People News It was good to hear from Chris Spurrier

I am looking forward to a couple of days in each place (those were the days!). Addis in the 1970s is a rather nice place and a good time can be had by one and all. I am somewhat friendly with the station manager and there are a couple of pounds of best cheddar in my suitcase for his son, who has a craving for the stuff. This, it is to be hoped, will see a few beers float our way, sometime after landing. Then there is a rather nice restaurant called The Cottage where the waitresses are particularly sinuous Nubians, who wiggle in a most enticing manner. I was there only a couple of weeks back and the prospect of another evening at The Cottage is filling me with a rosy sort of glow and in fact all is pretty good with the world.

Or at least it is until abeam Khartoum, when our engineering consultant announces that we ought to shut down number 4 engine. There is not a lot of drama to shutting down an engine on a VC10 so we do that and our esteemed commander puts on his best pensive mode. Spare engines are thin on the ground at Addis but there is one in Nairobi, this being the time that BOAC scattered spare engines around the world for situations like this. Moreover Addis, being hot and high with a short runway is not the place from which to contemplate a three-engine ferry. So E.C. announces that we are continuing to Nairobi (NBO) – good decision so far! NBO isn’t actually our alternate but we can probably get there all right so frantic sums follow (no computer flight plans or INS in these days) so all manual calculations. There are three of us pilots, one doing the navigating with a sextant and lots of complicated stuff like log tables. NBO is about 600 miles further than Addis and HF comms are not very good over Africa so I am doing a great deal of shouting to arrange a reroute. This is all most exciting and I am more or less convinced that all concerned know what is happening as we steam off southwards. What I’ve not mentioned so far is the NBO forecast which says fog for our estimated arrival time. E.C. is a sanguine sort of chap so when I point this out to him he says “Yes I know, but the forecast for NBO always says fog for this time of day at this time of the year”. So we continue south and the sun comes up and we eventually get within VHF range of NBO. They seem surprised to hear from us but we are mostly expecting that. What we are not expecting is to be told to enter the hold as number eight to land because it is foggy! This is definitely not part of the master plan, as we are becoming seriously short of fuel by now; also the pax are beginning to wake up and enquire as to why we are still airborne, rather than sitting on the ground at Addis. Only one thing for it – Kilimanjiro.

Kili is quite close, has a long runway, is rarely used and has no fog. So off we go again. This time it all works well and we find ourselves sitting on the ground with 140 pax, a dead aeroplane and a near-deserted airport. This has become a real adventure. We manage to get the terminal opened up and some breakfast sorted out with the cabin crew helping the locals with the service. Meanwhile E.C. is trying to find hotels. There are some, but they are ten miles away and there is only one 30-odd seater bus available – also, there are not enough rooms available! A new career looms for me and the other first officer as we set up a mini accommodation bureau pairing off all the singles to make the rooms spin out. There is an enormous amount of goodwill from the pax considering that they expected to be in Addis and the Seychelles, rather than Kilimanjiro. Anyway, we set off to the hotels after a very long day (night) before overtime payments had been invented. I still have a letter in my log book from a person high-up in cabin services dept thanking me for being a good steward by helping to serve meals on the ground!

Minimum rest is taken, after which we are back off to the airfield, minus the pax but with the cabin crew, for a three engine ferry flight to NBO. As I had done some 3-eng ferries in the RAF I am surprised that no one seems to think twice about this and there are no requests for permissions or dispensations as we do the sums. I wrongly assume that the E.C. has done at least one such take off for practice as part of the command course and we just do it. Very interesting it is too at that altitude! With the entire BOAC African schedule now in tatters, we finally deliver our aeroplane to meet its new engine and set off to the hotel, to await flying the serviceable aircraft back to London. No meal in The Cottage, no days in the Seychelles; but I learnt about flying from that!

I learnt that when the forecast nearly always says fog it is often because there nearly always is fog. I learnt that if you are going to initiate a long range diversion it is a good idea to have a spare diversion-for-the-diversion up your sleeve. Above all I learnt that flying commercial aeroplanes isn’t just about flying. It is very much about looking after your passengers in unexpected circumstances and taking control of your own destiny when you are somewhere out of the way. Don’t ask – just do it. Finally I learnt that there was someone in the higher echelons of cabin services who thought that pilots came under their control.

Mike Bannister

G-AWZK, now on display at Manchester Airport. Those who consider the HS 121 Trident 1C to have been a masterpiece of aviation will no doubt want to follow the efforts of the resolute team, including Neil and project leader Tony Jarrett, who intend to move the last remaining complete airframe (G-ARPO) to Sunderland. Papa Oscar was delivered to Teeside Airport (now Durham Tees Valley, formerly Middleton St. George) by Dick Boas in 1983, which was the very last flight of a BA Trident. It resided in the Fire Training area of the airfield but survived complete as it was used for smoke and evacuation purposes, rather than as a bonfire. The intention is to dismantle the airframe into a kit of parts and to transport them to the North East Aircraft Museum for re-assembly. Details are updated regularly on the website www.savethetrident.org which carries the latest project information.