Having recovered from my face-changing incident, and after I’d accumulated a substantial number of unloggable hours flying the good ship ‘Crapper’, Lieutenant Maree, my long-suffering instructor, in a moment of great personal weakness, deemed me ready for my own solo check and handed me over to a more senior instructor.
An interminable while later, after I’d thumped the poor old Spammy we were flying into the ground far too many times for its health or that of the check instructor, he stumbled, ashen-faced, from the plane. The next moment he wound the wind sock around the tail wheel, made a strange gesture that I interpreted as ‘Go die if you wish’ but could have meant ‘Cut the engine and go sell cars’. Without seeking any further clarification, I immediately opened the throttle, sped off down the runway and lifted off into a clear, windless winter sky.
It was only after I had raised the undercarriage and completed the rest of the after-take-off checks that I turned around and saw the empty rear seat and realised that I was alone. I started yelling and hooting like a lunatic, and stopped only briefly to radio the control tower and request my landing instructions. Coming in over the airfield’s perimeter fence on the final approach, I thought that I’d better calm down as I was almost certainly being observed through binoculars from the tower.
Under my less-than-expert guidance (some would call it abuse) the Harvard hit the ground, bounced a few times and then settled, the speed rapidly bleeding off until I could safely turn off the runway and make my zigzagging way back to the dispersal (parking) area. I manoeuvred the aircraft into its designated parking spot on the Dunnottar flight lines, applied the brake and started the engine shutdown process.
I couldn’t help noticing that a group of my fellow pupil pilots had all gathered to the port (left) side of the Harvard and were waiting for me to disembark. For more than 50 years, pupil pilots in the SAAF had followed a time-honoured procedure when welcoming home a fellow pupe who had just completed his first solo circuit, and I was about to get my once-in-a-lifetime turn.
As I got out of the cockpit and onto the left wing, willing hands removed my helmet and parachute and hoisted me high onto the shoulders of the cheering crowd. Without letting my feet touch the ground, they carried me 300 metres or so back to the area surrounding the pupes’ crew room, stopping only occasionally for passers-by to slap my back or shake my hand.
Outside the crew room, a waist-deep pit, about a metre wide and four metres long, had been dug and filled with water, thereby creating a sizeable pool of mud. It was into this squishy mess that I, like so many who’d gone before me, was unceremoniously dumped by my colleagues.
As I write this, I still get a lump in my throat when I recall the intense emotions that flooded through me as I emerged, dripping with slime, from the glory hole. Standing there, waiting for me to exit, were all of Charlie Flight’s instructors and pupes, each of whom shook my hand in heartiest congratulations despite the mud dripping from their own hands afterwards.
Now, nothing as momentous and significant in the lives of the young SAAF pupil pilots as surviving their first solo flight could go uncelebrated. So, by the time I’d finally succeeded in soloing, plans were well underway for the Pupes’ Solo Party at the CFS officers’ mess.
In anticipation, we pressed our step-outs, shone our buttons and buffed our shoes. We then dispersed to every corner of the surrounding towns and cities to collect our dates for the evening. My date was from my home town and her brother was about to marry the daughter of a senior SAAF officer. While waiting for her in the lounge of her home, I encountered her brother’s future mother-in-law.
‘What do you do?’ she asked.
‘I am a pupil pilot in the Air Force, ma’am. I just went solo,’ I said proudly.
‘My husband is a pilot too,’ she stated, looking down her nose at me, clearly not expecting any reply.
‘What rank do you hold?’ she asked a few minutes later.
‘I am a candidate officer, ma’am,’ I replied brightly.
‘My husband’s a general!’ she said, and I swear she never spoke to me again after that, not one single word.
After soloing, the flying intensified, with aerobatics dominating much of the time spent in the air. The Harvard, in the hands of those who know how to fly her properly, is a graceful bird and, in my humble opinion, does the best stall turn of any aircraft I know.
She will also react without warning if you are even slightly abusive to her. Many was the time when I got it slightly wrong going into an aerobatic manoeuvre and paid the immediate price of spinning out of control, losing a large amount of altitude and spending the next 30 minutes climbing back to a safe height so that I could spin out of control yet again.
The brass who make decisions on these things had decided to spare Lieutenant Maree any further punishment and allocated me instead to another instructor, Lieutenant Frikkie Knoetze, a cousin of a well-known boxer. I don’t think Frikkie was a dyed-in-the-wool Harvard fan. I know this because when we landed at the end of each lesson he would say, ‘I hate flying with you in this fucking aeroplane!’
I would probably not be too far off base to say that Frikkie and I enjoyed a courteous, if not particularly friendly, instructor/pupe relationship.
I had learnt quite early on that by applying an excess amount of rudder while trying to do a straight roll in a Harvard was the most effective way of making the guy in the back seat retch. To be honest, I discovered this abjectly cruel, but justifiably vengeful move purely by accident one morning following a particularly heavy instructors’ pub night.
I had got quite tired of Frikkie beating me on the back of my bone dome with his joystick. In trying to avoid the wretched thing hitting me while preparing for my 60-hour test, which involved extensive aerobatics, I was attempting a straight roll (a 360-degree roll around the longitudinal axis of the Harvard) but applied an overzealous amount of rudder and was immediately rewarded with a loud groan from the rear seat. Seconds later I heard Frikkie deposit significant portions of his breakfast into a barf bag.
The game was on, and every time he used the stick thereafter, I waited only a brief period before telling him that I wanted to practise straight rolls – again and again and again!
The 60-hour test came and went and was followed by an intense period of sharpening and evaluating our aerobatic skills and introducing all manner of practical flying, including navigation and formation flying.
Before long, our days at CFS Dunnottar drew to a close, and in early October 1977 the remaining 60 or so 1/77 pupes gathered at the gates on a Monday morning. A small group of instructors had gathered to ensure our timeous departure from CFS and bid us farewell, with orders to report to Flight Training School (FTS) Langebaanweg on the West Coast.
The base was about 120 kilometres north of Cape Town and 1 500 kilometres from CFS, and we had to be there two days later… the Wednesday morning.