Page 293 - Demo

289ranged for her to fly with us. I took her on a formation lead trip which was a bit of a problem as the RAF had introduced a minimum weight limit for our ejector seats and she was below it. In fact, Jackie%u2019s (Brother in Laws wife) mother worked for Martin Baker and so I contacted them. The RAF had ordered seats with that specification, but the seat was used by far eastern aircrew who were much lighter. It was more of a legal problem than a medical one. Eventually the doctor said she could fly. Unfortunately, she had a problem with her ears on the way down, but I got her back safely and I think watching us recover in cloud gave her an insight into what was happening in the cockpit when she was controlling. We met again when she was posted to Linton some years later, by which time she was a good and experienced controller. While we were at Lossiemouth, we did a night stop at Kirkwall. I took one of the Group 2 students on a practise airways trip to Sumburgh. Looking back, I must have been mad as we were not supposed to fly over the sea or indeed in an airway. However, we could fly under the airway and the student could practise the sort of navigation from beacon to beacon that he could not do anywhere else. It was a long flight out of sight of land with just Fair Isle en route and we could not have landed there. I think we did a bit of an approach to Sumburgh before coming back. The next day the weather was poor but there was a possibility of a higher cloud base to the West of Scotland and so we launched at 5-minute intervals. We got Scottish radar to tell us when we were over the sea and then let down breaking cloud somewhere about 2000ft. We then turned back towards land and tried to go up one of the inlets, hoping to get over the first hills to be able to continue at low level. It was not possible and so one after another we carried out low level aborts and climbed to a safe height. We then realised that we were short of fuel and had to call fuel priority for recovery to Lossiemouth. Thankfully ATC were very much on the ball and got us down safely, although it had ap-