Akrotiri and Aden
After Halfar, Akrotiri was a bit boring. There was a runway ready for us, but not much else. The station was still under construction and accommodation was primitive— no problem there. But the EOKA threat was at its height and we found ourselves behind the wire again. Luckily for me I led the first 208 detachment of four aircraft down to Khormksar,
Aden in June ‘56 and spent six weeks doing Photo-Recce around the Aden Protectorates. We were tasked with low-level photography of a number of old airstrips whose locations were only vaguely remembered, usually marked out by white-painted oil drums. We also did an oblique line overlap of a section of the Yemen border near Beihan. The border was politically sensitive and there were UN observers on the Yemeni side watching out for us. The rugged terrain, extreme cockpit temperatures at low level (we had no aircon) the sketchiness of the mapping, and the distance of some of the targets - we sometimes flew most of the sortie on one engine to save fuel — made this in some ways the most demanding flying of my tour. In event of a forced landing or bale-out the tribesmen were notoriously hostile. So we carried the famous “gooleychits” enshrined in RAF folklore. These promised the tribesmen generous rewards if they returned us to the British with our dangly bits still attached (I heard years later that they were probably written in the wrong language, although I shudder to think of the trials they must have done to establish that!).
{Tim Webb’s Comments - In Aden we showed Salah, our coffee boy, one of the ‘gooleychits’, once he recovered from his laughing fit he acknowledged that they were indeed worthless - they were in the wrong language!}
RAF Takali - Operation Musketeer
By August 1956 Col Nasser had nationalised 
the Suez Canal and planning was under way for Operation Musketeer to reoccupy the Canal Zone. Their Airships decided (wrongly, in our view) that the Meatbox could achieve little against the might of the Egyptian Air Force, who by then had Mig 15 So we were sent back to Malta (13) — Takali this time-and became the air defence of the island. For the next three months we were given carte blanche to beat the hell out of the carrier group working up for the Suez invasion. We used to send off sections of four aircraft as quickly as we could turn them round. We found that if we stayed well below 50 ft
