Page 95 - Demo

91displays. So, I wasn%u2019t the only crew member who didn%u2019t like it. The next weekend was at RAF Church Fenton and then at Sleap. Little was I to know that years later I would be organising displays at Church Fenton.In June we were called out on SAR to look for a crashed Buccaneer. We found an oil slick but nothing else. It looked as if they had just flown into the sea in poor visibility. The pilot was a USAF exchange pilot and their safety record was not as good as one would expect. The navigator had ejected from a Buccaneer a couple of years earlier. We must have gone on leave later that month and as we have some photos of a party at my parents%u2019 house in Guildford. I expect we went there for a few days. Going back to parents was about the only holiday we could afford in those days. We carried out another SAR sortie as soon as we got back from leave as %u201cnoises%u201d had been heard on 121.5 which was the civilian distress frequency. We found nothing on that occasion but had to land at Valley for some reason, probably short of fuel and went home the next day. At the end of the month, we did a very short sortie, just 25 minutes at night. This was probably a couple of circuits to ensure we were night current before being detached to Singapore where we were sent a few days later. This time we travelled by VC10 which was awful. Firstly, we had to get to Brize Norton. We had all our kit for a 2 month detachment including uniforms and flying kit and this took up a couple of heavy bags at least. The powers that be often sent crews by train which meant staggering across London with it all. The better option was a coach in that once you were in it that was that although it took hours. In our case we were taken by an RAF Hastings. I am not sure what they were actually used for in those days as really they were obsolete. We left in the morning and arrived around about lunch time to be told that we would be staying the night at Lyneham. We pointed out that we could have landed there