Page 55 - Demo

51was for us to position to land downwind on the reciprocal runway but we might not have been able to do that. Hugh and my plan was that we would have to divert and our diversion airfield was Kinloss. Although there were other closer airfields we generally went to other maritime bases in those days. We had decided that I would fly while Hugh would go back to the navigator position, we did not have a navigator on board,and navigate us up the Irish Sea, round Scotland and back to Kinloss. It would have been quite an adventure but luckily was not required. Once we could handle the aircraft, we had new skills to learn. These included pilot bombing which was done at 100ft. You had to fly over the buoy that you were aiming at and drop 2 smoke or flame bombs depending whether it was day or night. These represented the first andlast of a stick of depth charges. The siggy in the tail would call out your score. You were looking for 50/50 no line error and this indicated that you had straddled the buoy. Once you could do that you had to do a follow up attack which involved climbing to 500ft while turning and then descending back to the target. You had to get to 500ft to be allowed to have 60 degrees of bank. Too much bank at low level could cause an accident and indeed several Shackletons had been lost that way. Once you could bomb the buoy you progressed to the skid. This was something towed along behind one of the RAF launches which put up a plume of water which looked like a snort mast on a submarine. There were various rules on closing angles to the launch to make sure you didn%u2019t bomb it. I loved pilot bombing and at 100ft we were pretty accurate even though the target would have disappeared under the nose before you pressed the bomb button. You just tracked it in your imagination to a row of rivets and then released the bombs. We also had to learn to drop Lindhome gear which was a dinghy and containers tied together in various configurations with buoyant cord. This was dropped from 140 ft at 140 kts. I suppose they made stronger containers when we got the Nimrod, but they looked the same. We could also drop mail in con-