Pilot Error

Maybe it was us. We hadn’t been subjected to any more stress than any other squadron anywhere else in the Middle East. In fact, we were having something of a Cook’s tour compared with some of the other chaps.

Maybe it was our ground staff; they had more cause to gripe than we had, what with primitive conditions, sand, not enough spares or sophisticated tools, and Flight Commanders always getting on their backs to get maximum aircraft on the Board all the time.

Whatever it was, funny things were happening out there . . . and it wasn’t localised.

There was the time we were escorting, in the loosest sense of the word considering the discrepancies in speed, a gaggle of Free French Marauders who had in their bomb bays a live load of women and children. Don’t ask me how they got them in apart from having them squat on lash-up benches.

Somewhere over the Med one of the Marauders had opened its bomb bay doors, spilling its screaming human freight into an inhospitable sea from about five thousand feet.

We watched them go careering, cartwheeling down in what looked like slow motion, feeling completely detached and not even raising an eyebrow when tiny, insignificant splashes announced the arrival of each body.

Finger trouble? We doubted that mechanical or hydraulic systems had acted on their own, or electrics had suddenly decided to go on the rampage without some human element activating a switch.

Then there was the time that one of our own aircraft had ditched because of engine problems, miles off the coast.

The ditching was good enough; the sea was almost flat and calm, and circling above we could almost hear the old dinghy drill recital of, “Tail down . . . nose down . . . OUT!” and imagine the chap near the main spar hoist the three dinghy packs onto his head, ready to Jack-in-the-box them out through what should have been an open astrodome.

Nothing happened.

After what seemed a century, one chap got out – we swore through the geodetic structure – and climbed onto the port wing.

He just stood there. He looked for all the world as though he was waiting for a 22 bus to take him to Piccadilly Circus, almost absent-mindedly.

Coming in low across the almost-awash Wimpey, we saw who the fellow was. He was a new bloke, posted to the squadron only a matter of weeks back and hadn’t got his knees brown.

There was nothing to do but to watch him stand there until a bigger-than-usual wave knocked him gently off the now-submerged wing into the sea.

He went down and didn’t come up again.

Finger trouble? Concussion? Lack of survival instinct or discipline?

There were other funny things happening. We lost one Wellington when it careered off into the desert on take-off, wheels still firmly rattling over the pierced steel planking (PSP) at a great rate of knots.

When we got there, the aircraft was squatting on the hummocks like a broody hen, its back broken, its six-foot-plus navigator standing by the side of the break admiring it in a detached fashion, and the skipper still sitting in his seat swearing with gentle emphasis.

The starboard throttle lever had broken away in his hand at about 70 knots. What, he asked, should he have done to remedy this odd situation apart from getting out and hailing a passing bloody taxi?

The pilot of another Wimpey bled to death after his aircraft swung on take-off. From where we were it didn’t look like a particularly vicious swing – but the aircraft veered off the strip, dug a wheel in and proceeded round in a rapidly diminishing circle with a full load on board.

Poor old Tiny – he was a beefy Australian – apparently thought the whole lot was going up; he’d seen a few do the same thing during his tour.

Whatever the thoughts galloping through his head, Tiny decided to get out, his did his crew. The crew departed by various exits relatively orderly fashion.

Tiny unstrapped and left through the overhead exit – without bothering to trip the perspex panel’s safety catch. He burst through the canopy (as I said, he was a beefy man) like that on TV one sees these days extolling the virtues of a certain Japanese light car, shedding bits in all directions.

It would have been all right if Tiny hadn’t caught his neck on a Jagged piece of perspex on his way out. The artery was severed, and he was almost dead by the time we got there.

There wasn’t much one could do. The human body only has X amount of life-sustaining fluid in its system.

Finger trouble? Fear? Insufficient discipline within himself?

We had our own troubles; and in retrospect, now that the smoke and heat of the whole thing have long since vanished, some of the things which happened were plain damn stupid.

There was the time we were called out to search for a ship in distress north of Algiers. It had either hit a mine, been “fished” or something. Whatever the cause, it had broken its back in heavy seas and needed maritime help.

The trouble was that we only had a bearing to go on, nothing else.

The weather was stinking when we left the strip, climbing away in an almost solid clag, lightning speeding us on our way and winds from all over – or so it seemed.

We must have been flying a creeping line ahead search for about six hours before our primitive radar (The Mk2 type, resplendent in washing-line aerials along the back and under each wing, making built-in headwinds a reality) picked up some sort of blip-out of the massive sea returns.

