Page 77 - Demo

73were at 500ft so there was not much room for error. I was very much hoping that the sonar buoys would not pick up anything so we could clear the area. Anyway, nothing came up on the buoys, so we carried on. This happened three times. If a buoy was unserviceable you had to relay it and as I said positioning for this while flying on instruments required a lot of concentration. The turbulence was awful. In retrospect the radar was probably just picking up the rain storm. We resumed our patrol and Steve who was in the right hand seat suddenly said %u201cnumber4, feathering number 4%u201d. Brian the flight engineer said there is nothing wrong with it and Steve said look at it. The engineer only had a small window to look out of and when he did he said %u201cOh that%u2019s a nice fire%u201d. So, at this point I was thinking that I might have to ditch the aircraft in Mid-Atlantic in pitch darkness. Bearing in mind that no pilot had survived a Shackleton ditching this was a worry. The Nav called make your heading 090 and he gave a position for the radio operator to put out a Mayday call. The problem with the engines is that if you cannot feather the propeller by lining the blades up with the airflow it will continue to drive the engine round. This will inevitably lead to an engine fire which usually meant the wing fell off. To feather the propeller, you needed engine oil under pressure. Luckily,Steve had seen sparks as oil hit the exhaust stubs and had reacted very quickly to stop the engine. A high pressure oil pipe had come loose because of the turbulence and the oil sprayed out over the exhausts where it caught fire. Once the engine stopped the oil stopped flowing and so the fire went out. Actually, we had dumped 30 gallons of oil so there was not much left. There had been a lot of discussion between pilots about using a Viper if the Griffin in front of it was losing oil. Mike Bondisio had been faced with that problem when he lost 2 Griffins on his way to Gibraltar. He had not lit the viper and had nearly had to go under the bridge in Lisbon before landing. Steve and I had decided that it was unlikely that the Viper would ignite the oil and so we lit ours. We