Chapter 15
What’s wrong with me? I am probably the world’s most eligible bachelor, but all that I seemed to be able to do is to hang on to the new women in my life for about six months at a time. My first foray into the love stakes following the loss of Sheila, my wife, almost five years ago had been Sandra, the media icon. That had been a helter-skelter ride of emotions, but in the end her ‘calling’ recalled her, and now it was the turn of the aristocracy. Unfortunately the circles that Sasha moved in were very unforgiving, irrespective of what I was like as a person, or what was secreted away in the bank account, it was my family tree that was far more important to them. For the first three weeks of our fling Sasha spent it in bed, not that bed, a hospital bed, but once she was on the road to recovery that sorted itself out, and we started to hit the high life (although not straying too far from a loo), first my version of it and then gradually hers, but I was definitely not invited inside. I suppose historians in years to come might indicate that I didn’t try hard enough to integrate (or should that be ingratiate) myself into her circles, but I am a great believer that a person is what they are, not who their great uncle, third removed was, and the final straw came when Sasha invited her coven over for a bridge weekend at my ‘pad’, and I was ‘told’ by the head crone to ‘pour the tea’.
When I sarcastically hinted that I might actually employ other people to carry out that function, Sasha absent mindedly reverted to type and snapped at me to ‘stop making a fuss Andrew, and just do it’.
Up until that moment I had only been having a ‘bad hair day’, but that seemed to be just a teensy weensy bit O.T.T., and I think I handled the situation quite well considering. I gave her and her cronies one hour to get off my property, and then I would tell the security staff that they were ‘weapons free’. I then stormed down to the marina, untied the Aquarama, clambered on board, turned the ignition keys, and as soon as the engines fired rammed the throttles to their stops. It was a good job that there was no speed limit in my marina as it would have been exceeded by the time the Aquarama’s stern had cleared the boathouse. Carol eventually sent a helicopter to herd me back (with my head start there was nothing in the marina that could catch up with me) as ‘Bob the Bosun’ didn’t think that I had enough fuel on board to reach Morocco ‘at full chat’. By the time that I finally, and rather sheepishly, edged the Aquarama (surprisingly the Chrysler motors seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed the abuse) back into its home, two hours after its frantic departure, and David had driven me up to Mi Casa, there was absolutely no sign of Sasha or her Wiccans. I never did enquire about what had happened after my departure – ‘plausible deniability’ and all that!
That was three weeks ago, and now, as I mulled it over in my mind for the ‘enth time, a sexy young voice whispered into my ‘shell like ear hole’ ‘Lady S, you are cleared to join ........’ I was back in the land of the living and dropping in for a flying visit to my favourite Ejército del Aire (Spanish Air Force) base in northern Spain (no air traffic controller had yet had the spherical’s to correct my RT procedure). For some obscure reason I was their guest of honour at some ceremony or other, followed by a spot of lunch, and then later on, yet another free dinner. Once my inner self had been fully sated then it was to be a few hours’ sleep in the VIP quarters and then onwards and upwards to the UK for an early Christmas with Alice and her new husband Algernon, and all went well until I pressed the ‘undercarriage down’ button. Instead of ‘three reds’, followed reassuringly by a few clunks and then ‘three greens’, my finger disappeared into the bowels of the side panel, and as I looked on in mild interest at this strange occurrence, a rather sticky puddle started to form around my heals. I didn’t need to remove my oxygen mask to smell its distinctive odour; it was hydraulic fluid (gocha), which at that moment should have been making its way to my undercarriage jacks, not turning the cockpit floor into a paddling pool. The hours spent playing in my ‘quarter of a Hunter’, practicing emergency procedures paid off. Without really thinking I glanced down at the undercarriage indicator lights, one red light – with no indication of the situation improving any time soon, and pulled the emergency down lever. This normally blasts compressed air into the undercarriage jacks forcing the legs down, and then locking them. I say normally because in this instance all it did was turn my new paddling pool into a Jacuzzi. ‘I discontinued my intention to land at the present time’ (aborted my landing) and mentally went through my options, (a) continue my decent by courteous of Martin Baker (eject), or (b) ask for help. I opted for the latter and declared an emergency to the sexy voice, which quickly lost its sexiness and became very business-like.