Frank, at the navigator’s table, managed to get some sort of fix out of the mess of DR on his plotting sheet, scribbled it down and passed it back to the wireless operator hanging on to his transmitter handles like grim death.

We circled at a respectable height over the ship – or the half we could see.

The vessel had broken its back all right and had bust clean in two. There was no sign of life visible _in the gloom as we flew over the ship. The half we saw – the stern half – was apparently without human crew, wallowing, tossing and sloughing about in an angry Mediterranean like some lost soul.

Well, we’d found the thing. Now to get back home in one piece. We felt confident that “The Other Side” wouldn’t be putting up any intruders in weather like this.

It was real hard arm and leg work all the way back, as indeed it had been all the way out. We made the coast and asked for Sandra (I believe it was Sandra, it was so long ago) as we made the transition from angry sea to wet and soggy beach line.

Sandra was the searchlight cone over some strips, put up to guide lost crews home. One had Sandra if one was operating from a really sophisticated strip that had generators and searchlights.

The front gunner spotted those waving arms of light first, groping feebly up through what seemed endless storm clouds and torrential rain. It was bad enough to be wet inside the aircraft, in places.

It was going to be a hairy landing, with considerable crosswind across the PSP strip. Coming in with the tail out of line like a puppy trotting along the footpath, we considered ourselves lucky to knock over only one gooseneck flare before getting both wheels on the deck and holding the tailwheel off for as long as possible to keep the rudder effective.

“Did you get the position?” asked the Flight Commander as we decamped the bedraggled Wellington. Yes, of course we did. Hadn’t the message got back or was the static too bad?

What transpired was almost mayhem. Frank had passed the position to the wireless operator, who had tucked it under his outer gloves parked on his tiny table while he tried to make sense out of a welter of dots ‘n dashes coming through his earphones from somewhere in the crackling ether.

On top of that, something blew a fuse in the works and the W/Op had to cope with that. By the time he’d fixed it, something else had cropped up (I believe he’d been asked to contact one of the HM ships we knew was in the general area) and he’d forgotten all about the position report.

It sounds potty, but it happened. Another example of human stress is in an unusual situation, even though we’d all been trained for this sort of thing.

Finger trouble? Is stress in too large a lump? Insufficient discipline?

Whatever the reason, the sight of that crumpled piece of paper sent our Flight Commander into something akin to hysterics.

The classic example of what could be called finger trouble (although we didn’t think so at the time) was when we lost yet another of His Majesty’s aircraft. This, commented squadron wags afterwards, qualified us for the Iron Cross.

We’d had a brush with one of “The Other Side’s” surface vessels, done it a power of no good and had in return been dealt a severe blow in the port engine.

The nearest land was about 60 miles distant, the southern coast of inhospitable Sardinia – luckily, now on our side.

We’d managed to get the poor old Wimp up to about 5000 feet before the port engine gave up the ghost entirely. From the look of things, we’d done an oil line completely and utterly.

Finger Trouble No 1: we didn’t feather when it was apparent we’d get no more urge from the port motor. The sight of that damn prop windmilling uselessly still is fresh in one’s mind, and one can’t find a reason to justify not feathering.

We got out a distress call promptly enough. The crew started looking around for things to jettison when the starboard engine began complaining and the altimeter unwound with indecent haste.

I can’t remember why, but we had been carrying a table in the aircraft – a dirty big wooden table rabbited from somewhere in the best traditions of souvenirs that most WWII airmen know about.

Try as they would, those crew not doing something useful couldn’t get the table out, or take it to bits and chuck the pieces out through the hatch. In retrospect, it was just as well that there would have been terminal damage to the tail surfaces if they had.

Finger Trouble No. 2: never carry unauthorised cargo which could become a hazard in emergency situations.

We called one of the wireless operators up from the rear turret to hang on to the rudder pedals via a length of catwalk rope. Our right leg was going into spasm with the strain of shoving that lead-heavy rudder bar.

With shrill cries of, “OK, now PULL! . . . let it out a bit . . . not too much,” coming through the intercom, the rest of the crew either giving us regular courses to steer, passing replies to messages asking about our condition from Elmas (Sardinia), the coastline at long last came in sight through-yes, bad weather again.

We’d jettisoned the last of the ready-use ammunition, depth charges not already deposited on that ship from “The Other Side” and various other impediments by the time that coast came into view.

