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

ISSUE No.8 - AUGUST 2006
81st ENTRY NEWSLETTER
Editor: Mike Stanley

Phase 4 - Redhill based The Continuing Story of……………..Frank Chammings

Being an Area Engineer meant that I dealt with all the serious technical problems raised by the Chief Engineers of our operations, it also meant that I had to inspect the Operations to ensure that they were maintaining the standards that the Company set. In 1981 we had a Bell 205 crash at Balikpapan in East Borneo, I was phoned one Sunday morning by the Engineering Director and told to bring my passport in the next morning. We, that is the flight safety pilot, Mike Griffin, an ex-Fleet Air Arm maintenance test pilot and I flew to Singapore and arranged our visas for Indonesia and then flew to Balikpapan, East Borneo via Djakarta.

Djakarta had improved tremendously since my previous visit. We were then flown by helicopter and set down near the crash site and walked through the jungle to find the 205 lying on its port side in the trees, we were told that an orang-utan (man of the forest) was seen there the day before. The helicopter's engine had failed and as the aircraft settled in the trees the main rotor blades struck a tree and tipped it on its side and it fell about 80 feet, four people died. After taking a load of photos (you never have too many) the engine was removed and taken to Singapore.

All the trees around the helicopter were cut down to make room to under sling the fuselage out and it was pretty hairy with all these huge trees falling down around us whilst the engine was removed, and the helicopter was eventually righted and the whole damage could then be seen. The up righted photo shows how much damage was caused to the fuselage. The engine was shipped to Singapore and a rep from the engine manufacturer Lycoming and an engineer from the overhaul company Standard Engines removed the front engine cover and a load of metal fell out so the engine was sent to Lycoming in Connecticut, I followed it later and stayed there for two weeks whilst parts of the engine were examined and tested.

The cause of the failure was the drive adapter coming loose overstressing the reduction gearing stripping the final output gear, the photo shows the stripped gear. Whilst staying in Milton, Connecticut I managed to get a trip into New York and getting to the top of the Empire State Building.

Back at Redhill, there were two of us in the office but my colleague's wife had contracted cancer so I did all the overseas trips for a year or so. I'm glad to say that she survived the cancer and incidentally has since outlived my colleague. In Egypt we had helicopters at Port Said, Suez City and halfway down the Gulf of Suez at Ras Shukier. Our office was in Cairo; I was lucky to see the 'Son et Lumiere' at the Pyramids one evening. Once I was driven to Port Said and after overnighting I was driven down the road beside the Suez Canal to Suez City. The oil rig was about to move so I went out on the 212 to collect the staff who were staying in Egypt, the rig had a problem with the anchors and we had to stay the night and when we woke up in the morning we were well down the Gulf of Suez as the anchors were freed in the night. After flying back to Cairo, the aircraft at Port Said moved to Hurgada so I went down in our Islander which was based at Cairo Airport, Cairo is a nice place after the desert and the hotel was good, except when you entered the lift it was disconcerting to find that the back of the lift was the wall of the hotel, any way to save money! A few weeks later, over the wedding of Charles and Diana, I did a six week tour of our operations in Malaysia and Indonesia, during which we had a Bell 205 have a nasty landing on some logs at Duri, Sumatra where I was based some years earlier. The N2 (Rotor RPM) apparently ran down and the pilot thought he would land on this nice meadow just below him, unfortunately, the meadow was elephant grass which hid huge logs lying on the ground and he caught one of these logs and had to leave the 205 there. The problem was only an indicating failure so the pilot needn't have landed.

In 1982 the company had heard about computers and decided to computerise our stores at Redhill, I was made Computer Liaison Engineer and sent on an IT course in Fleet Street. I had to liase with the programmers and the stores to make sure we were getting it right. Nowadays you can buy programs all set up but not then. I was pleased to note that when I retired in 1999 the system was still working, but I was then told that it wasn't Y2K compliant.

After that I did some trouble-shooting with different departments, in particular with Maintenance Schedules using a very early word processor on a DEC mainframe computer.

I then did a spell arranging overhaul and repairs of our major components, this was surprisingly very interesting, especially during Farnborough shows having invitations from companies wanting our work, we dealt with about 1500 components a month spending over £750,000 on one company Fields of Croydon now taken over. I spent some time trying to improve the reliability of hydraulic pumps and generators, in particular, by getting the firms to suggest modifications, which were eventually approved by the manufacturers. I then became the Flight Safety Engineer getting all the in-flight reports of technical problems and then suggesting solutions by modification etc.

