The CT had already been ‘turned’ in this short time but, because of ZANLA’s propaganda, he had some doubts for his safety in Selous Scouts hands. So he offered to take the Scouts to the base in Mozambique from which he and his group had come. When asked how he would do this he said he was fit enough to hop all the way.
Odds and sods
IN SOME AVIATION MAGAZINE I read of someone using a fixed-wing aircraft to rescue a man from the ground whilst airborne. I was intrigued by the technique described and attempted to do it myself. The idea was to let out a long length of rope from the rear cabin (about 500 feet of rope), with a suitable dead weight at its end, then turn steeply towards the rope’s end in the manner of a dog chasing its own tail. By holding the turn, the majority of the rope was supposed to descend with its end section hanging vertically downwards. With correct handling of turn and height it was reported that the weighted end of the rope could be positioned over any selected spot. This allowed a man on the ground to take hold of a slip harness, fit it under his shoulders, remove the weight and await uplift.
Once the man was secure in the harness, the pilot simply had to increase power, still in the turn, to lift him clear of the ground before rolling out into straight and level flight. Thereafter the man at the end of the rope could be placed back on the ground in another location in similar manner to his uplift. Alternatively, he could be hauled up into the aircraft.
My trial might have succeeded had the Trojan been able to sustain a very tight turn but this proved impossible because of that aircraft’s power limitation, so the experiment was dropped.
In one of the Hunters hangars at Thornhill a tractor used for towing aircraft to and from the flight lines refused to start one very cold morning. One of the technicians decided he had the solution. He placed a ‘little bit’ of Avpin in the carburettor to get the engine running. When subjected to pressure, Avpin combusted spontaneously giving off the high volumes of gas that powered the Hunter’s Avpin starter-motor turbines. But Avpin was certainly not suited to containment because its gas generating potential was awesome. It took just one turn of the tractor’s starter motor for the ‘little bit’ of Avpin to blow the tractor engine’s head clean off the engine block and through the high roof of the hangar.
In the self-same hangar another hole was made in the roof, but in this incident the circumstances where far from amusing. Armourer Mike Ongers was standing on the Hunter ejector seat he was servicing when the ejector cartridge fired. The seat itself went through the roof but Mike impacted the roof and was thrown back through overhead lights before dropping onto the concrete floor of the hangar. His injuries committed him to a wheelchair for life.
On 4 Squadron the technicians were getting very upset with my Squadron Warrant Officer, Spike Owens. They complained that their WO was nicking their costly tools thereby forcing them to take special precaution whenever Spike was around.
Spike Owens had come to Rhodesia from the RAF many years before and was well known for his huge collection of vehicle parts and home appliances which he claimed he had bought at bargain prices with the intention of re-selling them for profit. His collection included every tool imaginable. Where he got all these things from I cannot say but Spike was always able to produce spare parts and items that were hard to find.
I was very fond of Spike. He was always bright and helpful and I was especially thankful for his resourcefulness when it came to keeping our aircraft flying. Any suggestion that he might have ‘inadvertently’ picked up so and so’s tools was met with vehement denial. I could not pin him down but remained pretty sceptical. Nevertheless the unfortunate nickname given him by Henry Jarvie stuck. ‘WOBOTOC’ stood for Warrant Officer Bill Owens Thieving Old C.…
FAC errors and successes
CHRIS WEINMANN COMMENCED VISUAL RECCE in Mozambique on his own on 16 February 1974. Two days later he called for jet action on a large camp he had found just north of the River Daque fairly close to the Rhodesian border. This base had definitely not existed ten days earlier when Chris, Brian and I had been together on recce training. He chose to fly to Salisbury to brief Canberra and Hunter crews for a strike that for some reason or other did not involve FAC marking. Bill Buckle provided photographs taken for mapping purposes during the dry conditions of winter and, on these, Chris marked the extremities of the area to be struck from the target picture he had in his mind. The target of approximately 700 metres in length and 600 metres wide appeared to be a combined FRELIMO and ZANLA base.
An attack plan was formulated in which four Canberras, flown by Squadron Leader Randy Du Rand, Ian Donaldson, Mike Delport and Prop Geldenhuys would employ ‘lead-bomb technique’ to deliver two loads of nine 500-pound bombs and two loads of ninety-six 28-pound fragmentation bombs. The Canberras would be followed by four Hunters, flown by Don Northcroft, Ginger Baldwin, Rick Culpan and Jim Stagman firing 30mm cannon on the periphery of the target with re-strikes to fill in any obvious gaps that appeared within the Canberra bomb patterns.
Lead-bomb technique involved the lead bomber passing to his No 2 an aiming correction if his first bomb was not spot-on its intended strike point. I strongly opposed this method of bombing live terrorist camps because the delay between each stick of bombs gave terrorists way too much time to run clear of target. Lead-bomb technique was only suited to fixed targets such as ammunition dumps, fuel storage farms and buildings.
Nevertheless the bombs on this attack exploded on their planned positions despite the cloud base being lower than expected. This had forced navigators Doug Pasea, Bernie Vaughan, Bill Stevens and Bill Airey to make last-minute setting corrections to bombsights late in the attack run. The Hunters patterned as planned.
According to Randy du Rand’s Air Strike Report, he struck at 1259:50B with last Hunter clearing at 1303B. This meant it had taken three minutes and ten seconds to place down all weapons, which was at least two and a half minutes too long. If Hunters had led this attack, the four Canberras could have been much closer to each other and the re-strike by Hunters could have finalised the attack in less than forty-five seconds.
To add to this unsatisfactory situation, Chris realised too late that the target was displaced 200 metres north-eastward of the position he had marked on the photographs. This meant that only two-thirds of the strike was inside the actual base. The reason for Chris’s error lay in the considerable difference between the dark-green bush lines, as they appeared to him in the month of February, and the leafless trees and bush line as it appeared on photographs taken in winter. FAC marking would have eliminated the error and Chris was wiser for his mistakes.
Three days later I also made a mistake by agreeing to fly with Hugh Slatter in a Vampire T11 to mark a target for Hunters and Canberras. Aerial photos of a camp I reported had been taken from a Canberra flying at 40,000 feet the day before but it was agreed that the target lay in such flat, featureless ground that the jets would have no chance of locating it on an unmarked first-run attack. Air HQ was always keen to try new approaches in operations and had decided that I should lead the attack in a jet instead of my puddle-jumping Trojan. Having not flown in a jet aircraft for over ten years, the speed at which ground was being covered and the height at which we flew compressed the terrain I knew so well from 2,000 feet into unfamiliar perspective.
In the long dive to the target, Hugh adjusted his aiming according to my instructions and pressed the firing button for a salvo of four 60-pound squash-head rockets, but they failed to fire! Only then did I realise we had aimed at the far end of the terrorist base and not at its centre, so I transmitted an immediate correction “Drop 500”. Fortunately Rob Gaunt, having assessed where the failed rockets would have landed, picked up the correction and fired. Hugh was pulling up steeply and turning out right to allow me to look over my shoulder to see
