Strapping in, and cramming on my headset, I heard Martin’s words through the intercom:
“This thing’s running so rough it’ll hardly take off!”
He put on more power with the collective lever in his left hand, to compensate for the grumbling engine, tipped the nose in a theatrical bow to the crowd of family and friends seeing us off, put the nose into wind, and teased our helicopter, Uniform Kilo, into the air.
“You sure it isn’t just that we’re so absurdly overloaded with all this stuff we’ve packed?” I said as I waved through the perspex side windows at the crowd. Their hair was all now horizontal in our downwash.
We had had a silent compromise session while loading Uniform Kilo the night before. We knew what our maximum permissible weight was, and we needed to make sure that everything we were loading would earn its keep. I couldn’t see why Martin had been to his local mountaineering shop and bought a huge solid brass water purifier, weighing as much as several gallons of fresh water. Martin had obviously thought I was silly to bring so many spare batteries for my two video cameras, each weighing as much as a pint of engine oil. Rather than fight about it, we’d brought the lot, and as a result Uniform Kilo looked like we were using it to move house.
Our take-off was later than the 08:30 scheduled, of course, as a consequence of rather too much time spent over the bacon rolls and coffee we’d laid on for our friends and family. During the bacon rolls party there had been a kind of inertia stopping us saying something as inadequate as “Well, we’ll be off then”, when quite clearly most people there expected never to see us again. Perhaps our naivety was more obvious to them than to us.
So, with the helicopter’s engine coughing and grumbling, we climbed out from Cambridge Airport and flew south-south-west, aiming straight for an unscheduled visit to Heli Air at Denham, our maintenance base.
We set down on the pad outside the huge engineering hangar, to the evident surprise of the engineers, who clearly thought they’d seen the last of Uniform Kilo for a while, if not for ever.
They pulled all the panels off to reveal the engine, and did something plausible to the ignition timing.
It made me think how far we were about to stray from civilisation, as defined by the presence of nearby Robinson engineers. As pilots, we’re not even allowed to take a screwdriver to any part of Uniform Kilo, so this complicated machine was going to have to start off perfect and stay that way, certainly once we left Greece in a few days’ time.
John Mikealakis, Chief Engineer at Denham, talked to me with only his legs visible from the engine compartment:
“I see you couldn’t agree on what stuff to leave behind!”.
He’d been supervising personally the preparation on Uniform Kilo for most of two months, checking every component, and fitting special hot weather filters to everything that needed filtering. He was clearly perplexed at the rough running, and alarmed at our huge payload of personal stuff.
“You have remembered how hot the climates are you’re flying through?” he asked. The hotter the air, the thinner it is, and the less weight it carries for the same amount of power.
He wished us luck, rather gravely as we climbed back in.
Putting the engine right did not in itself take all that long, but by the time we were back from Denham on the western fringes of Greater London towards our intended course over the Thames Estuary, we were two hours late.
With the sprawl of London spread out on our right, we passed very close to the point where the year before I had survived an engine failure in my Jetranger helicopter. As we passed by, it was a reminder to me of how quickly and unexpectedly things can go wrong in a helicopter.
With the sprawl of London spread out on our right, we passed very close to the point where the year before I had survived an engine failure in my Jetranger helicopter. As we passed by, it was a reminder to me of how quickly and unexpectedly things can go wrong in a helicopter.
I had been flying to see my sister-in-law, with my wife and young son. It had been a perfect flying day, with cool still air, blue sky, bright sunshine, and forward visibility across three counties in every direction. Suddenly, with no warning, the Jetranger had lurched violently, the nose had tipped up, and every warning light in the cockpit had come on. Lowering the lever to enable the machine to glide in autorotation, I had looked around me for a suitable field to land in. Below me had been a mixture of dense housing, and green fields, and, while calling an urgent Mayday, I had chosen one quickly, and aimed for it.
Twenty seconds later I had come over the hedge, in the right place, at the right height, but too fast. The field had been too short for me to stop in without hitting the hedge at the far end, so, still gliding with no power, I had lifted up over the second hedge, passed over a road, and found myself over a muddy field, sloping gently away from me towards the edge of a housing estate. Not wanting to end up in someone’s back garden at 120 mph, I had turned sharp left. Ahead of me now, up another slight slope, I had been able to see a huge set of electricity pylons. Knowing I just had to put an end to this situation before the pylons put an end to me, I had stood the helicopter on its tail to stop it. With the last gasp of energy in the main rotors, I had put the skids firmly down into the mud, and looked up to see the pylons and cables towering right above me, knowing I was lucky to be alive.