In 1991 we had a Bell 212 crash into the sea off Eket in Nigeria, off we went again, most of the crashes I had dealt with were Robinson R22's, not only did I do the investigation I had also to cost up the repairs, so it was a change to get hold of a larger helicopter which exceeded our insurance excess of £100,000. The Bell 212 helicopter was recovered from the sea and I had to ensure that there was no mechanical failure, the co-pilot was handling when the problem occurred and he died when the cockpit Perspex failed when the helicopter hit the sea and he was killed. Anyway it transpired, so it was thought that the co-pilot had inadvertently switched the engine to full throttle, the pilot didn't appreciate what was going on and thought that the subsequent yawing and noise assumed the tail rotor had failed so ditched in the sea, he must have dozed off. On the flight back to Heathrow we stopped at Kano I was half dozing when Brian Spurway appeared walking down the aisle in uniform. He invited me up front and I stayed there during the take-off. Thanks again Brian. In June that year we had a Puma ditch in the sea off Dampier, Western Oz. Again, I had to show that there were no mechanical failures by stripping out all the controls etc. The cause was pilot error by misjudging the lights on the ship they were to land on to take the harbour pilot home. The last accident I attended was back in Duri, Sumatra when the tail rotor came off, the helicopter landed in the trees with the engines still running. The exhausts were directed against a tree and as the hot air blew back into the fuel leaking all over the helicopter caught fire. During the 'landing' the main gearbox came out of its mountings and subsequently the main rotor blades had chopped the aircraft into pieces leaving a part of the nose untouched by the fire as can be seen in the photo.

The cause of this one was a cowling coming off and hitting the tail rotor causing the tail gearbox to rupture and detach. We offered 1,000,000 rupiahs reward to the local villagers and eventually the rotor was found with marks on it, which indicated which cowling had come off. We couldn't determine this before because everything was burnt out. Interestingly to me anyway, we had a look at the RH skid which was about four feet in the ground, we dug down and had to get a water pump after two feet and when we got down to four feet we found whole logs still not rotten but indicating how the soil was made up, I guess the water table kept everything in a state of preservation. When we were looking in the jungle for the missing tail rotor I once got separated from the main party and being in the tropics the sun is mainly overhead during the day so I lost my orientation for a while, when I found the trail I was surprised to find tiger tracks on the path, I quickly realised that I should find my way back. We were close to an overgrown tapioca plantation, it does grow on trees; a lot of agricultural ideas were tried in the jungle in the past but when I got there they were mostly all overgrown and abandoned. I did a few trips to survey helicopters for sale, to Heli-Swiss at Bern, to Trento Italy and I went to Milwaukee when we were computerising our technical recording as we using the same system as Midwest Express a hub airline.

I finally ended up in the Quality Assurance Department inspecting our operations, I managed to get a trip to the Falklands in 1996, and even inspecting the Royal Flight of Oman on a contract, I have noticed that several of our Entry have been involved with Quality Issues, I can only put this down to our individual standards that we have set ourselves from Halton and in our careers. As it happened I was spending my final years writing Maintenance Programmes and I carried on doing this after I retired. In 1981, the Company was asked if they had someone who could put some ex-RAF Whirlwinds on the CAA Register, I was asked but I had to do it privately, so I went to Northolt and got the three Whirlwind Mk 10's registered and they were flown out by the new owner on Permit To Fly, one is still flying in Ireland. I spent some time keeping these aircraft serviceable and when the one remaining ex-Royal Flight one became available I restored that one and it is now in the Helicopter Museum at Weston-super-Mare, I also did a Mk 7 and that is also in the Museum.

In 1994 we decided that we were going back to Devon, I had gone to school with my wife though we were in different years and we bought a house with two acres of land in Okehampton for the same price as a terraced house in East Grinstead, I then rented a flat in Horley, near Gatwick and carried on working at Redhill driving down to Devon every two weeks or so in my MGB GT LE which has now done 260,000 miles.

When I retired I was offered a month's contract to assess the spares holding of the Royal Flight of Saudi Arabia with a good daily rate of pay, so I spent the month there going to the hangar within the Royal Palace and sorting out their spares for the Bell 214ST's they operated, I really earned the money, no booze for a month. A Bell 214ST was flown on to the royal yacht every weekend, Thursday and Fridays in the Middle East, the helicopters were there to fly the royals to hospitals in the case of medical emergency. According to the pilots, the yachts sailed out beyond territorial waters and allegedly anything went with women from all over being shipped in. I must say that I have left out a lot of stories and photos that I might have included, I have written of my experiences in the belief that technically minded people, as we all were to have gone to Halton, will be interested in the helicopter industry the details of which is largely unheralded elsewhere