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                                    227at Linton on board. I also had to act as the ADC to Air Vice Marshal Don Bennet on the day when he unveiled the monument. This all took place the next year and so I will come back to it.Another thing that happened almost straight away was that the Station Commander called me in and asked if I would take over as the Officer I/C The Mountain Rescue Team. I assume that he picked me because of my seniority and also that I was a qualified Joint Service Expedition Leader. I did this until the end of 1988 but will cover it all now. The team was actually the RAF Leeming Team but Leeming was undergoing a major NATO revamp and was closed for a couple of years. The area we had to look after stretched from more or less the border of Scotland down to the Humber and from the Lake District in the west, through the Yorkshire Dale and East to the coast encompassing the North York Moors and Wolds. RAF Leuchars covered Southern Scotland and RAF Valley covered Northern Wales with St Athan covering Southern Wales, Kinloss covered Northern Scotland . The team consisted of 5 permanent members, the Team Leader, who in my case was a Sergeant PTI who was incredibly fit and could walk for miles without a rest. Later he was promoted and took over the Valley Team. He was replaced with a sergeant armourer who was a very experienced mountaineer. In fact at one point he took some time off to join a joint services team to climb Everest. The other team members had to include an MT driver as we had a 3 ton Bedford to move all the kit about in, a store man and a wireless operator. This was in the days before mobile phones. Sometimes on a call out if it was a long way away the wireless truck would have to stop, put up an aerial and get an update on where to go. I think we must also have had handheld sets but these would be line of sight and of limited use on the hills. These 5 chaps (all male in those days, females were allowed to join much later) had a couple of days off midweek. The remainder of the team which was about 20 strong were all volunteers from around the station. The single chaps had to commit 
                                
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