Algerian Incident - 2 - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

This is the second part of a three-part flying story from 49 years ago that I have never written about, nor spoken about, since it happened.

The return flight to UK was much more eventful. After departing Gibraltar we flew eastwards across the Mediterranean but after about 90 minutes one of the Hastings’ 4 engines failed with a low oil pressure problem. The captain informed the crew that he was returning to Gibraltar and we were all quite pleased at the prospect of at least one more day on The Rock. I transmitted the appropriate message on HF (Morse) to inform Gibraltar that we were returning for a precautionary asymmetric landing. There was no need to declare an emergency because the Hastings would fly quite happily on three engines.

We were well outside VHF radio range of Gibraltar so I used the HF frequency 5695.5 khz, the daytime channel for the RAF flight watch ‘guard’ channel which provided reliable Morse communications around the world. There were quite a few RAF stations always listening out on that frequency including Gibraltar, Cyprus, Gloucester, Prestwick, Uxbridge, St Mawgan (Cornwall) and even RAF bases in the Middle and Far East. They all had point-to-point communications with each other so if the specific station a signaller called did not answer immediately, one of the others did. In my case, St Mawgan answered my call and acknowledged that we were returning to Gibraltar.

A few minutes later the Captain called me on the intercom and told me to send out a Pan emergency message to say that a second engine had failed and that we were unable to maintain height (we were at about 9,000 feet at the time). We now had one unserviceable engine on each side. The Captain told me and the rest of the crew that his intentions were to make an emergency landing at the nearest suitable airfield on the Spanish mainland. He said he would let me know what airfield that was when he had chosen it.

I started to write out the message I had to send and while I was doing that one of the navigators thrust a life-saving jacket into my hands and told me to put it on straightaway. Every RAF signaller had his favourite mnemonic for remembering the format of distress messages – after all we were very rarely called upon to transmit such a message. There were two mnemonics in general use, PAT HAS A TIP and PATCASATNI. I always remembered PATCASATNI: Position And Time; Course And Speed; aircraft Altitude; Type of emergency; Number of souls on board; Intentions of the captain. A Mayday message in Morse started with ‘SOS’ three times, a Pan message started with ‘XXX’ repeated three times, but otherwise the contents followed the same standard format.

My Pan message, in which I stated that the Captain’s intentions would follow shortly, was acknowledged first by St Mawgan and then several other RAF stations chipped in briefly just to acknowledge that they too had heard the message. There was no reply from Gibraltar but that caused me no surprise because we were within the HF skip distance (too technical to go into here!). I informed the Captain and he said that there were no airfields in Spain within reach (the mountains were in the way) and that he was heading for Oran in Algeria. Here is a link to a Google map of the area.needed to know the 4-letter ICAO abbreviation for Oran but no-one on board had the necessary document to look it up so I transmitted my complete message again, this time stating that our intention was to land at Oran. That caused some confusion amongst the ground operators on the HF band because Oran in Morse is the same as ORAN which could have been an ICAO 4-letter abbreviation for an airfield – but wasn’t! The captain then broke in on the intercomm to tell me to be prepared to upgrade the emergency to Distress/SOS as he was not sure we could reach Oran. I then transmitted the message again stating ‘Oran in Algeria’ in plain language. By this time we were getting very low and I could see through the pilot’s windscreen the North African coast appearing through a heavy haze.

Suddenly the co-pilot called out that we had company: there were two French fighters alongside and they guided us the final few miles to the runway. We were not entirely surprised to see the fighters because our pilots had been unable to talk to anyone on their VHF radio and we all knew that there was a war going on in Algeria and that Algerian airspace was prohibited to all non-French aircraft. As Wikipedia currently puts it: “There were 210 French nuclear tests from 1960 until 1996. 17 of them were done in the Algerian Sahara between 1960 and 1966, starting in the middle of the Algerian War (1954–1962).”

The captain put the aircraft undercarriage and landing flaps down at the very last minute and the aircraft flopped down safely, but heavily, on the runway at Oran La Senia; we were heavy because we were carrying fuel for the flight to UK but no means of jettisoning what was now a considerable surplus. I was still repeating the Pan message over and over again on the HF and on the final time I added that we were safely down and that I was closing down HF watch.

Click here to go to the final part of this story