Test Pilots’ Daring Attempts To Save Fairy Gannet

An interesting story from The Press newspaper (Christchurch, New Zealand) dated 3 December 1958.

Test Pilots’ Daring Attempts To Save Plane

LONDON, December 2.

Government officials are studying reports of an astonishing air rescue attempt by two test pilots who risked their lives to save a crippled experimental plane, according to the “Daily Mail.”

It happened over a secret test airfield at Bitteswell, near Rugby, when Harry Rayner, aged 37, flying a Royal Navy turbo-prop Gannet fitted with an experiments! engine, radioed that his undercarriage had failed.

Chief Test Pilot Tom Frost, aged 35, saw the Gannet flash past with the main nose wheel jammed half down. The main wheels were locked in the wings, so a landing attempt in that position meant disaster, the newspaper said.

“I took off in a Provost jet, but when I got up there I could see it was hopeless. I knew the main wheels would not come down unless the nose wheel could be pushed out and locked in its proper position,” Frost said.

“I radioed Harry and told him to hold the Gannet steady so that I could come up underneath and try bumping the wheel with my cockpit hood,” he said.

Twelve times Frost flew up underneath the Gannet trying to bump the wheel. Each time the nose of his jet was lying just below the Gannet’s propellers, which are one in front of the other. Rayner stopped one, the “Daily Mail” said.

Nothing happened. The wheel remained jammed, but Rayner refused to bale out.

He told Frost to land and watch him closely as he tried flying down the runway, bumping the jammed wheel on the ground even though the Gannet’s outsize propellers had only six inches ground clearance.

Again nothing happened, so Rayner decided to get the plane down as it was.

The runway was sprayed with fire-fighting foam to make it slippery. Slowly the Gannet sank on to the foam-covered runway, the wheel snapped up into the fuselage, and it landed safely.

Two pilots “had a few gins.”