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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 2034.PDF
836 FLIGHT International, 21 November 1963 HOW TO WIN A GOLD MEDAL . . . M and Mme Violet, of the Aero Club des Cheminots at Guyancourt, near Paris, rest their Marcel Doret trophies on the wing of X-ray Golf after the fight from Biarritz to Paris "Flight International" photograph Memory of events from now is confused. I was working at very high pressure, trying to detect some obvious fault in the aircraft, scan the ground, maintain height, and use the radio. Most urgently I wanted to know whether there was an airfield nearby. Only ATC could tell me reliably, but nothing useful seemed to emerge, because of intermittent radio and a general lack of under standing. Distress frequency of 121.5Mc/s was my best bet for prompt navigational assistance. I repeated my call on that frequency and received prompt acknowledgement, but again no advice. It became painfully evident that I would have to rely on my own resources and, scanning the Jeppesen chart, I noticed that Chateau- dun beacon coincided with an airfield. I therefore turned 180°, retuned Chateaudun NDB and began to home towards it. Notifi cation by radio of my intention produced an apparently disinterested acknowledgement. I wanted particularly to find out how far I had to go, having plotted my position by rapid dead-reckoning to be about 15 n.m. south-west of Chateaudun. If it was more than 20 or 30 miles I would have made a power-on forced landing. By now I had the topographical map on my lap and was flying along a distinctive line of river, road and railway which was not duplicated anywhere within my mental area of uncertainty and led directly to Chateaudun. Following this northwards, I tried hard to pinpoint my position along its 20-mile length, but the crossings and small towns were so frequent that I could not be certain of a fix. Successive exchanges on 121.5Mc/s produced no enlightenment, except the information that Chateaudun was military. It was only when I was told in reply to a specific question that Chateaudun could be raised on 117.9Mc/s that I could even presume it was active on this Saturday afternoon. We were now just above 3,000ft at 125 m.p.h., maintaining height quite comfortably. For a while the vibration was so steady that I thought I might have a partly extended undercarriage and not engine trouble at all. I lowered and raised gear, but it made no difference. Then, when it seemed that perhaps the engine had decided not to stop after all, it gave a short sharp jerk, which reacted on me like an adrenalin booster pump. I was banking 40° left and right to keep that line feature in sight through the haze below, the passenger anxiously spotting and reporting what she could see on her side. Once the engine emitted two loud back-fires. I was beginning to hate the thing. I reduced my emergency to Securite, changed to 117.9Mc/s, and received an immediate answer from Chateaudun. I persuaded them to give me a confirmatory VDF bearing to check my radio compass. They said they had no radar. Attempts in English to extract information about QFE, runways, winds and so on became exasperating, but a broadside of my most incisive French estab lished that the problem was linguistic and had nothing to do with unwillingness to help. Another problem was to explain our The flight log kept during the broken journey from Gatwick towards Bordeaux. The remainder of the log was altered to cover the later on ward flight from Chateaudun. Estimated and actual times at beacons are noted, with times of changing tanks, on the right it So JLi*h 7-"**" rtJ*' 14 L_a MZK 3+ l?»-wiJi;U,.7() Wfli #T4S~ Wj2 unfamiliar type of aircraft. They did not know a Comanche, but •'Monomoteur, quatre places" seemed to do the trick in the end. Still that line feature defied all attempts at pin-pointing. Each jerk from the engine made me more inclined to give up this one- armed cross-country, but I did want to get C.S.E.'s aircraft down in one piece and I continued hopefully as each new hamlet below turned out not to be Chateaudun, or any other place recognizable on the half million map. Finally, the edge of a runway pattern loomed up out of the haze, and the confounded topography arranged itself unmistakeably. We had been limping for something like 25min. I requested a straight-in approach to the north-east, but was told to land to the right of the runway in rough grass, so chose the out-of-wind main runway to the east. For five more minutes, without fully closing the throttle, I circled down and made a com pletely uneventful landing, 33min after the trouble started. From now on I really could not have cared what happened and was only mildly interested at first in a line of five olive-drab fire engines, which left their sentinel posts beside the runway and joined in close convoy behind me as I followed taxying instructions to a p.s.p. hardstanding beside the control tower. I ran up the engine and found a 200 r.p.m. drop on both magnetos, but no other signs of trouble. I opened the door and asked whether we might disembark as we were not Customs-cleared. Would they please cancel my flight plan and notify Bordeaux. Apologies for distur bance of Saturday afternoon were met with the utmost friendliness and we were soon deeply involved in explaining symptoms and swapping theories with a charming group of French Air Force groundcrew, not omitting to take some mighty pleasant heaves at cigarettes and nuzzling our feet gratefully against terra firma. During a pause in discussions, a gendarme handed me a form announcing that all Customs formalities had been completed. Tracing the Trouble With regular pauses while groundcrew bounded away in a 2cv van to seek out more tools, we started combing through the fuel system. Fuel was drained from each tank into a tin hat, smelt, tasted and passed fit for use. The carburetter was psychoanalysed and the removal of a square plug produced a small amount of dirt. All attempts at removing a sparking plug to assess mixture con dition were defeated by lack of a suitably long tube spanner. After some hours our French friends were becoming more and more incredulous and their questions clearly indicated that they felt I had committed some betise and had not really had engine trouble. It transpired, meanwhile, that Paris Control had notified them by land-line simply to expect an aircraft in distress, without giving any details, despite my previously filed and notified flight plan. Chateau dun had accordingly arranged fire and rescue services to cope with a flaming airliner at least, and had been quite sure that our little Comanche, droning smoothly in from the south-west, was a chance passer-by. This despite the fact that Chateaudun had heard us on 121.5Mc/s as well as on 117.9Mc/s. Finally, we replaced the cowlings and ran the engine. It lacked a fraction of its normal intake pressure and r.p.m., but mag drop was now normal, so I made a test flight. The radio circuit-breaker popped again, but the tower managed to tell me that I was leaving a noticeable trail of black smoke at full power. I made two more climbs from low level close to the tower to confirm the smoke and noted also that I was getting well below normal rate of climb Otherwise, my "enemy No 1" was running well. Though they now believed that I had trouble, we all realized that there was nothing we could do about it. Passenger and I therefore retired to Chateaudun, sought out the better hotel and regale^ ourselves with such strong nourishment as restored us to a near- human frame of mind and morale. I was prepared to make Cna -
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