both due to failures of ground D/F stations at night. Khartoum, which I was trying to reach from Juba, simply failed to answer me on VHF and El Adem, when I called for a Homing and Controlled Descent, fed me “bum steers”. In my time we lost three aircraft which forced landed short of fuel in Khamseen conditions and this happened to three more soon after I left the squadron. Nobody was hurt in any of these incidents, although the aircraft were all written off. Over the seven years 208 flew the Meteor, I believe
the squadron only lost three pilots - not bad for those days.
Comparison Between 208 in the 1950s and Current Fast Jet Squadrons
For starters, rank inflation had not yet started. We had only one Squadron Leader, The Boss, (Tom Neil, an ex-B of B pilot for the first half of my tour) and 3 second- tour Flt Lts (the Flt Cdrs and the Pilot Attack Instructor (gunnery for us!)), so the remaining 18 pilots were Fg Offs - mostly young (20-21) first tourists, and nearly all bachelors. The last of the NCO pilots had left before I joined. Training requirements were flexible and flying discipline was relaxed. No one at HQ 205 Group seemed to know what Fighter Recce was all about. Few formal exercises with the Army were laid on so we devised our own. We knew the areas in the Sinai and in the desert South of Suez where the army liked to play so we went hunting for trade. We went wherever we liked at whatever height we liked! The form was to sniff out some Pongos playing with their tanks or guns, beat the hell out of them and then take some happy snaps with our forward or side-facing oblique cameras. Some prints would be sent to they unit to show them how ineffective were their attempts at concealment and camouflage. One day, a newly-arrived flight commander returned from such a trip with a radio aerial from an Army vehicle stuck in an engine intake. Not much damage there, but his No 2 had his ventral tank flattened and the underside of one engine nacelle bashed in. He had been flipped almost inverted by his leader’s slipstream and actually bounced off the desert while recovering, by a brilliant piece of instinctive flying. He survived to become eventually a Senior Captain on 747s with British Airways and Singapore Airlines (Take a bow Brian!).
Read a more detailed account of this incident here:
This sortie was not a very professional bit of leadership, and I believe that in today’s air force it would have ended the career of the flight commander; But I (t’was I what dunnit, m’lud) got away with a hats-on chat, without coffee, with the charming AOC Air Marshal Barnett.
