials of my old friend) has promised to send me a couple of pictures of a very amusing incident that did the tours of bars for many years after the demise of Jersey Airlines in 1969.

As soon as they arrive...(he is still in France sampling Merlot) I will attempt to put this story into print with the names changed to protect the guilty!

Bounder

[=CfC=Bounder]

My second posting as a newly qualified “last officer” was to Jersey Airlines in 1967. This was a wonderful island for a twenty-one year old….six girls for every bloke on the island…petrol 1s 6d gallon and beer 9d a pint (old pence!)
I was to fly the newly acquired Dart Herald which replaced the DH Herons and DC3’s.
Apart from the tragic loss of a DC3 landing in fog at Jersey, the most talked about incident involved an empty Heron flying between Jersey and Dinard on the French coast.
We often flew “newspaper flights” in the middle of the night to bring the daily copies of the Times and Telegragh to the Channel Island population. This involved flying “off” airways in the FIR and at any level you liked! Do you get the idea?
Frequently, the French fishing boats would appear around dawn off the Minquiers rocks near Jersey. By skimming the waves from behind the rocks, you could give these poor souls the fright of their lives by nipping over their fishing boats at mast height plus 5ft! Many were seen to duck into their nets yelling “Aaaah les Roast Boeufs…….merd allors!" (or something to that effect!)
Well…this empty HP Heron with a guy called JLS (single pilot) went a tad too close as the pictures below show! He was fortunate enough to chose a twin masted vessel with wooden masts or would not have survived the incident. One mast went clean through the wing to the spar and took out engines 3 & 4 . The galvanised wire between the masts almost went right through the prop on engine 3 (can’t see in the picture)
JLS managed to pull off a CfC type severely damaged landing at Dinard in front of a Jersey Airlines Herald awaiting passengers by the terminal. In true style, he climbed out of the wreckage in his Mae West, lit a cigarette and walked over to the Herald taking a seat at the front to return to Jersey.
A large black police car appeared shortly after the incident and a couple of gendarmes entered the cabin of the Herald. Seeing JLS sitting in his lifejacket they asked “Pardon Capitaine, peraps yu culd come vith us and explain the circumstances of the damage to ure aircraft?”
JLS flew as a co-pilot for a good while after the incident….but he was bought more beer at the bar than anyone else for a long time to come.
I had the best time of my career in Jersey without a doubt….great characters and wonderful memories of the sort of flying that was  never to return due to the increasing regimentation of civil flying.

Bounder

[=CfC=Woof]

Good story, Bounder.   Did you fly the Heron also or just the Herald?  And what were they like to fly?  More info, please.

[=CfC=Woof]

Your mention of flying IFR off airways direct (good luck in that) reminded me that that was the way we always flew around Europe.  Amazing to me that there were no mid airs.  Although Leo LeBlanc whacked into a hill doing this.  Very bad results.

I was at five or six thousand feet one beautiful morning going from Cannes to Marseilles in a C47 when an Alitalia DC4 descended through my altitude, whiz bang about 200 yards right in front.  It certainly filled a lot of windscreen.  For once I was flying legitimately so I called up the controller to complain and he came back with:  "Ah yes.  He was just showing you to his passengers."  As you said, the good old days.

And that reminds me of the night, in the dark of, carrying one lonely pax from Langar, our base near Nottingham, back to Gros Tenquin in France.  She was an enlisted man's wife (don't ask) and heavily pregnant.  Her nurse, ahem, my mechanic Cpl Roy Cullen from Newfoundland , (my God, how do I remember these things?  I have no idea what I had for breakfast yesterday) of course had to deliver the baby on the metal floor of the C47, but no harm done to the airplane.  It was the freighter  version and thus easily hosed down after we landed.   The only difficulty we had was trying to figure out where the kid was born.  England, Belgium, France, in Canada because it was an RCAF airplane?  They're probably still working on it.

Roy Cullen by the way was a permanent fixture when I drove C47s.   The copilots changed, but never Roy.  One of his finer moments, apart from the night he fell through the rudder, was telling me in graphic (what else?) detail about the pleasures of the local cat house near Cagliari where we had just spent the night.   It wasn't the sex that thrilled him, apparently.   It was the fact that each girl cost only 28 cents Canadian.  A fair price for the mid-fifties.