Twenty seconds later I had come over the hedge, in the right place, at the right height, but too fast. The field had been too short for me to stop in without hitting the hedge at the far end, so, still gliding with no power, I had lifted up over the second hedge, passed over a road, and found myself over a muddy field, sloping gently away from me towards the edge of a housing estate. Not wanting to end up in someone’s back garden at 120 mph, I had turned sharp left. Ahead of me now, up another slight slope, I had been able to see a huge set of electricity pylons. Knowing I just had to put an end to this situation before the pylons put an end to me, I had stood the helicopter on its tail to stop it. With the last gasp of energy in the main rotors, I had put the skids firmly down into the mud, and looked up to see the pylons and cables towering right above me, knowing I was lucky to be alive.
Twenty seconds later I had come over the hedge, in the right place, at the right height, but too fast. The field had been too short for me to stop in without hitting the hedge at the far end, so, still gliding with no power, I had lifted up over the second hedge, passed over a road, and found myself over a muddy field, sloping gently away from me towards the edge of a housing estate. Not wanting to end up in someone’s back garden at 120 mph, I had turned sharp left. Ahead of me now, up another slight slope, I had been able to see a huge set of electricity pylons. Knowing I just had to put an end to this situation before the pylons put an end to me, I had stood the helicopter on its tail to stop it. With the last gasp of energy in the main rotors, I had put the skids firmly down into the mud, and looked up to see the pylons and cables towering right above me, knowing I was lucky to be alive.
Twenty seconds later I had come over the hedge, in the right place, at the right height, but too fast. The field had been too short for me to stop in without hitting the hedge at the far end, so, still gliding with no power, I had lifted up over the second hedge, passed over a road, and found myself over a muddy field, sloping gently away from me towards the edge of a housing estate. Not wanting to end up in someone’s back garden at 120 mph, I had turned sharp left. Ahead of me now, up another slight slope, I had been able to see a huge set of electricity pylons. Knowing I just had to put an end to this situation before the pylons put an end to me, I had stood the helicopter on its tail to stop it. With the last gasp of energy in the main rotors, I had put the skids firmly down into the mud, and looked up to see the pylons and cables towering right above me, knowing I was lucky to be alive.
I shivered with the memory of it all, as we flew on.
A headwind had got into its stride, which would delay us further. And we had used up extra fuel, which meant that we may not have the range to make our first fuel-stop in Germany.
Not a great start, I reflected, but I was sure we could catch up a couple of hours over the next seven weeks.
We set course for the Channel coast, passing overhead the airport at Biggin Hill. To my right, where Kent meets south east London, I could see Beckenham, where I had grown up.
It had been an idyllic childhood, following the 1960’s model of a father out to work, and a mother who stayed at home and looked after the children. Beckenham in those days had still been a post-Edwardian oasis of un-made roads and impressive merchants’ houses with rooms in the attic for the servants. In this suburban paradise,I’d been free to wander off after breakfast, to make camps and have elaborate adventures in the generous parks, and return home, grubby and tired, only when food was needed.
As I looked down, I could see how Beckenham had changed since then. The Edwardian houses had been pulled down to be replaced by blocks of flats to accommodate London commuters. The High Street, when I knew it, had had several butchers, lots of bakers, and probably even a candlestick maker. Alongside them had been one of the original version of Sainsbury’s, complete with men in white coats and boaters cutting cheese with wire and wrapping your stuff in grease-proof paper. Now the shops are all restaurants offering a glimpse of Italy or Bombay, and Estate Agents.
Just south of Biggin Hill, we picked up the long railway which cuts a dead straight line for twenty miles through the greenery of Kent, and followed it until we could see Beachy Head. Checking our fuel gauges, we called London Information to say we were coasting out, and turned out over the Channel heading for Calais.
The sea crossing took a quarter of an hour, and it reminded me of all the water we were going to have to cross in the next seven weeks. Half way across, the steel grey water of the Channel looked cold and merciless. The engine’s note and rhythm seemed to vary minutely, and I couldn’t be sure whether this was my brain playing tricks on me, reminding me of how personally vulnerable we were to mechanical failure mid-Channel.
Martin kept the inflatable liferaft on his knee, gripping the tag marked “pull here to inflate” with his left hand, while holding the map with his right.
“Make sure that thing doesn’t go off inside the cockpit” I said quietly out of the side of my mouth, in case I made Martin jump and pull the cord accidentally. I reckoned the inflated raft was probably twice the size of the inside of the cockpit.
On reaching the French coast with it’s upturned wartime concrete gun emplacements still littering the sand dunes, Martin took the controls and turned east. I did a calculation of our groundspeed and endurance, and could see that Germany was a write-off for fuel. We would run out of fuel completely about 30 miles short of the airfield, which would not be a great start, so I suggested to Martin that he should head for a small airport used by gliders not far from Ghent in Belgium.
“They should have the right sort of fuel”, I told him, reading from the directory. I gave him a revised course to steer, and we landed an hour later, our eyes everywhere for landing gliders.
