SINGAPORE 1972-75

Singapore. A pleasant change from Bahrein, spending 2.5yrs in the far east, complete with my family (wife Jill, David and Lindsey). This poor quality picture is of me about to take a winch launch into the wild blue yonder in a rather old glider with pretty low performance in the glide. But, it got us airborne......











This one is of me standing in the rear door of a RNZAF Bristol Freighter that we managed to 'borrow' from the squadron then resident at Tengah. The nose of the aircraft you can see inside the Freighter is an Indian-built 'Rohini' glider which one of the members of the ANZUK GLiding Club had found lying in a hangar at Ipoh, Malaysia. We had negotiated to be given it but had no way of getting it back to Singapore, until someone asked the RNZAF if they had anything going up that way. To cut a long story short, I flew up to Ipoh via Kuantan (vicious fighting there in WWII) and met the crew we had sent up by road, and after a bit ok juggling managed to get the very large and heavy glider tied down in the Freighter and we flew it back to SIngapore. Now, there were only two people on board the Freighter, me and the pilot so when I saw the RNZAF pilot chappie come down the stairs from the flight deck, I thought "hullo, so who is flying this kite?" As he passed by to the rear of the kite, pilot says casually "just going to tuhe loo - won't be but a few minutes". I got out of my seat and strolled casually to the stairs (rather quickly, actually) and shot up onto the flight deck to be confronted with an empty cabin and 'George', the auto-pilot in sole command of the aircraft. I checked the panel, saw that we were at 2,500 feet above endless jungle and looked for the auto-pilot disengage switch in case 'George' suddenly went mad - a not altogether unkown ocurrence in those days. And there I stayed until the real pilot reappeared..... SInce I was flying a lot in those days I wasn't frightened or even much concerned, just very, very cautious in trusting my life to a mindless machine which, although capable of flying the kite much better than a human being, could easily throw a sudden tantrum and dump us upside down into the jungle........


The Rohini hadn't flown for several years, so we carried out a pretty thorough inspection of everything, esepcially inside the laminar-flow wings before deciding that it was airworthy This picture is of Ray (barking-mad) Parkin, our inspiring Chief Flying Instructor taking a last few pictures before getting the kite airborne for the first time. We didn't use parachutes in those days but, for some strange reason Ray thought he ought to wear one for the air-test. It all went well, other than that we missed the bit in the Pilot's Notes for the kite where it said "be aware that deploying full spoilers restricts the rearward movement of the control column". Accordingly, when Ray tried to round out for landing with full spoilers he discovered that he couldn't pull back on the column far enough to round out.....
Happily, he got away with it, as did the Rohini. I only flew it a couple of times and didn't much like it. It was very heavy and for me, well over 6 feet tall, cramped. I much preferred the Slingsby Sedberg, Swallow, T31 and Tutor.