Roy was also with me the foggy morning we took a taxi from  the hotel in downtown Brussels to the airport.  The cabbie (it must have been his first trip ever) got lost.  The first thing that alerted us to this was when he ducked his head and tried to hide under the dashboard.   For a very good reason.   Somebody's DC4 had just loomed out of the fog and blasted over the cab's roof.  I swear it's wheels left rubber skid marks,   The idiot driver had blundered onto the main runway.  Fortunately he was able to blunder his way back into the fog and we escaped all authority.

Look what you started, Blue Dog, with your nostalgia fetish.  Back to your Morris dancing, I say.  Back!.

[CFC_Conky]

Great story Bounder!

A few of those Herons made their way to Canada in the guise of the Saunders ST-27, the four piston engines being replaced by turboprops.

i know how you feel Woof, I can remember stuff from thirty years ago but can't find the car keys I used five minutes ago...

Speaking of ancient memories....:

...I open the door of the lavatory and what do I see but a the business end of a very elderly woman who forgot to lock the door....some things you just can't unsee

...Walking off the aircraft after a flight to see a lone woman sitting forlornly in her seat trying to be invisible, with a strange look to her jaw. As I get closer to the rear of the aircraft, I pass by the slightly open door of the lavatory to see one of our flight attendants gingerly pouring out the contents of an air sickness bag into the toilet, looking for the poor lady's false teeth.

Aviation is such a glamorous career!

[=CfC= Binks]

You guys should round up a few more stories and create an anecdotal book. It would go down a storm in airport bookshops!

Great stuff.

[=CfC=BlueDog]

Champion tales, Bounder & Woof.   

Just love stories of the 'interesting' characters one comes across in the aviation world - legends to their compatriots , but trouble-makers/cowboys to their crusty old seniors/supervisors/bureaucrats.

[CFC_Conky]

Time for some more ramblings...

I didn't have a camera with me back then, so all mages are from the net.

In May of '82 I was hired to fly a Piper Aztec in support of the effort to eradicate the Spruce Budworm from the forests of eastern Quebec




The spray company was called Conifair, and they operated DC-4's, -6's and Lockheed Super Constellations:





My job was to fly as "bird dog" for the tankers, backing up their navigation. They were equipped with ins sets, but they were very unreliable so we would follow the tankers during their drops, and if the ins went for a burton, we would follow the track on a 1:50,000 map, letting the tanker pilots know if they were off track, when to turn and when to turn their nozzles on/off.

Now for the fun part, the tankers would fly a box pattern over a section of forest, spraying insecticide from an altitude of about 100 feet AGL. Yes, you read correctly, one hundred feet above the trees. Every morning at dawn (3am-ish), the bird dogs would take off for a weather check. The insecticide had to be applied in perfectly smooth air, otherwise to dosage would be off and/or the stuff would drift away to where it did not belong. According to the SOP's, weather checks were flown at 50 feet AGL and naturally, we would cut that in half. The rooster tails when you fly low over the water in IL2 are pretty accurate .

If the conditions were right, we'd send for the tankers. They would have an IP, usually a church steeple, that they would cross before starting their runs. It was very amusing to see a large four engined aircraft fly over a church at 100 feet at 4am, then watch all the lights in the villages turn on! . There were complaints aplenty, but we had special dispensation from the authorities during the spray season. The spraying usually went on from 4am to 8am, and if possible we'd also have a go in the evening from 7pm to 10pm. Calm, cloudy days were best for spraying since there were usually few or no thermals to deal with. The were also some Piper Pawnees spraying over tighter spots. This was also an interesting operation as they would land on secluded country roads to refuel and load up on product. They could run on automotive fuel and it was not unknown to see one at a country petrol station. Over the border in New Brunswick they used Grumman Avengers for spraying and it was cool to see them flying around. Unfortunately they would usually lose at least one per season. The Avenger was a tough bird though, most of the time the pilot would survive the crash, usually due to engine failure.

