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Aviation History
1949
1949 - 0027.PDF
JANUARY 6TH, 1949 FLIGHT Rush Job to Singapore had left Basra, and the hills at the back of Sharjah were obscured by the black sky as we passed over. By this time we had begun to receive '' actuals'' from Karachi, and they were as forecast. At least one thing was reliable! Ferries was flying, so that I could afford to relax and reflect wistfully on the piping days of war, when aviation was an airman's dream, and all the world was covered with 2,000-yard runways, open twenty-four hours a day, with BABS, SBA, VHF, HF, MF, Sandra, and all the other aids which were designed to help a chap in need. Nowa- days it seemed as if we were sliding back; runways crack- ing up, weeds on peri' tracks, cattle on tarmacs, radio aerials blown down, unserviceability, unreliability, etc. But, anyway, we found Karachi, and the Radio Range was working, and so was the VHF; the Radio Beacon proved to be quite reliable for our let-down on the Radio Compass. We spent three hours there repairing the two retraction-strut fairings, which had somehow got tangled up with the nosewheel; the B.O.A.C. Indian engineers did a first-class job for us. Not that we minded the delay too much, for a night flight across India in the height of the monsoon can be a little rough, and the more light we had the more we could avoid in the way of bad weather. Through Cu Nimb to Dum Dum Later, as I took off at 20.30Z, the sky was clear for a while, and then it became more menacing. However, we didn't have too bad a trip, apart from the odd spells of torrential rain, which looked and sounded like a fire- man's hose playing on the windscreen. It was broad day- light before we reached the really towering cumulo nimbus* clouds, which seemed to start in the trees on the hillsides below and finish in the stratosphere, with filmy wisps of cirrus clinging around their anvils like hair in a breeze. With some weaving and a few bumps we eventually reached Calcutta after seven and a half hours, and the clouds broke up conveniently so that when we were some way off we could see the Hooghly River coiling like a great snake through the verdant paddy fields. Here there seemed to be even a smell of water in the air, and everything looked as if it had just come out of a cold bath. Even the air was clean, so that under the clouds the visibility was limitless. I ran across veteran K.L.M. pilot Jan Moll in the restau- rant at Dum Dum, looking as spruce as ever, with an immaculate Constellation waiting for him on the tarmac, and we had coffee together. Then we were off again, and feeling nicely tired and quite at home in our crew com- partment. I was asleep even before we had taken off ; and I stayed that way until we were passing over Rangoon. By this time we were two and a half hours behind schedule, but we were not worrying because our stopover at Bangkok would provide a buffer to absorb the delay, without affecting our arrival at Singapore. We had a few bounces over the hills in Northern Siam, but otherwise nothing untoward occurred. The aircraft was behaving beautifully, and at least the first part of our objective seemed easily in sight. We landed at dusk at Don Maung airport, outside Bangkok, at 05.30Z on August 20th. We had been flying for forty hours thirty- five minutes, but it seemed ages since we had left London. It was another life. Surprisingly enough, no one felt par- ticularly tired, least of all the passengers, in spite of their immovable seat backs, and they were in no way dissuaded from savouring the delights of Bangkok. We all dined in the Trocadero Hotel, and I, for one, got a few hours' sleep in before some coolie brought in a . revolting cup of tea to wake me up. It was raining then, and by the time we had all piled into a convoy of rather delapidated taxicabs and driven the 13 miles to the air- port, our morale was at its lowest ebb. Most people will agree that once one breaks the continuity of any physical or mental effort the picking up of the threads again seems infinitely more difficult than when one broke them off. So it was with us, and I rather cursed the luck, or rather my c 17 lack of foresight, which put me in the left-hand seat, this time whilst Ferries sank into his rather soft bed. It was still raining when we took off in a cloud of spray at 18.00Z, which was on schedule. Ahead and around, the sky was lit at intervals by lightning flashes which illumin- ated the clouds for many miles around, and thus greatlv exaggerated the intensity of the storms. We flew low, at 3,500ft, until we were over the sea and fairly sure that there was nothing too solid in the cumuloform variety before us, and then climbed up to 9,500ft. As we increased power for the climb, a few protesting groans from the sleeping crew enquired "what was up," but soon died down after our laconic " nothing." After that all was quiet and peaceful, and gradually we flew out of the rain belt into a clear tropical sky. Somehow the num- Margil Airport, Basra, where a landingwasmade in a temperature of 120 deg. F. in the shade. ber of stars in the sky seems to vary in inverse proportion to the number of degrees in the latitude scale, and there always appear to be far more in the tropics than in tem- perate latitudes. Anyway, it was a nice night, with a pale moon to starboard, and we could see the ridge of black mountains stretching down the backbone of Malaya as we flew along the eastern coast. Around 22.00Z there was a faint glow in the sky over to port, and by 22.30Z it had begun to reflect in some high cirrus to the south. We could see the ground clearly then, and so we began our descent, winding around some large cumulus left over from the previous afternoon's in- stability. It was just before dawn that we passed over Tengah, obscured then by a rain shower, but by the time we had done a wide circuit the shower had moved on, and we came in to land on the dazzling white concrete run- way in clear weather. Our records show—and so do Qantas Empire Air- ways (! )—that we cut motors on the unloading apron at 23.00Z. We were on schedule, fifty-eight hours five minutes after leaving London. Tengah is really an R.A.F. airfield, but it is being used by civil companies because Kallang is at present unsuit- able for large aircraft. There was, however, a restaurant, and whilst we waded through our eggs and bacon, we discussed plans for the return trip. Our only load was to be three Indian students, a fact which might have given some concern to a scheduled air- line, but which was of relatively little importance to us. We found that, in view of our light load, it was possible to operate with full tanks and thus fly direct to Calcutta. This meant a useful time-saving, and also obviated the expense of a landing at Bangkok. The only snag was that meteorological information about the route was scanty, and no weather reports had been received from India since the previous day. We knew that a trough of low pressure associated with the monsoon was likely to give extensive thunderstorm activity over Bengal, and that conditions off the Burmese coast would be bad, but there seemed to be no real reason for delay, so we made our preparations.
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