Page 206 - Demo

202ly nights that women were allowed in the mess. We could low fly to 50 ft but the minimum height for a run and break when we returned to the aerodrome was 1000ft. It would appear that white pilots could only get a verbal bollocking and nothing else. One day a Squadron Leader who had been instructing on our Squadron was leaving. Everyone knew he was going to do a low beat up when he took off to go back to Harari. He was warned against doing so but did it anyway. Very low. Again, nothing happened. We did find this all rather trying and talking to a British Army Major and his wife who invited us to dinner one day, we all agreed that the only difference between the blacks and whites was their colour. They were all incompetent.Eventually, after a couple of weeks, we were ready to begin instruction and did so. After a couple of trips we did an SCT landawy to Kariba, which was nice but not really necessary. Unfortunately, I had a magneto failure on the way and so had to divert to Harari. I wrote home that it was worrying flying over very rough country with a misfiring engine for half an hour, but we could always have jumped out if need be! It was to be 15 years before I ever did that. We then went on to Kariba and were taken all over the dam which was impressive. After a very nice lunch in a hotel, we flew home, partly at low level looking at a huge herd of elephants in the area. A couple of days later I had a trip in a Piston Provost with Rob. It was really interesting. Many of the controls in the cockpit were the same as in the JP but they did different things. They had helped with the problem of taxying a tail wheel aircraft. In something like a Chipmunk you had to keep zigzagging as you could not see directly ahead as the nose was in the way. In the Piston provost, you could jack your seat up high enough to see over the nose.The next weekend we took a couple of students to Harari and stayed in the mess. As usual the organisation was poor and although we had booked rooms in the mess, the house member had forgotten to do so