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51drop stores and were also air-to-air refuelling qualified. Remember, I hadnone to start with and was desperately trying to convert as many as Icould as quickly as I could.With the small numbers available to me, this meant that I had to geteach of them to do six trips in a twenty-day period. The maximum flyingtime allowed by law for a pilot is 120 hours per month and I was askingthem to do at least 150 hours in just twenty days, not far short of doublethe normal maximum rate %u2013 and in a combat zone. You can see theproblem and, as you have heard from Jeremy, we were obliged toprescribe the non-addictive drug Temazepam for all of my crews toensure that they did get some proper rest between flights. I made aparticular point of interviewing each captain and crew on their return toLyneham to reassure myself that they were fit to undertake this sort ofhigh intensity operation. Without exception I found them to beabsolutely drained, but determined and confident in their ability toundertake the task. The one thing that I could do to help take some of thepressure off them was to add an extra captain and navigator to each crewto do the operating between refuellings. Without this I am not sure thatthey could have managed. We also fitted the Hercules involved in thevery long flights with locally purchased inertial navigation systems,which we located in the forward end of the freight bay.The airlift turned out to be the biggest since the Berlin Airlift of1948-49. The Hercules carried over 7000 tons, or 15 million pounds, offreight, including 114 vehicles, twenty-two helicopters and nearly 6000troops and support personnel. We did all of this with very littlereinforcement in terms of manpower (although I did claim back someaircrew that had recently left the station and were thus still current). Asan example of the effort put in, my engineers worked 54,000 man hoursover and above their planned duty time during the period of the conflict.I can best illustrate the extent of Lyneham%u2019s achievement by noting thehours actually flown, compared to our normal peacetime task, which was2800 hours per month. In April we stepped that up to 5000 hours; in Mayit was 7000 hours and in June we flew 6000 hours. And all of thatwithout any substantial reinforcement of personnel while still beingrequired to satisfy any number of MOD-sponsored tasks that wereunconnected with the Falklands War. Many, of the latter, may I say,were levied despite my protestations as the Station Commander.Station Commanders were normally limited to 10 hours flying per