Hi folks!

I thought that Verity had explained the principle reasonably clearly in his book (We landed by Moonlight – recommended). You can see it ‘for real’ in the SOE film ‘Now it Can Be Told’ (as mentioned in the previous thread on SOE Daks) which is available as a DD (also highly recommended) video from the IWM Lambeth. The Lysander in the film is a 161 Sqn aircraft which carries out an agent training landing. There are a couple of other aviation scenes; a Halifax dispatch from Tempsford and a Hudson pickup. It’s almost certain that the Lysander in the film is the example today surviving in the RAF Museum; yes, it’s both a film star and a genuine ‘spyplane’. Not a lot of people know that (although it’s on the aircraft’s captionboard). 😉

Having been researching the Lysander in depth, both John Romain (with experience of the French built German equivalent, the MS-500 Cricket, previously the Fieschler Storch, as well as another Lysander) and Andy Sephton are quite rightly unable to recommend a real, full SOE style landing. What is acceptable in wartime certainly isn’t a good risk in peacetime, as Andy mentions in his extracted text previously. A number of Lysanders were damaged and lost due to this technique, both on practice and on ops. For the non-pilots among us it is the equivalent of ‘no hands’ riding your bike. On cough from the engine, one control input outside the narrow envelope, and at best you have a very broke airyplane. Today we can’t get another from the factory via the ATA…

The landing is simple in principle. Three torches held in the points of an ‘L’, and the pilot lands along the long arm towards the bottom stroke of the ‘L’ inside the letter. Obviously the ‘L’ will be much elongated from the real letter.

It wouldn’t look much in real life, because the torches were just that – low wattage battery powered hand torches which would not be visible from the ground (that being the point). Night-time is obviously ‘out’. During at least of the flying evenings, the W.W.II searchlight at Old Warden has been powered-up and used, but it wasn’t available to the Marquis!

Sometimes we just have to use our imaginations…