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49to spend a night there. Mike and I had no problem with that and I think we met up with some of our Cranwell friends who were now on Squadrons in Germany. The course ended at the end of November and on 1 December 1968 we at last started our MOTU course.Chapter 6The first thing that happened was the arrival procedure during which all my travel claims for the last few months were finally paid. The clerks who were dealing with our paperwork said that they had wondered who it was putting in all the weird claims. Courses always start with Ground School and there was a lot to learn this time. Ship recognition, maritime operations, coding messages to mention a few things on top of learning all about the aircraft and its engines. We flew the Mk 2 Shackleton on the course. This was powered by 4 Griffin piston engines driving contra-rotating propellers. Every 5 hours you had to lubricate the transition Units that made this work by throttling back and forward a few times. The aircraft also had a tail wheel, and the main wheels consisted of two huge balloon tyres. Landing the aircraft was quite an art. If you were a bit too fast the aircraft would bounce very high. At that point you either waited until it came crashing down again or applied full power and went round again. It also had air brakes for the wheels. These were powered from a compressor on a couple of the engines so that when you started to taxy the accumulators were full. However, to steer you applied differential braking and if you were not very good at it it was easy to over control and so use up the air. At that point you had to stop and run the engines at a higher setting than when taxying for several minutes until the accumulators were replenished. Sometimes if you had a long way to taxy at for example some of the US Navy bases you would have to stop anyway. This made you extremely unpopular with any other aircraft behind you. Before take-off you had to run the engines up and check the magnetos. There were 2 per engine and you had