Page 108 - Demo

104At some point in the summer a new siggie joined the crew. He was straight out of training, whilst in the past the siggies had all flown Shacks and so were really second tourists. This new chap was keen but not very good. In fact, I remember thinking that if I had been the Captain I would have sent him off for remedial training or got rid of him. One night on an exercise he detected a small radar contact in a Norwegian Fjord and we flew into investigate. It was of course pitch dark. At the end of each radar homing the operator called %u201con top now, now, now. Nearest land%u2026.%u201d On this occasion we were aware that we were in a fjord with high ground either side but thought we had gone up the lefthand side. Bill waited a moment or two and then started turning right. At the same time calling out to radar %u201cCome on, nearest land? Oh, said the radar operator, %u201con the nose half a mile%u201d. Unfortunately, the nav plot had slipped a bit, which it often did and we had gone up the right hand side. Bill quickly increased the rate of turn and everything went very quiet until we were pointing out to sea. In August Gabby%u2019s WRAF time came to an end. She had signed on for 4 years which was the normal WRAF short service commission although many WRAFs never completed that long. They had an option to leave on marriage and had to leave if they got pregnant. We tried for a baby to be born after her 4 year term ended and so she was about 4 months pregnant at that time. There was discussion as to whether it was safe to do radar talkdowns and so for her last couple of months, she stopped doing talk downs and just did local control at the top of the tower. She had given Prince Charles a talk down when he came to Kinloss on a land away during his pilot training and so to give us lesser mortals a talk down was a bit beneath her anyway. She was actually very good on talk down and came across as very sexy. Pilots just followed her voice. We decided to have a last fling before children and so hired a very small cabin cruiser to go down the Caledonian Canal. Our boat was rather tatty whilst most of the hired ones were very smart. And