Page 295 - Demo

291one side. With half our fuel obviously unusable we were now down to minimum landing fuel 30 or 40 miles from home. I took control and started to climb as you use less fuel at height. Of course, it costs fuel to climb, and I looked at the gauge going down very quickly. I was hoping to get high enough such as when the engine stopped, we could glide in. I declared a Mayday and hoped for the best. At some point I told the student that I did not think we would make it and to prepare himself to eject. In the end we did land safely but there was hardly any fuel left in the tank available. The engineers took the whole tank system to pieces but never did find what had gone wrong. I never let a student miss a fuel check again, although in the Tucano fuel was not so much of a problem.At the end of the month, we had a jolly. We were allowed to fly one overseas ranger a year as QFIs. This was a jolly obviously, but we did have to do a lot more planning than we would normally ever do in the day to day flying. And so it did have value. We had a French exchange officer on the Squadron, Serge Lieutaud. His English was not that good,but he was a nice chap and good pilot. He announced that he needed to go to Paris for a medical and so it was decided that our QFI ranger should be to Paris. We had planned to land at a military airfield in Paris but after first agreeing, the French Airforce then said that we could not fly our single jet aircraft over Paris after all. Very sensible really. And so, we decided to land at Beauvais. The plan developed into taking 4 JPs to fly as 2 separate formations, thus 8 QFIs could go. The wives then decided to come along although they would have to fly civvy. We would all stay at %u201cLe Circle%u201d just off the Champs-Elysees. This is the French Air Force Club.The weather on the Friday was poor. I was leading the second pair with Ian Churchill an ex-Hercules Pilot with me. We flew down the airway IMC most of the way and then had to do a procedural VOR approach