Dinghies were already stacked near the astrodome; the crew were more or less at their stations, apart from one hanging onto the rudder pedal rope and another near us up in the cockpit.

Feeling our way down gingerly, undercard down, keeping an eye on almost redline temperatures and falling pressures in the starboard engine, we lost height gradually, watching the really luxurious runway at Elmas get nearer, blessedly nearer.

Then it happened, that unexpected last straw which often breaks the back of the most willing camel. A wind shear got us by the throat short of the coastline.

The official wrap-up said that the aircraft appeared to drop with a lift-like motion. That was putting it mildly.

Things happened suddenly. There was a lifting feeling as we dropped smack bang into a skyhole. There was a comment, “Here we go chaps – hang on!” Someone said, piously of course, “Jeeesus”.

We managed to keep some semblance of control as the aircraft hit the water just short of the shoreline. We bounced off like a stone skipping over the surface, flung by some schoolboy’s hand, and went careering over the beach at a very low altitude slap into the marshiest marsh we’ve ever seen or experienced.

We worked it out later that we had experienced deceleration forces of considerable magnitude. We were doing about 70 knots when we hit the mud and went from that speed to zero in about 20 feet.

The wireless operator who’d been hanging onto the rudder pedal rope disappeared from sight with magical rapidity. So did the chap who had been standing next to us, holding onto the instrument panel for support.

We had been loosely strapped in, forgot to tighten the straps and impinged with force on the panel ourselves, burying helmeted heads into some part of the works and stopping the rest with our stomachs.

Finger Trouble No. 3: alas, crew discipline, is the responsibility of the pilot in command (that’s what they call him these days, we gather). And the inability to cope with an unusual situation. Sounds cruel, but looked at coldly, it’s true.

What happened after that?

It took half an hour to dig out the rope-hanging wireless operator from where he was trapped, head down and only inches away from muddy water where he would have drowned had he let his head drop. He’d shot down right into the nose.

We held his head up with one hand and picked pieces of bomb-aimers panel out of his face with the other during those 30 minutes. He ended up by being permanently disfigured.

The chap standing next to us also shot forward and – luckily – downward, ending up straddling the front turret’s rear section, badly ruptured.

We were also in a state of some disrepair.

The rest of the crew seemed OK, apart from one chap who had had the devil of a tour of operations. He snapped, leapt out of the open astrodome, ran across the wing and sloshed across the marsh yelling his head off.

There is no pride in writing this. We do so merely to point out that absolute self-discipline is something very hard to maintain once one has achieved it when stress appears with terrible suddenness.

The poor old aircraft, when we last saw it, was awash in evil-smelling muddy ooze, sinking slowly and silently.

That darned table wedged itself somewhere in the aircraft, stopping would-be rescuers from getting to us. They used axes and in one case bare hands to get to us and help us out, and to dig that W/Op from under at least three feet of solid mud which had punched its way up through the smashed bomb-aimer’s panel, when we hit.

Incidentally, we came to a slithering and sudden halt about two feet from a solid-looking wooden stump that looked as though it could have stopped a tank, let alone a cloth-covered bomber.

Much later in our tour, we were flown to a Court of Inquiry in Sardinia. We played poker all the way, on the floor of a rickety Dakota, while an Army Colonel, strapped in as tightly as he could, watched us with a sort of fascinated horror.

Insufficient crew discipline was the verdict. And, when one weighs it all up, that’s precisely what it was.

The aircraft was never seen again. They couldn’t salvage much apart from the guns and one or two instruments before it sank into the mire.

We went back after the war to view the spot, flown by then British European Airways on a Viscount route-proving flight. Sitting on the flight deck, we flew the same approach (with all four donks purring smoothly) and it looked lovely.

We were driven to the marsh’s edge by an obliging ATC bod who’d been told most of the story you have just read. We couldn’t spot hide nor hair of the aircraft, nor – thank heavens – that dratted table. But the solid-looking stump was still there like some macabre memorial to a willing aircraft and an unruly crew.

What does this rather dreary tale add up to?

Discipline, within yourself and among your crew if you’re flying with one. An ability to cope with lightning-fast stresses, and unusual situations at all times.

The ability to relax when able without penalising your reaction to things that happen fast – and in flying, they usually do.

As we’ve said, we aren’t particularly proud to have written this account. But if it helps other people to arm themselves against similar flying and crew discipline situations, and give themselves some pre-insurance against relaxing their own inner disciplines, then it’s been worth it.