As I slowly orbited the airfield, and doing a couple of slow speed fly-by’s just for fun, a well-oiled machine leapt into action. Within a few minutes a patch of the secondary runway started to turn white, and someone upstairs looked down very kindly on me. The observers in the control tower ‘thought’ that despite the one red light my undercarriage was still locked in the up position and my flaps were still in the downwind configuration (30 degrees) (neither fully up nor fully down), and the belly air brake was retracted. The Lady S had four empty drop tanks fitted on her wings, they had been fitted, but not filled, prior to my short(ish) trip to the airbase, and then mańana they would have been filled for my onward journey to Southampton. Somehow I don’t think that this was now going to be happening – not in Lady S anyway (but perhaps in a pine box if I got it all wrong).
Finally everything on the ground was in place, and after a quick chat with Teddy back at El Campo, and one dummy approach, I committed myself to reconnecting with terra firma. As all the hydraulic fluid had by now vacated its system I was flying in manual (eat your heart out ‘fly by wire’ jet jockeys) so it took me a little while to reduce the airspeed. Lady S was in no hurry to slow down as the undercarriage was not dangling in the slipstream and the flaps were not fully down, but finally I got it ‘sorted’, and as I crossed the runway threshold, with the Avon quietly ticking over behind me (in ‘flight idle’) I ‘committed’ and closed the HP fuel cock and shut it down, perhaps it would save any foam from being sucked into the intakes, and then, when I judged that it was ‘about that time’, I eased the stick back slightly, and as her air airspeed decayed the Lady S settled lower, and lower, and lower, then suddenly I lost all sensation of movement and was surrounded by white fluffy stuff. Was I about to be greeted by St Peter, nope, it was by Fred. Due to the drop tanks skiing on the foam my emergency landing had just become the most totally underwhelming event of the year; and I just slid gracefully to a halt in a sea of foam.
Fred allegedly gained her nickname for her ability to sketch the cartoon character Fred Flintstone, although I personally had never seen any evidence of this. Teddy reckoned that if all else failed she could always give an ailing Avon the kiss of life, and David was convinced that she could effortlessly kick start a Challenger Tank; she was a big girl, and she was one of my Plane Captains. She and her team had flown in earlier in the King Air 350 to tend Lady S’s needs whilst she was on the ground.
As I sat there watching her surging towards me, a visible bow wave forming in front of her, I metaphorically sprang into action. I opened the cockpit hood, switched everything off; and then sat perfectly still. I really didn’t want an uplifting experience - by kind courtesy of Martin Baker. Fred hoisted herself effortlessly up the side of Lady S and leaned over me, and I then experience a total eclipse, nothing unusual there though, as I said she was a BIG girl. She inserted the safety pins in the rear sear of my seat and various other locations, rendering anything that could go bang safe, and then un-attached (or was it dis-attached) (nope, ‘released’) me from Lady S. After she had lowered herself into the waist high foam I removed my mask and helmet and dutifully handed them to her, and then stood on her surcoat (which she had fortuitously placed on the ejection seat seat-pan, my boots were soaked in hydraulic fluid) and slipped one foot over the sill and into the step on the outside of the fuselage. I had every intenti
on of getting my ‘now not so shiny’ flying boots even dirtier, but then found myself being plucked like a feather off the side of Lady S, and cradled safely in Fred’s arms. As I was transported gently to dry land, guess how many cameras came out of the woodwork, and where did all their images go?, on to the front pages of every tabloid newspaper in the free world of course; perhaps not an ideal way to endear me to the free press. Fred commandeered a passing fire tender and gave Lady S a quick wash and brush up, and after all the foam had been removed from her fuselage she found that she was virtually un-phased by the whole experience, just a couple of dented drop tanks. Once I was satisfied that there was nothing terminally wrong with the only love of my life I was transported by the Base Commander to the VIP quarters, where Sam was waiting with my change of clothes, and then it was back to ‘business as usual’, what was a wheels-up landing between friends; and think on the bright side, it did save wear on the brake pads.
