Flying Scot by Air Commodore Alastair Mackie Cbe Dfc*

Author:Air Commodore Alastair Mackie Cbe Dfc*
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783036097
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

I spent the weekends at the house we had been given at Finningley, the station, permanent yet again, where my squadron, numbered after the famous and long-established First World War unit 101, was to form. The airfield had just been refurbished and there was rubble and rubbish everywhere. As Gregor and I bicycled across it towards the adjoining village, he fell, revealing as I picked him up a huge cut in his thigh from a bit of airfield lighting broken glass. I waved down a van in the middle distance, which came to the rescue and took us to the sick bay. As the doctor sewed it up, it proved to be no more than a flesh wound but there was a lot of blood. I fainted, waking to the doctor’s stentorian cry to the orderly to, ‘Do something about the wing commander.’ Rachel, of course, was present as the twentieth stitch went in. Her maternal, ‘What do you say?’ got a moving filial, ‘Thank you’ from Gregor.

The house was a pre-war married quarter for a senior officer. Fortunately, we had a batman to help with the huge task of keeping it in order. We were also blessed with a good school in Doncaster for Gregor. For David, now ensconced at Ardingly, I was able to keep up the three-weekly parental visits in an Anson borrowed from Waddington, flying to the MDA at Thorney Island and going by train to the school’s nearest town, Haywards Heath.

In July I left my job to become Frank Dodd’s student on the Vulcan, using my last few Canberra trips to try out the new, semi-automated radar descent instrument landing scheme (ILS), precursor to hands-off versions that later came into general use. With Frank’s help I found the Vulcan amenable and a joy to fly. The brilliant control system, so sensitive that it had to be fitted with artificial ‘feel’, made pilots forget its enormous size and although far more complicated technically than any aircraft I had come across before, simple once one got the hang. In unbounded exhilaration, I could hardly believe my luck. Never mind the career, I thought, just let me get on with the job.

My inheritance was no mean one. The first role of 101 Squadron was night bombing in the FE2B, a canvas-and-string stalwart of the First World War, under the command of the sonorously named Major the Honourable Twistelton-Wykeham-Fiennes. Thereafter mothballed, 101 re-formed at the famous Norfolk base, Bircham Newton, in 1928. It was equipped first with Sidestrand and later Overstrand aircraft, still partly canvas and with wires instead of string. The Sidestrand sported a scarf ring, a horizontal circular mount for swivelling the Vickers gas-operated machine gun by hand. The Overstrand had the first Boulton Paul power-operated turret, later armed with four Browning machine guns to become a standard fitment. Named after Norfolk villages, the aircraft survive in silver modelled form amongst the squadron’s treasures.

Re-equipped with Blenheim light bombers, 101 took part in the notoriously dangerous daylight raids envisaged as feasible by the pre-war air staff but soon abandoned because of crushing losses.

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