Page 208 - Demo

204aircraft stopped spinning with no inputs from him. Later, I closed the throttle and told him the engine had failed. He just froze on the controls. It was quite hazy, but I expected him to look down and pick a flat area without too many giant anthills to set up for a forced landing. Nothing. He just held the controls while the aircraft entered a glide. I was about to say something when he said I will land there. Looking ahead, out of the haze, loomed a runway and he was actually lined up on it. It was thelanding strip at Ian Smith%u2019s farm. I knew it was in the area somewhere but had never seen it before. He carried on towards it until I took control and pointed out that we had our wheels up and overshot. It crossed my mind to wonder what the international press would have made of him doing a wheels up landing there. Ian Smith, of course. was the previous White Prime Minister. We then flew back to Thornhill and I gave him another simulated engine failure while we were downwind. It would have been easy to position for a landing on the airfield but again he froze and I eventually overshot before we crashed into Gwelo%u2019s high street. Not surprisingly I gave the poor chap a thumbs down.The Squadron Commander had resigned after we had been there for a couple of weeks. He had to give 3 months%u2019 notice but it would have been better if he had gone straight away. He obviously wanted the Air Force to fold and was just disruptive. At one point he made the students captain of the aircraft while we were instructing them. We pointed out that we could hardly train a student and give him various problems if he was the captain and so after a day, we went back to the normal way of working. We were never allowed to authorise flights and that meant we had to get an authoriser, usually the Flight Commander, to authorise us. We eventually got the Flight Commander to authorise the whole day%u2019s flying. He was now full time on the Vampire so he just popped in in the morning and did it. We also eventually organised a coup and took over all the programming. Towards the end of our time, we were the only QFIs there and this speeded things up enormously. The Squadron