Page 79 - Demo

75Dewer decided that he would fly with us as first pilot, leaving Tom Wood as captain. As we got changed for the first flight Dewer asked me what would I do if the brakes started slipping as we got to full power. The parking brake was a lever by your left arm in the left-hand seat and so I said that I would knock the parking brake off and go and indeed that was what normally happened. He said that was quite incorrect as the brakes should hold at full power and so I should throttle back and investigate the fault. Anyway, we got to the end of the runway, I applied power and the brakes slipped. In accordance with what he had told me in the changing room I throttled back at which point he shouted,%u201cwhat are you doing%u201d. I said the brakes were slipping and he said something like never mind. Meanwhile the engineer had realised there was a problem and throttled back the vipers. I then applied full power on the Griffins and knocked off the parking brake. We had slid about 1000ft down the runway by this time. The eng realised that we were going after all and brought the Vipers up to full power and we were away. I don%u2019t think that Dewer ever mentioned what had happened again. He flew with us 3 times and made me do the take off each time while he did the landings. I think that the take-off was always more iffy than the landing as an engine failure could be disastrous. We were a performance X aircraft where there would be a long gap between where you could stop if you lost an engine and where having lost an engine you could get safely airborne. However, we never had performance tables to work this out and so would always have aborted the take-off even though that would mean crashing ahead. At least we would be close to the airfield. I think Wg Cdr Dewer was nervous of taking off and his landings were not much good either. On one occasion he got so low on the radar approach that the Controller said you are going well below the glide path Acknowledge. That was the only time I ever heard a control-