Page 89 - Demo
P. 89
85Nimrod that was serviceable was tasked to support the fleet. Close support areas started to catch up with distance support areas and on one occasion at night we homed onto what turned out to be another Nimrod.It had all got rather silly and we went off task early. On one of the sorties as we relit one of the outer engines to go homethere was a large bang and so we shut it down. As we were being fed onto the final approach the adjacent engine surged and so we shut that one down as well. I was in the left-hand seat and looked across at Pete, he just said get on with it and so I did a double asymmetric landing for real. Pete saw the flight commander the next day and asked if it could count as one of my 6 monthly drills. However, it could not as it wasn%u2019t supervised by a QFI! We had another engine failure a few days later. Indeed, in the early day%u2019s engine failures were not unusual. Later this changed when we cut down the use of full power. Up to that point we always used full power for take-off. The take-off calculations were such that after you reached the speed at which you could no longer stop on the runway you could still get airborne if an engine failed at that point and still make all the various heights to miss the ground as you climbed away. It was realised that you could make these criteria without using full power and so often you only needed the maximum continuous power which was at a slightly lower RPM. This really made a difference to the engine life and so engine failures became few and far between.In November we rented our first TV for 55p per week and spent our first Christmas together in Tigeribu. Gabby%u2019s Mum, Paul and Phillip came and stayed with us for a few days. Her father saw them off from Oldham for some reason, probably to show Paul the way which was something he might have done. Anyway, he gave us a call at 4am to say they were on the way. I was not best pleased. In those days a phone call at night was usually calling you into work and meant dropping every-

