Page 211 - Demo

207Harari, one of the engines would be time expired and an engine banged and missed all the way back. I vaguely wondered about the ethics of opening the door and parachuting out leaving everyone behind if the engine finally failed. At some point the pilots announced that one of our students had set his compass up incorrectly and by the time he had worked it out, he could not make Thornhill and was diverting to Bulawayo. He would have to stay there the night as it was now dark, and he did not have a torch. His wife took it quite well as if this was normal. We eventually landed safely at Thornhill and were having a beer in the bar when the Dakota crew unexpectedly came in as their Dakota was u/s. It wasn%u2019t the time expired engine that had been misfiring but the other one. A Dakota could not maintain height on one engine as the Chief Ground school Instructor proved. He was doing an air test on a Dakota which involved shutting the engines down in turn and restarting them. Having shut one down he found it could not be started again. Foolishly he was some way away from his airfield and so ditched it in a reservoir. Hence, he was grounded and now was the CGI. He was actually quite a nice guy and came to one of the many fancy dress parties in the mess in a sort of loin cloth. My children had been very excited that I might see Tarzan in Africa and so I sent a picture of him home and said that I had not met Tarzan but had met his dad.Towards the end of the course, we flew up to Harari again. Wg Cdr Rob Tasker had by now left the Air Force and was setting himself up as a coffee farmer in a farm next door to his cousin, Ian. Ian%u2019s was 6000 acres and worked cattle and grew tobacco, maize and now coffee. Rob%u2019shouse had not been finished and so we stayed with Ian. His farm had been built as a hollow square. I do not think there were any windows on the outside, but inside there was a pool and it was very nice. At the outside corners of the house were hand grenades on poles a couple of feet high. Inside the house there was a listening room where you could listen for intruders and work out where they were. The appropriate hand gre-