This little rural airfield seemed rather untypical of Belgium. It was a huge grass meadow, set in a range of pretty grassy hills, bathed in sunshine, and full of interesting and charming people having fun. A million miles from the usual impression we British have of Belgium as a dull flat landscape dotted with grey industrial cities connected by crude motorways permanently damp from the greasy drizzle.
We found the right fuel, but, embarrassingly, we had no way of paying for it. We had not planned for a stop in Belgium and so we had no Belgian cash with us. When landing, we had assumed that we’d be able to pay by credit card. “Never assume anything” was rapidly being reinforced as my personal motto. The airport for some reason refused to accept credit cards, or even other currencies, and there was nowhere to change money. It took more than an hour’s negotiation in three languages humbly and gratefully to secure an invoice for later payment in Belgian francs, and get away, now more than three hours late.
“Did you see that smear of oil by the exhaust pipe?” Martin asked me, as he restarted the engine. The clue had been two tiny spots of it on the concrete at the fuelling area, but the source of it was obscured by the panels around the engine. I wondered if it mattered.
One of our original objectives for the day was to fly to, and possibly to land at, a dot on the map called Imst in Austria. This small mountain town was where the charity SOS Childrens Villages had built their first village for the care of orphaned children soon after the second world war. Their British fundraisers, headquartered in Cambridge, had suggest we drop in for a photo-opportunity. Imst is about 30 miles west of Innsbruck, and to reach it we would have to clock up another 500 miles, which meant four or five hours. With the weather looking increasingly miserable, and with nightfall approaching, this now looked unlikely, and we began to feel that it would be better to settle for much less than that.
The least we could aim for was to reach the small town of Treschklingen in southern Germany, about 400 miles ahead. Here we had arranged to have lunch with my friend the Baron, Freiherr von Gemmingen Hornberg and his wife Freifrau Gudrun, friends since my teenage days. I had worked on the Baron’s poultry farm in successive summers. I had drunk a lot of beer, some even for breakfast, while trying to learn a lot of German.
The route from Ghent, clumsily redrawn on my knee in the cockpit, took us through cloud and continuous rain to the Rhine above Cologne, where we turned south to follow this huge river up to Mannheim, and its confluence with the Neckar. Great industrial landscapes emerged from the misty rainscape immediately ahead of us, and we were rocked by the slowly rising heat from massive power stations. Forced by the low grey rainclouds to fly low along the river, we had to dodge the hazards presented by the industrial might below us; high tension cables hanging sullenly across our path, and alarmingly high chimneys giving out heavy metallic smells.
At Mannheim we turned left, and Martin flew low up the wooded Neckar valley in the direction of Heilbronn, and some miles short of there landed at the tiny hilltop airfield at Mosbach, about 10 miles from Treschklingen. Four hours late.
The Baron and the Baroness were patiently waiting at the airport to welcome us, with their son Götz. They were completely relaxed that we’d made them wait so long. I suppose they were used to me in a way; as a teenager I’d always turned up late at their place, 1500 miles from home, on a oily old Triumph motorbike, completely out of petrol and in need of a good bath. So not much change there, then, I reflected.
They gave us a sumptuous traditional German supper, and as much beer as even Martin could drink. We talked long into the night with their sons Götz and Frido about old times. Frido told us a refreshing joke about the way every German who ever attended one of Hitler’s great popular rallies will tell you that he had put his right arm up in front of him to raise a point of moral objection with the words “Er, hang on a minute” but his voice had been lost in the din of others saluting their Leader with a remarkably similar gesture.
Full of beer and Wurst, I was overwhelmed by the nostalgia of it all. The Baron’s lovely house was all so exactly the same as when I’d last left it when I was eighteen. It was unsettling. The third stair up on the heavy oak staircase still creaked to defy your attempts to arrive back in the small hours without waking the whole house, the same antlered hunting trophies, the same lavatory paper holder with “Leck mich am Arsch” inscribed cheerfully in authentic Gothic. Baron Gustav had always been a notable figure in some sort of LMAA society; it seemed to have some connection with Goethe from what I gathered, but I never really worked it out.
I went to bed feeling more than a little anxious. So many things were not going right. The engine ought to have been running faultlessly after its lengthy overhaul, which seemed a rather basic requirement. And it now appeared to be leaking oil. The timetable was in shreds, which hinted at a complete re-write of all our planning if it carried on like this. We had had no useable currency for our first fuel stop, which had made us feel like real beginners. The day was supposed to have ended up several hundred miles farther on, which felt like an impossible distance to catch up. We had inconvenienced the Baron and Baroness, which was rude. Without their kindness in putting us up for the night we might easily have found ourselves kipping down in the corner of a damp and freezing hangar, which would have forced us to confront the fact that despite the fact that we’d packed Uniform Kilo with enough survival stuff to climb the Eiger we hadn’t actually brought any bedding.
Things would have to improve from now on or the whole trip was going to collapse around our ears.
PREVIOUS: Chapter one – In the begining
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