Algerian events – past and present - Tony Cunnane's Afterthoughts

Written on 30 August 2011

Some of the Gaddafi family have just been reported to have arrived, apparently unexpectedly, in Algeria.

If true, and you never know with stories about the Libyan leader, I wonder if they are receiving as warm a welcome from the Algerians as my crew did when we arrived in that country 50 years ago this week. We dropped in, also unexpectedly, in the middle of a long-forgotten war, in a 4-engined Hastings transport aircraft that had only two engines still working. If you have not already read that story on my RAF Years website it starts here.

There is another, even more remarkable, story on this Afterthoughts website (here) about an eventful meeting between an RAF Valiant nuclear bomber and a USAF B-47 nuclear bomber over Algerian skies in the late 1950s when they were both circling in opposite directions around a nuclear mushroom cloud created by a French weapons test.