Disaster On Flying Duty


by Eric Hartwell - Date: 2007-02-05 - Word Count: 313 Share This!

One day in 1968 our shift was into its fourth night of night flying, the three previous nights having went well. We provide the aircraft to cover the night flying exercises and had spare serviceable aircraft ready in case of a retuning aircraft landing and becoming unserviceable to fly until the fault was rectified.

During the flying period of the aircraft we had to try to have enough aircraft ready for the following morning's flying programme, which was achieved. After our late night due to the flying programme going on until the early hours of the morning, the shift normally stayed in bed until around lunch time. After having a light lunch and before the start of our next night flying shift, we would relax in various ways by enjoying the summer sun, going into town or just go to the beaches and play beach games or swim.

On our last night flying shift we entered the squadron's maintenance office, just as we had done for the previous three nights and signed on the shifts present board, in order to show that we had turned up. After signing in we looked for our aircraft to see what serviceability state they were in, if the aircraft were serviceable they would be prepared for the evening's flying programme if they were unserviceable they might have to be repaired ready for flying depending on how many aircraft were required to fly.

Whilst checking my aircraft over to fly, we had a call to get every helicopter flying that had a rescue winch, as an emergency call came in that there were three people reported missing at sea just off Looe Bar beach. We scrambled eight aircraft. When they got airborne we went into the maintenance office to try to find out more about the incident unfolding. To our horror three of our shift had not signed in that night.


Related Tags: disaster, helicopter, death, flying, aircraft

Discuss issues and add opinions at the worlds best home page

Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

© The article above is copyrighted by it's author. You're allowed to distribute this work according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
 

Recent articles in this category:



Most viewed articles in this category: