A few more historic pics

Here are the scourings of my album. I had been hoping to include this first one in the recce test, but couldn’t find it. A Supermarine Attacker on delivery to Pakistan, taken either at Benina or El Adem. A revoting aeroplane, but with direct lineage to the Spitfire via its Spiteful wings.

Now a Mossie running in to break at Kabrit. Note one can see the nose of our aircraft as I was standing up to take the pic. I generally flew without being strapped in because of all the moving around the cockpit that was necessary

Meteor NF 13 formation take off. We did love messing with formations

Because here is our Meteor T7 about to make a fool of himself. We were doing a four in box formation take off. I had the camera at the ready but was cursing him as he drew well away from us, he had forgotten that his aircraft was much lighter than the NF 13s that comprised the rest of the formation. However just as I was about to forget about a pic we started to catch him up and I snapped this

We passed him and as I took the camera from my eye I saw that his ventral tank (180 galls) was touching the runway and he then disappeared behind us. Note the remains of the ventral tank laying just behind the aircraft. Number 4 was able to safely hurdle over him. When we landed and went to inspect the result we learnt all about turbo lag. He had realised what had happened and cut the throttles to let us catch up, but did not open up soon enough and this was the result. This film stayed in my camera until after the Court of Inquiry in which he claimed that the engines suddenly lost power.

Last but by no means least, a snap of our plumbers reloading the 20 mm cannon. Incidentally the nav sat on a two inch foam cushion on the front of the bomb bay, the ammo tanks were directly below his a**e, just the job if you had gippy tummy. The guns recoiled against a semi bulkhead immediately below his feet.

My training plus my tour out there I always consider was equivalent to todays university course. I learnt nearly as much.