Thanks for the compliments, which I don’t deserve, being not much of a writer.

Talking to one of my sons reminded me of another daft thing we did, have i used the words “sand happy”, this is a good example.

But I did dream up a hairbrained scheme to stretch our range on trips away. Airliners crossing the Atlantic in those days still carried navigators who used sextants to aid navigation. I read an article in a magazine about a method of long distance navigation called “single heading”. In this the barometer readings of the departure and arrival points were used to calculate a heading which could be maintained regardless of wind changes which should mean arrival at the right place. So I tried this, although our flights were not long enough to really test it.

Now, the daft bit. On one of our trips to Malta from Kabrit we encountered the jet stream, and I got a headwind of 186 knots, about 213 mph. Kabrit to Malta was give or take 1000 miles, and our theoretical range, no wind, was 700.We had to land half way to refuel anyway, the winds at height over the Med were generally from the North West, so going back to Kabrit almost a dead tail wind. So, my bright idea, if there was such a wind when we were coming back we might be able to do it non stop. We would need to find the missing 300 miles, direct flight time would be about 1 and a half hours and there it was, 1 and a half times 200 is 300, bingo. of course that speed had been exceptional and in fact the wind had dropped to just over 100 soon after, so for safety I reckoned we would need another 100 miles. I realised that the Suez Canal was 100 miles long. I discussed this with Joe, saying if we could glide 100 miles things should work out, so to prove it, how about trying to glide the length of the Canal?

Well we had a go but couldn’t quite sensibly pull it off, we had got so low we would use too much fuel to climb to any reasonable height, so we never tried it out. Thinking about it, if we had had to land short we would be on an Egyptian airfield which was a definite no no. However, using the Meteor as a glider was an interesting experiment.