The 81st Entry
RAF Halton Aircraft Apprentices
Sept 1955 - July 1958

ISSUE No. 7 - MAY 2006
81st ENTRY NEWSLETTER
Editor: Mike Stanley

Phase 3 Middle East, Trinidad, Nigeria & UK by Frank Chammings The continuing story of....

We were then assigned to Abu Dhabi in the Arabian Gulf, I had to take the Bell 206 licence at the CAA Gatwick Beehive before going and I went unaccompanied in August 1972, there were two Whirlwinds, known as WS55 Series 3 in civvy street, and three Bell 206's supporting the Abu Dhabi Oil Company (ADOC) a Japanese company, offshore on Das Island we had two Bell 212's twin engined Hueys, basically a 205 with two engines, eventually they came to Abu Dhabi making a large operation supporting Abu Dhabi Marine Areas (ADMA) a BP company and Amerada Hess. Das was being used as an offshore storage area; large tanks were being built so there no room for anything else. Four Whirlwinds joined us and a half dozen 212's as oil production was stepped up. It was a large operation and we doubled the size of the hangar.I had to be flown out once to a Bell 206 which had entered a fog patch and in turning around to return to base had flown into the water, the a/c being top heavy turned over with only the floats visible above water. After being winched down, I was taken to the a/c by boat; I had to dive in and swim through the cabin with a rope so that we could recover the machine. I was tempted to put a knife through the floats to sink it but there were too many witnesses as there was an Indian prawn fishing boat alongside. The prawn boat eventually lifted the a/c up and it was secured. The next morning I opened the engine doors and the engine gearbox being made of magnesium disintegrated in front of me and as the a/c was still upside down the residue went into the sea. On putting the a/c on board a workboat we washed it with freshwater and then sat at the stern of the ship looking at the sharks fins following us. The fuselage was brought ashore at Abu Dhabi and was eventually sold to Autair of Luton and we shipped it in a container to the UK. It was very expensive to live in Abu Dhabi and we had a problem keeping engineers, the company gave us all sorts of allowances including end of contract bonus to encourage staying there, my wife went home as did many of the wives. I was then Deputy Chief Engineer on a bachelor contract of four months on and one month off in UK. I did a Bell 212 and Pratt & Whitney PT6T-3 engine course in UK in August 1973 and took my licence before returning, during the flight back the VC10 diverted to Kuwait with an engine failure, we stayed the night in the Kuwait Hilton and were put on a flight to Abu Dhabi the next evening.

Bristows saved a lot of money by sending Instructors on a course at Bell Helicopters in Dallas, Texas and then getting CAA approval for a training school at Redhill, the Instructors then using their course notes to train the rest of us. We also had an operation at Dubai down the coast and we supplied the Dubai Police Wing with engineering support, which is continuing to this day. United Arab Emirates wanted to form a consortium with us but Alan Bristow decided that they wanted too big a slice of the cake so we eventually left the scene. The company, which replaced us, is still going strong with several ex-Bristow staff. .

I left Abu Dhabi in November 1974 for some leave and flew to Trinidad on New Years Day 1975, I was leave relief for the Deputy Chief Engineer as a bachelor for four months. The operation consisted of 3 205's and a 206 flying for Amoco at Galeota on the south-east of the island, we did 5 days on and 2 days off at Port of Spain in the north-west, getting there entailed a rather hectic car journey, throwing out the empty glass bottles of Carib beer into the bush as we went, not very environmentally friendly! Part of the road went through 20 miles of a coconut grove and this was quite dangerous as nuts were falling on the road all the time. I was there for the carnival. All the steel bands had a sort of framework on wheels from which the drums were suspended and they were played as the frameworks were pushed to the centre of POS. Starting at around midnight it took all night to get there with the drums banging away all the time, I helped to push one and my ears are still ringing.

After returning to UK I was sent off, with the wife, to Port Harcourt, Nigeria in the Niger delta where we had two Wessex and one Whirlwind flying for Shell, one Wessex once had ground resonance, (the a/c would bounce from side to side) and instead of taking off, the pilot tried to shut down and the a/c fell over. We covered SAR for Shell who would send out an inflated truck inner tube and throw it out somewhere and then tell us back at base to "rescue" it. This time I was the winch man and we found the tube in the Niger and it had floated into a sort of side lagoon, the trick was to try to trap the tube in the downwash and then go down the wire to pick it up. Unfortunately, it was the same pilot who had the ground resonance and he couldn't get it right and the tube was blown into some bushes at the side, my winch operator decided to see if I could wade to the tube and dunked me into the water, I had thoughts of crocodiles etc, but I couldn't feel the bottom so we gave up and went home.

