Page 64 - Demo

60instructed me. I was back at Kinloss for a couple of months and then it was Paddy%u2019s crew%u2019s turn for the Sharjah detachment and so I went out again. I was quite happy about this as flying around the Gulf was really one of the wonders of the world. You could see turtles and huge rays swimming about along with sharks and other big fish. We also did gunnery which was good fun. We had 2 20mm guns in the nose but the ammunition feed was complicated with that on the port side of the aircraft feeding the starboard gun and vice versa. It was normal to get a stoppage after firing a few rounds. We were supposed to take the jammed rounds back to be examined at base but we thought that flying with a rounds bent through nearly 180 degrees was dangerous so the siggies took them down the back and threw them out the flare shoot. One of our siggies was a gunnery trainer and he said the problem was in starting and stopping the shoot. To demonstrate this, we dropped some flame floats in the sea and then flew towards them. He started firing and just did not stop. It went on for about 30 seconds I think until he run out of ammunition. The cockpit was full of the smell of cordite, and you could see it blowing over the nose. Very operational. By the time the guns stopped the whole crew were convulsed in laughter. I am not sure if anyone would ever have hit anything with the guns, but they were perhaps a deterrent. We were in Sharjah until November and one of our problems resulted from 42 Squadron under flying their hours. The Shackleton was fairly unreliable and were pretty much worn out, but each Squadron had so many hours to fly. If you under flew, then I think the Squadron would have to explain why. The detachment commander of our detachment decided that we would not only fly all our allocated hours but would also fly the previous detachments short fall too. Goodness knows why he thought that a good idea but there we go. It meant that we had to work pretty hard in very hot conditions. One day we were briefed for an 8- or 9-hour sortie and these were not overly popular, while we en-