Page 58 - Demo

54ok and then involved a Stage 2 session. We dropped the buoys and started tracking the submarine when the operators reported that we were losing contact. At this point Hugh and I realised that we had made a fundamental error. The buoys could be dropped with long or short cables so that the transducers could be deep or shallow. In certain water conditions there could be a marked shift in temperature at a particular depth and that could mean a cloak of invisibility for the submarine. The submarine would know if this were so and would take advantage of it. The solution was to drop the buoys with the first one with a short cable end the next ones long. Or something like that. We had forgotten this and now were about to lose the submarine. How were we going to rectify this was a problem that we were not sure we could solve. At that moment we were saved by a tragedy. We were called up and told to divert immediately to the Bristol Channel where a Sea Vixon Navigator had just ejected. All thoughts of our practice war ended and we made haste to actually do some operation work. What had happened was that the pilot had lost control of the aircraft, and the navigator had ejected. The pilot then regained control and returned to Yeovilton. The ejection had pushed the nose down far enough for the pilot to regain control and was a sort of known solution, I think. Sadly, the navigator had to go through a small hatch in the roof. In flight he spent his time enclosed in a small compartment. I think the only thing he could see was the pilot%u2019s feet. On this occasion he broke his arms as he went out and landed in the sea. A mile or so either way and he would have landed on land and survived. As it was, he drowned, the ejection went ok but he could not inflate his life preserver. As for us, we flew up and down looking for him for some time until we saw a fishing boat with the crew waving at us. We flew over and saw that they had recovered him still attached to his parachute but unfortunately dead. That was the end of our course and our stage 2 failure was soon forgot-