Page 65 - Demo

61joyed the flying, enough was enough. We always took off at 8am as it was cooler then but, on this occasion, we found a fault with the aircraft. Paddy said ok we will scrub but the detachment commander said we would have to go later when the fault was fixed. This would be at about 10am and Paddy said we could not get airborne then with our fuel weight and the engineer agreed. After much argument we were ordered to go with both Paddy and our engineer very unhappy. To get airborne we would need to use water meths as well as the vipers and I had never seen this done before. What it meant was that water meths was injected into the cylinders to provide more power. Our normal maximum boost was I think 56 inches and with water meth it went up to 82 inches. The problem was that it was very unreliable, and any engine could drop out at any time with a huge loss of power. Also, it was time limited anyway. Paddy did the take off and using nearly all the runway we got airborne and I raised the undercarriage. Now our problems really began. The aircraft would not accelerate. The additional drag with the flaps set at take-off meant that we could not go faster and if we raised the flaps we would stall. At this point we were at about 100 feet and just heading into the desert. All we could do was slowly ease the flaps up bit by bit. At some point we must have come out of water meth but still had the Vipers at 100%. I think we were about 5 miles from the base when we got the flaps up and were able to start a turn back out to the coast. We flew the sortie as briefed, but no-one was ever ordered to get off late again. Indeed, with a less experienced pilot than Paddy we probably would not have made it.Dubai was bigger than Sharjah so we would go there from time to time. To demonstrate how different it was to now I remember that one night we flew there for some night pilot training. We probably had to do a three engine landing as we had to do so every so often. In the Shackleton we closed the engine down for that and so we were not practise asymmetric but rather asymmetric for practise. Any way we landed at