After the presentations, march-past and a lunch staring at three buttons on the front of the blouse of my sexy voiced air traffic controller (and idly wondering what the breaking strain of cotton thread was), I went to the hangar where Topsy had had Lady S moved to. He and half my team had arrived tout-suite in Zebedee, anything for an away-day and a free lunch, and I expected her to be ready for an air test, wrong. It was wishful thinking to say the least, and I was not impressed by what greeted my eyes. Lady S was swinging gently under a crane, her drop tanks and wings lying cushioned on the hangar floor a few meters away, and Fred’s feet protruding out of the cockpit. The ejection seat had been removed and she was apparently looking for a Mod plate; ‘was it anything like a china plate?’ I asked. After the ejection seat had been removed she had used copious reams of blue EBR (elephants bum roll) (oversized kitchen roll) to soak up the miscreant hydraulic fluid and then headed south, then west, then north, and finally east clutching a torch and bendy inspection mirror; being a southpaw female definitely had its advantages. Had she been your common or garden right handed male mechanic she would have been castrated and have two hernias before she had completed half the journey. Finally she reached her objective, shone the torch at an obscure angle and looked obliquely at the mirror. ‘No Mod Plate’ she squeaked – the port rudder peddle was trying to give her a tracheotomy.
‘Sh*t’ grunted Topsy and stormed off.
‘There really must be an easier way of earning a crust’ thought Fred.
After investing quite a few hours that evening on honing my chat-up skills on the blouse, her husband came off duty and took her to the safety or their home, so I reluctantly went to check on the progress, or lack of it with Lady S. Did I want the bad news – or the even worse news? Early in the life of the Hunter a serious fault had developed, several pilots had had a digit disappear through the same orifice that mine had, and very quickly a modification was brought out to rectify the problem – Mod. 01, and this was identified on an otherwise identical Undercarriage Selector Unit of its predecessor by a small Modification History Plate (Mod plate) attached to its outer case, and stamped with zero one. Unfortunately instead of being destroyed, or returned for modification a few unmodified selector units found their way to the back of various storage shelves, or into the hands of surplus equipment suppliers, although over the years, with the aircraft still in front and second line service, this was not a problem. If anything went wrong with a unit then trained supervisors ensured that a modified one was fitted in its place, but unfortunately when Herr Englbund created one airframe from his two hulks he must have had his untrained workforce replace the presumably unserviceable selector unit with one from his growing store, and unfortunately in the move to his hangar an unmodified unit must have moved from the back to the front of the shelf. Their untrained eyes hadn’t noticed the lack of a modification plate, and Herr Englbund hadn’t entered the replacement of the unit in the aircrafts log book. There was a lot of other things going on and his usually meticulous mind had missed it, which didn’t really matter did it, after all it wasn’t as though it would ever fly again, oops.
On hearing what Topsy had to say, John earned his pay and grounded all my Hunters, and his crews worked throughout the night and found a further two unmodified units, one in the spare Mk6D and the other in Peter’s aircraft, and then it can be safely said that ‘the excrement then impacted on the revolving ventilating machine’ when he rang a panic stricken CEO of HHA at five o’clock the following morning and asked ‘have your teams missed any other items’. By mid-day every Hunter in a flyable state world-wide would be grounded by the CAA.
The following morning, after a bleary eyed Teddy explained all this to me, I sympathetically said ‘and your point is – it’s not my problem – how am I going to get to Southampton now?’, after all I didn’t want to miss my first Christmas dinner of the season.
Gently banging his head on the hangar wall, he pointed at a Hunter green Grumman G450 parked at the hanger entrance, I thought I recognised it.
~~~~