Tales

Blown Away

Our story, which I believe is true, occurred during the sixties at Avalon airfield during the Mirage production era. It seems that a new Mirage was taxiing into position at the end of Avalon’s long runway for a routine predelivery test flight. Unbeknown to the pilot and certainly well out of sight was a farmer on a tractor cutting the grass alongside the bitumen near the far end of the three kilometre runway. Everything is ‘go’ in the Mirage. The pilot firewalls the throttle and the Atar goes to full burner for a spectacular takeoff that will see the aircraft retracting its gear promptly and maintaining straight and level flight till the end of the runway before pulling up into a high speed zoom climb. Well you can guess what is going to happen! Totally oblivious to our farmer on his noisy tractor, the Mirage thunders past our hero like a scalded cat at better than 300kt (555km/h) and not that many metres distant. Not even seeing the aircraft or understanding for one nanosecond his fate, the farmer is propelled from his seat by the not unsubstantial shockwave, waking up moments later in the long grass wondering what on earth happened!

(Anonymous)

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