Tony Cunnane's RAF Years

I clearly remember arriving in my car at No 3 Flying Training School in late April 1966. A few miles north of RAF Dishforth, which had its main runway adjacent to, and parallel to, the A1 trunk road, there was a right turn with a small and easily missed signpost to RAF Leeming. In our joining instructions we had been warned that this was the only entrance to the RAF Station and that it was nowhere near either Leeming Village or Leeming Bar, both of which were at the northern extremities of the base. After turning off the A1, I pulled into the grass verge as a Jet Provost Mark 3 roared very low overhead and disappeared out of view - Leeming runway 34 was just beyond, hidden by trees. After a short while watching the jets and marvelling that in a week or two I could be flying solo over that very spot, I continued along the twisting minor road, through the village of Gatenby, and eventually arrived at the main guard room.

The regime at Leeming was much more relaxed than at South Cerney. I found the Jet Provost easier to fly than the Chipmunk. No more tail-wheel three-point landings on bumpy grass and, of course, the instructor and student were seated side by side which seemed much more friendly. My instructor was Tony Ryle. He arranged for me to make my first solo at RAF Topcliffe, then the Air Electronics School. It happened on 2 June 1966. I doubt if there was anyone there who knew me from my Air Signaller and AEO days and, since I didn’t get out of the cockpit, there was no-one to see me going off solo wearing a flying suit with an AE brevet on it.

The flying in the first few months of the course was all on the early JP Mark 3. My first lesson in the much more powerful JP4 (2,500 lbs of thrust compared to the Mk3’s 1750 lbs) was not until 9 August. (Click here to view another page of my log book.) The difference in performance was quite startling. The Mark 4 syllabus included an introduction to high altitude flying at up to 35,000 feet (approximately 10,600 metres). The JP was unpressurised and the oxygen equipment we used was designed to provide 100% oxygen at a maximum height of 30,000 feet. Flying at 35,000 feet unpressurised meant that both student and instructor were getting less than 100% oxygen and were, therefore, mildly hypoxic. I should mention here that in the 1960s and into the 1970s the RAF used the incorrect term ‘anoxic’. According to the medics, anoxia means a total lack of oxygen while what we experienced was hypoxia, an oxygen deficiency. It took many years for older aircrew like me to get used to referring to hypoxia instead of anoxia.

Above:
No 21 Cse photograph taken at the start of the course. My last photo wearing an AEO brevet, although I could not have been certain of that when the photograph was taken, and the white lanyard denoting the Senior Student.

Below:
No 21 Cse photograph taken at the end of the course - the first photograph showing us wearing our RAF pilot's wings. There are more of us in this photograph than in the one above because we gained students from other courses during our stay at Leeming (and lost some!)

One day on a solo trip in a JP4 I experienced some severe vibration during my aerobatic sequence. After landing I'm sure my instructor thought I had merely performed, albeit accidently, a high 'g' stall. I knew I had not done that and I denied it vociferously. I was sent up in the same aircraft with the Unit Test Pilot the next day after no fault had been found with the aircraft. After I had done my bit without incident the UTP then put the aircraft into a maximum speed dive. At exactly 400 knots, the maximum speed permitted, he applied 6g to pull out of the dive and the canopy exploded with an enormous bang. Large pieces of the perspex canopy smashed into my right shoulder and caused me quite a bit of pain as we returned to base without further incident. The engineers decided that the canopy seal had been wrongly fitted. When I had experienced severe vibration at 5g loading, the canopy seal had probably weakened; when we dived at 400kts with the UTP in control the canopy simply gave way altogether on the pull out of the dive. I was vindicated - but sore! The incident is recorded, briefly, in my flying logbook.

Before carrying out any flying at high altitude (above 20,000 feet) all students had to undergo decompression chamber training to familiarise ourselves with the insidious effects of hypoxia. I had to go even though I had done the training several times before when, as an AEO on Valiants, we regularly flew up to 45,000 ft – but with better oxygen equipment. I used the word insidious because hypoxia creeps up on you. Most pilots describe the initial symptoms as feeling drunk, happy or carefree, with perhaps a tingling in the fingers and a tendency to giggle!. If not wearing flying gloves, you would notice your fingernails going blue. Some aircrew notice nothing unusual at all – until it is too late. Should you remain hypoxic in the air for more than a few minutes you are likely to lose consciousness. For this reason, the time spent between 30,000 and 35,000 feet, the maximum height permitted, with two pilots on board was limited to 10 minutes because of limitations in the JP4's oxygen system. On solo flights, whether the solo pilot was an instructor or a student, flight above 30,000 ft was prohibited altogether. I had to cause to remember this before I finished my course at Leeming - see the next chapter.

Why did the training syllabus include flights at 35,000 feet? Not just because it was possible. The aim was to demonstrate that for a given aircraft the rate of roll increases at high level but the rate of turn decreases. That is a technical subject, to do with the rarefied air and coefficients of lift, which has no place on my web site! After the painfully slow climb from 30,000ft to 35,000ft the instructor had to demonstrate those effects by a series of rapid rolls with full aileron deflection, much faster than achievable at lower altitudes, followed by a demonstration of how easy it is to g-stall the aircraft in even a gentle level turn. Before finally leaving 35,000 ft the instructor used to put the aircraft into a steep dive and then at about 33,000 ft pull up into a loop. Invariably, because of the reduced rate of turn I mentioned above (a climb being a turn in the vertical axis), the aircraft would run out of airspeed before the top of the loop could be reached and then the instructor had to demonstrate the recovery from the vertical or near vertical. The technique was to centralise all the controls, allow gravity to take over, wait for the aircraft to fall into a nose down attitude, let it accelerate to flying speed, and then ease out of the ensuing dive. For the first time I viewed North Yorkshire from 35,000 feet whilst pointing vertically down towards the ground with virtually no forward speed and zero g. What an amazing view! We then did exactly the same thing again with the student flying the aircraft and by then our 10 minute limit above 30,000 feet had been reached.

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