I then had a home posting at the Flying Training School at Redhill; I eventually took over as Chief Engineer with, at one time 40 small helicopters, two of which were private 206's owned by Tommy Sopwith and Douglas Bunn of Hickstead. Tommy kept his 206 at Brighton Racecourse and at one time kept a bubble car near the Battersea Heliport and travelled to his meetings in the car after landing at Battersea. Douglas is rumoured to have taken up the helicopter as he was allegedly banned from driving, he once had an engine failure and landed in the sewerage works near Epsom, he has quite an earthy manner so you can imagine when he rang me to say that he had literally landed right in the s***.

The Training School was another money saver for Bristow's, we trained our own pilots on small courses of about 5 or 6 trainees, they did 75 hrs which qualified them to fly as first officers at our large operation at Aberdeen until they obtained full commercial licences. The company had kept in contact with Sir Douglas Bader after he retired from Shell, he had a Beech Baron fixed wing registration G-APUB, and as he had a problem with the maintenance he was invited to let the Training School look after it.He dropped the a/c in and he was taken off for lunch with the Directors, when the a/c was ready I rang the Technical Director to tell Sir Douglas thinking that the Director would drive him down, however, he had to go to a meeting so he told me to drive Sir Douglas in his Daimler. We got in and I then realised that the car had an automatic gearbox, which I had never seen before; luckily Sir Douglas knew what to do so he instructed me how to drive it. I was often called to White Waltham to sort out his problems. Bristow took over BEAS which had 212's on oil rigs in the North Sea and also the Gas contract, every fortnight a helicopter flies over the main gas pipelines which supplies the whole country, we suddenly had five helicopters turn up, two Bell 47G5 and three 206's which were serviced at weekends and sent out on Mondays with the pilots carrying out the daily maintenance, I was called out several times as thing went wrong from Wales to Sheffield. The contract called for an observer to note any digging machines near the pipelines, the route marking the pipes had largely disappeared, as there was a surprising number of JCB's about. Once an observer fell sick so I volunteered to do the local run covering Surrey, Kent and Essex, we refuelled at Southend and overnighted at Woking and I then had to advise British Gas the map references of all the sightings that we had, British Gas would then send out someone to tell the JCB of the pipeline, this continues today, I don't know who has the contract now. In 1976 at the end of that fabulous summer, the 206 we had at Inverness which was due a major inspection at Redhill went u/s for an engine, I sent one up and then flew up to help the resident engineer to replace it which we did in a day or so, the pilot then invited me to fly down to Redhill with him and that flight was unforgettable, we flew over the Grampians to Newcastle, then to Paull where I saw Mike Johnson, then to our base at Gt Yarmouth, landing at Redhill in the evening. We saw all the bridges on the route down and fantastic marks in the vegetation showing the outlines of ancient building etc. and I didn't have my camera with me. One time I met up with Ron Furner at Redhill when he was contracting.

Several contracts were coming up for Bell 205's in Iran so having experience of the Bell 205 I was sent to Anchorage, Alaska to survey one for sale, I had a look at it and rang the office and was told the next morning that we had bought it. A little later the a/c was flown to upstate New York where I met it and was flown down the Hudson to New Jersey Docks where I put it on a Roll On Roll Off (RORO) ferry. A team met the a/c at Southampton and it was taken to Redhill and then flown to Iran. I then went to Voss, Norway to look at one but that was too expensive, so I then flew to Calgary, Canada via Chicago between Christmas and New Year 1977 and on returning to Chicago I had trouble with the immigration officials having only spending one night in Calgary they couldn't believe that I had enough time to survey the helicopter.

We had a lot of 212s operating in Iran after the coup circa 1979 and Alan Bristow decided to pull them all out, my mistake was to turn up one Sunday to do some overtime and suddenly I was sent home to pack a bag and to get a pilot in to fly myself and a colleague to Heathrow in a 206 to catch a flight to Luxembourg, my part was to meet the 747 cargo aircraft at Luxembourg to unload the a/c on to our trucks, it had quite a news impact at the time and James Clavell wrote the book 'Whirlwind ' which was almost the full story. At this time we had a serious problem with the Wessex ditching in the North Sea, Mike Johnson was the liaison engineer with the AAIB, all helicopters flying over the sea have beacons installed which operate underwater when the a/c ditches. Apparently the beacon indicated that the fuselage was in a sandbank and there was a choice of picking up the fuselage or the main gearbox. As it happened the MGB was brought up and sent to Redhill before going to Farnborough. The AAIB could not find anything wrong so another search was carried out to find the fuselage but by then it was covered by the sandbank. I heard the tape from the CVR and the pilot was talking normally until ..Nothing. It was later assumed that he had flown into the sea but Alan Bristow had lost confidence in the a/c so all the Wessex in Nigeria were replaced by the 212's from Iran,

.I was then put on a desk job as Area Engineer for the North Sea, Dubai and Trinidad and the Bell 212 Type Engineer, we had 30 by then and I never touched a commercial helicopter again as an engineer.

See Phase 4--- Projects.