Page 72 - Demo

68differently and Strike had to see what we did. Our Nuclear depth bombs were stored at RAF Macrihanish and our crew was sent there to demonstrate the loading procedure. Handling nuclear weapons was taken very seriously with a 2 man principle. And so, 2 people had to be involved at every stage to check on each other. After a night in the mess, we went out to our aircraft to accept the weapon. Now we knew that once we had gone through the various checks the weapon would be taken off before we flew home and so it appeared a bit of a waste of time. The weapon loaded was not a real one but just supposedly something that looked like it. It was raining and so the first nav had a raincoat over his flying suit which annoyed the checkers a bit. First, we went to flight planning and the navs were told to pick up everything they needed and to report any shortfalls. Our navs always carried all their maps on every sortie and so we had no need to pick anything up. In fact, there was nothing very much in the flight planning room as no aircraft were based there. The nav said everything was fine and we went out to the aircraft. here was a load of checks to do both in the aircraft and in the bomb-bay, but as we were not going anywhere there was no point in actually doing anything so we just chatted for a bit. Eventually Paddy shouted out the window that everything was complete. To our amazement that was followed by a Sqn Ldr climbing up the front hatch and stopping a stopwatch. That took so many minutes, he reported and that went into the Strike Command log as the time required from reaching the aircraft to starting the engines. Later that day we flew the aircraft home and that was that.At about that time a new Air traffic Controller arrived at Kinloss. The Air Traffic set up at Kinloss was a bit unusual in that they only covered aircraft in the visual circuit and on instrument approaches. The rather more complicated local area work was handled by Lossiemouth which had been a RN Air Station but was being taken over by the RAF. It was only a few miles away and as Shackletons took off and disappeared out