The Aztec quite a bit slower than the tankers in level flight so in order to keep up with them we would have to intercept them from higher altitude, then dive down to match or slightly exceed their speed. We would then park ourselves a few hundred feet behind and 100 or so above them, following their track with the map. when they came to the end of a line, they wold perform a procedure turn to realigning themselves for the next run while we would pull up and turn inside them, timing it so we could dive down into position as they started their run. They were easier to follow once they shut down one of their engines, which would happen quite often, being paid by the hour, the pilots would just keep spraying.

It was great fun!

As a postscript, John Travolta showed up one day in his Lockheed Jetstar and bought one of the Connies. There is also one that is now flying in KLM livery. I'm not sure if it's the same one but both were from Conifair.

As far as I know they're still trying to kill the pesky little bugs.

Pip, pip,
Conky

[=CfC=Woof]

If you peer closely at the nose of the T Bird pictured below you'll see a smudgy white streak.    A week in Lahore with Matron and a can opener for the first to guess what this streak is.  Ah, the hell with it.  I'm gonna tell you now.  It's  RCAF's first HUD, 1953.   A simple piece of white cord chewing gummed to the nose and centered in the slipstream.   If you ain't flying  true this thing will tell you right away.   Who needs a ball banging around in a dirty little tube?  

And as I mentioned on Xfire the other day, the other highly classified mod on our T Birds was the condom stretched over the throttle.  Seems our erks couldn't stop all those little buttons and knobs and such leaking electricity into our sweaty little palms.

We used the T Birds transitioning from T6s to the F86s.   Ten hours dual just to get the feel of high speed and high altitudes.   It was also used to get jet instrument ratings.

A side note:  I checked into the OTU Friday night and Saturday morning I was standing on the flight line, drooling and nursing a hangover when a F/L, (Red Ashley...God, I still remember his name) strolled up and invited me to ride the back seat of his T Bird while he took part in a four plane aerobatics show over Halifax.
The only thing  that really stands out in my memory is his dragging the left wing  through the grass during the formation take-off.  Of course I was too stupid to be concerned.   A great afternoon, though, and a wonderful introduction to jets.

And a morbid note I just remembered:  One of our instructors had perfected the loop landing in the T Bird and demonstrated it across the country.  Probably not such a big deal now but was considered quite daring back then.  (And fun to try in IL2)   You dive at the button of the active runway, pull up into the loop[, drop the gear and flaps while upside down and all things being equal you should touch down on the numbers.  Power off all the way.  A derivation is the half Cuban Eight off the opposite end of the runway.  I saw Bob Hoover doing both these in an Aero Commander with both engines  shut down.  Oh, the morbid note:  We had a S/L from the RAF on exchange as an F86 instructor and he killed himself in the T Bird on his first attempt at the loop landing.  A really great guy.

[=CfC=Bounder]

We should really organise a "Crazy" flying night and try some of these....any takers?

Bounder

[=CfC=Palmtree]

We should really organise a "Crazy" flying night and try some of these....any takers?

Bounder

Strictly a "straight & level" man myself!!! 

Pt

[=CfC=Bounder]

Your memory reminded me of another great flyer...maybe not in the same league as Hoover...but there was nothing he could not do in a Piper Cub!!

He came to UK and flew the airshow circuit in about 1992 I think....If you have not seen some of the crazy flying he did...here is one of the YoutTube videos:-

The legendary "Flying Farmer....Charlie Kulp"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2BPcurREpo&feature=related

I had the good fortune to have a chat and chew the cud with Charlie at the Badminton Air Show (Duke of Beaufort's private airstrip...you know!)about 1992.

With me was my old friend Tony Liddiard...he and I put together many old aircraft in those days and sold them off.......here we all are in this pic....Bounder, Tony and Charlie Culp...all telling each other lies about how well we could fly a 65hp Cub...trouble was...Charlie did not tell any lies!

Bounder

[=CfC=Woof]

Love the 'stache. Were you a practicing porn star by any chance, Bounder?  And I didn't know that Charlie Culp also played with  ZZ Top.  And furthermore, Palmtree, you are a stone killer and anything but straight and level.