This situation repeated itself a few more times before Tiger 2 told his leader he was low on fuel and breaking away for an independent recovery to base. In a relatively short time the obviously angry Canberra leader was on his own, the other Canberras having also broken formation. Two days later we heard Tiger Formation once more showing that all Canberras had made it safely back to base. By this time the 4 Squadron pilot responsible for interfering with Tiger Formation had been exposed and given a flea in the ear. He did not interfere with Tiger Formation again.
The Katangese forces were fighting the UN forces with all they had and one colourful French pilot’s exploits came to our notice. We knew him as Max and I only met him once. He operated a Twin-Dornier out of a small bush strip, Kipushi, whose 1,000-foot runway was half-inside Northern Rhodesia and half-inside Katanga Province. Most nights Max got airborne for his one-man air war against the UN. Crudely applied green and brown poster paint seemed to handle the rainy weather remarkably well and the camouflage effect was excellent. He employed crudely made bombs that were hand-dropped through an opening cut in the floor of his aircraft. Using the gas flame that emitted from its high stack at the Union Minière copper-smelting plant near Elizabethville, Max made timed runs to drop two bombs off each pass across the blacked-out UN airbase. He ignored ineffectual searching ground fire and made run after run against unseen aircraft on the ground. His efforts were well rewarded; in particular the destruction of a UN Globemaster was high return for such crude and inexpensive effort.
When he could, Max drank at bars in Elizabethville where UN forces were present. What guise he employed I cannot say but his objective was to find out how his bombing had affected the UN air effort and to glean whatever other information he could. In doing this he befriended a helicopter technician who agreed to take him onto the airbase and show him over a small Bell helicopter. Max’s casual questions were answered and he found out how to start the machine. He then awaited an opportunity to steal it.
When the right moment came, Max started the engine and, never having flown a helicopter before, heaved the Bell into the air and wobbled and swayed into forward flight. There were no difficulties with the low-level bolt to the border and Kipushi airstrip. But landing a helicopter is no simple matter as Max found out when his attempt to hover for the landing ended in a big mix-up as rotor blades beat the airframe to destruction. Max survived the experience and was airborne again that same night in his Dornier to bomb UN planes.
On 18 December the instructors were released from Ndola to return to normal duties. Most of the flight back to Thornhill was in bright clear skies, which was wonderful after the awful weather around Ndola. However, this changed as we approached Thornhill where we had to make independent radar approaches through torrential rain in severe thunderstorms. Bulawayo and Salisbury were experiencing similar conditions so there were no question of a diversion. Flight Lieutenant Ron Vass directed me by radar to the point where I was handed over to the Precision Radar Controller whose voice I recognised as that of Squadron Leader Bat Maskell. Without hesitation I requested to be passed to Flight Lieutenant Mac Geeringh. As always Mac guided me right onto the runway whose lights I did not see until Mac instructed me to look up for touch-down.
Having just settled down in the crew-room with a cup of coffee, I received a call from OC Flying who asked why I had insulted Squadron Leader Maskell by asking for Mac for the final radar talk-down. I explained that there had been no intention of insulting anyone but that a few weeks earlier on an instrument let-down in clear sky conditions my student, reacting correctly to Bat Maskell’s directions, would have reached ground well to the right of the runway. The experience had badly affected my confidence in him. Mac Geeringh, on the other hand, had a very reassuring voice and a special way of coaxing a pilot down the glide slope. For me, this had always ended up smack on the runway centre-line. Considering the weather conditions during this let-down I needed this confidence. OC Flying was satisfied, I heard no more about the matter and my personal relationship with Bat seemed unaffected.
The return to Provosts and instruction after jet flying seemed boring but it had its rewards because Dave Hume, Griff and Bruce McKerron were coming along well. But then I was very annoyed when told I would be losing my best student, Dave Hume, to take on Officer Cadet Dave Becks whose instructor had engineered a direct swap of students.
Gwelo Gliding Club
OUR METEOROLOGIST, HARVEY QUAIL ALWAYS provided very accurate forecasts of weather conditions until his deep involvement with the Gwelo Gliding Club, which he founded, seemed to rob him of his forecasting talent.
In 1962 he persuaded me to join his club as its Chief Flying Instructor. I accepted the position on condition that all flying members were grounded until they had undergone full instruction in spin recoveries with a Bulawayo instructor who owned a Tiger Moth. This was because, in 1961, two learner pilots had inadvertently entered spins and died because they had not been taught how to avoid or recover from this flying hazard. I would have preferred to do the instruction myself but our trainer, a Slingsby T31, was not suited for the purpose.
Every flight I ever made in a glider gave me special pleasure, even the simple instructional ones. I particularly enjoyed flying high-performance, single-seater machines. So far as I was concerned, gliding could not be compared with powered flight. It possessed a magic all of its own and two particular flights stick in my mind.
Mrs Mungay (pronounced Mingay), a great enthusiast who was always on hand to make tea for anyone needing refreshment, asked me to take her up on a short jolly. We made a normal cable-winch launch in the Slingsby T31 tandem trainer for what was intended to be a simple circuit and landing. However, on this occasion we entered strong lift just before the normal cable-release point so I cut free and entered into a tight turn to hold the thermal.
The initial rate of climb was impressive and, amazingly, it kept increasing. The T31 was considered to be more like a streamlined brick than a performance glider but our thermal was so potent that we climbed with ease to 11,000 feet where it was bitterly cold.
Being in an open cockpit dressed in shorts and a light shirt did not concern me because I was concentrating on climbing as high as possible. However Mrs Mungay, using the old-fashioned voice tube shouted, “My fanny is frozen." I laughed and ignored her problem until at 11,600 feet she was pleading with me to get her back on the ground. I rolled out of the turn to break from the thermal but the aircraft just carried on climbing. A little short of 12,000 feet I placed the glider in a full sideslip that did the trick and we descended down through ever-warmer air until finally we were back on the ground.
Since there had been no intention to do more than fly one circuit, the aircraft had not been fitted with a barometric recorder to prove the height achieved. So there was no point in complaining that I might have been denied the opportunity to claim a world height record for a Slingsby T31, simply because my passenger’s fanny was frozen.
My second memory is of a failed attempt to fly a Slingsby Swallow from Gwelo Gliding Club to the Salisbury Gliding Club. Progress was fine initially thanks to a starting height of 14,300 feet over Gwelo. But in the Redcliff area near Que Que I could find no thermals at all. In desperation I made for the Rhodesian Iron and Steel Company works to pick up lift around a smoke column rising from the factory. The acrid smoke made me cough and splutter and I experienced eye-watering burning of my eyes. As soon as I had sufficient height to make for Que Que I broke out into clean air. On two occasions I flew towards hawks soaring in weak thermal conditions but eventually I was forced to land in a farmer’s field and await collection. Any hope of becoming a proficient high-performance glider pilot was short lived. Club life was robbing me of time I needed to spend with my family and the cost of gliding was becoming too high.