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48sent engineering and support personnel which would be essential if I wasto establish a routine flow of aircraft through the island; I also sent anumber of Flight Commanders to ensure that everything was properlyorganised and that my personnel were decently accommodated and fed.By cancelling a range of non-Operation CORPORATE tasks and pouringin a huge amount of unplanned engineering effort the number ofHercules available for CORPORATE increased markedly and withinabout a week there was a continuous stream of Hercules being launchedfrom Lyneham at a rate of one every 45 minutes.These aircraft would stage down to Dakar where they would take on afresh crew and enough fuel to fly on down to Ascension and back toDakar without using any of the precious reserves on the island; anothercrew would then bring the aircraft back to Lyneham. Our loads were allhigh priority items, weapons, missiles, medical kit, spares and the like,that there had just not been enough time to send off with the ships on 5April.It soon became very obvious that, once the Task Force sailed southfrom Ascension Island, the only way of delivering urgent/vital supplieswould be through my Hercules flying down to it and dropping them byparachute into the sea, having provided sufficient flotation packaging topermit the stores to float until picked up by the ships. The vital work ofpackaging the items and working out the extraction method was done bythe Army%u2019s 47 Air Despatch Sqn, one of Lyneham%u2019s resident units.The air drop technique always worked very well but there was oneamusing incident when the small pinnace sent to drag the large loadalongside a destroyer for pick up, took over three hours to do the job. Akiller whale had fallen in love with what we had dropped and it chasedoff the naval boat every time it tried to get near it. It eventually took thedestroyer itself to chase off the amorous orca and recover the load.But now we come back to those Andover tanks. With the Herculeshaving a range of 3000 miles it was obvious that once the Task Forcewas more than 1500 miles south of Ascension we could no longer reachthem, so Group came up with two ideas.Option One involved increasing the fuel capacity of the aircraft byusing surplus auxiliary fuel tanks which had originally been acquired forthe Andover. Installed in the freight bay and plumbed into the aircraft%u2019sfuel system, each of these tanks had a capacity of 825 gallons so a pairwould supplement the Hercules%u2019 normal fuel of 63,000 lbs by a further