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Aviation History
1957
1957 - 0139.PDF
1 February 1957 141 turbines. The Britannia's passengers are asleep 20,000ft overthe Sahara. It is still dark when, seven hours after take-off, I wake to findwe are circuiting Khartoum. So fast does the African dawn break that it is light by the time we touch down and step out into thesticky heat (90 F) of an early morning in the Sudan. Captain Hutcheson decides that on the next sector (Khartoum-Nairobi) we shall do some deliberate rough-weather-hunting, to give crews experience of flying the Britannia in African stormsand to demonstrate the Proteus de-icing system. Reports in the B.O.A.C. Khartoum station manager's office, shuttered and fannedagainst the heat, say that the icing level is 16,000ft. The flight is planned accordingly. Four times more than the standard 250 kgfuel allowance for de-icing is taken aboard, and the rest of the fuel calculated in the routine way described later. Take-off run of the Britannia is rarely a payload-limiting factor,and our three departures prior to Khartoum had been relaxed affairs—none of those sudden leaps forward at full power as thebrakes are suddenly released. But one of the points to be watched in the tropics is jet-pipe temperature. Each engine has a slightlydifferent j.p.t., and therefore a different ambient reference temperature, which may vary from 24 deg C to 30 deg C. Ifambient exceeds this, the engine or engines concerned are part- throttled by 10 compressor r.p.m. per deg C. As this adjustmentis difficult to achieve accurately while pounding down the runway, it is done while on the brakes, as it was on our take-off fromKhartoum. The ensuing flight made me a lifelong devotee of storm-warning radar. Until then this equipment—Ekco on the Bri- tannia—had meant for me just a black dielectric nose-cap with a Capt. W. R. Hutcheson, training skipper in command, surveys Khartoum from the Britannia's flight deck. dish inside, some little back boxes, and a pair of radar scopes on the flight deck. Henceforth it will be a prerequisite of my travels by air. Three-quarters of an hour after take-off the Fasten Seat Beltsnotice lights up, and the captain announces over the public address system that the next few minutes "may be ratherbumpy." On the radar the grey core of a thunderhead is coming up, and instead of respectfully avoiding it, as we would on anormal service, we are aiming straight at it. The outers are throttled back to 9,000 compressor r.p.m.(normal cruise:- 11,350 c.r.p.m.) to reduce speed for penetration. We are now wrapped in cloud—the brownish-grey claustrophobicstuff of the intertropics which at Britannia height abounds in dry- ice crystals. The engine auto-relighting switches above eachpilot's head are already on. The bumps are slight at first, rather like Comet "cobble-stones" . . . suddenly they increase in amplitude, becoming full- blooded multi-g pitchings (someone late* said we recorded areversal of 4g). The noise is considerable, with the battering of hailstones—at times hitting us from beneath as well as fromabove—and cracks of thunder as we spark off blue-green sheets of lightning. But the captain, an old hand at flying throughAfrican storms in Argonauts, has no trouble in keeping a tight rein on the Britannia (this I am told afterwards). The experience lasts for but a minute—long enough to enableme to discover that the best way to ride a storm is fully reclined (horizontal if in a Slumberette), and as near to the e.g. as possible.But this is advice that need never be acted upon when the Bri- tannia is in service, thanks to the alert little Ekco radar dish upfront. (Later, on the homeward flight, crossing the African coast en route for Rome, I was to see our radar in its incidentalH 2S-type role of map-painter. The whole of Sicily and the toeS>f Italy were clearly portrayed, proving that the cartographers— and our navigator—were right.) "The only difference between our flight and the real thing was that the passengers enjoying the hedonistic pleasures of Britannia travel were trainee and supervisory crews . . ." Soon all is sunlight, blue skies, and calmness again. CaptainHutcheson, the training captain, is back in the cabin, giving one of the trainee first officers an extempore oral on the Brittania'sair-conditioning system. A B.O.A.C technician, whirling a wet- and-dry-bulb like a football supporter's rattle, is taking his routinemeasurement of cabin humidity.. In four hours we are over Nairobi, commercial capital ofBritish East Africa, 5,371ft above sea level, and approaching the red compacted murram runway of Eastleigh Airport. The surfaceis dry and soft, and selection of reverse pitch blows up a pall of red dust which is still suspended over the airfield as we disembark. Two days in Nairobi, our considerable enjoyment of which isowed to the efficiency and charm of East African Airways' Mrs. Diana Howard-Williams. And now from Nairobi to Salisbury,capital of British Central Africa—a fast four-hour cruise through clear African skies. We have left behind us the intertropical front, on its ceaselesspursuit of the sun back and forth across the equator, its mighty forces locked up in clouds of mesmeric loveliness. The differencebetween die scene outside the cabin windows then and now is profound. On the previous sector—our cabin a kaleidoscope ofsunlight and shadow—I gazed upon towering, flat-bottomed thunderheads sailing across oceans of cumulus, through which theSahara reflected the rays of the sun, as if the desert were on fire. The scene was such that, were it faithfully portrayed on canvas,it would be rejected by die Royal Academy as preposterous im- pressionism. But now I look down through the steady air of Mozambique—cloudless except for the odd fleck of cirrus way above in the tropopause—at olive-green jungle-covered slopes reaching up tothe Muchinga Mountains of Northern Rhodesia. I see white smoke from numerous bush-fires—apparently routine—curlinglazily upwards, and observe the sluggard Zambesi flowing yellow and muddy towards die Indian Ocean. The view downwards through the Britannia's horizontal ellip-tical windows is excellent—as the picture at the top of page 139 (taken from the seated position) testifies. Kentucky Airport, Salisbury—where we arrive after a four-hour, 305 m.p.h. cruise—is altogether appropriate to the pros- perous, up-to-date nationhood of Southern Rhodesia. My eyes,narrowed by the actinic glare of acres of white pavement, note G-ANBC, the third production Britannia 102, at Salisbury Airport.
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