Black Oxygen!

‘You’d better close down quickly, Skipper’, said the crew chief breathlessly a few seconds later. ‘There’s a bloody great hole burnt in the top of the wing.’

Masirah is a name that will conjure up memories for many ex-RAF personnel. It is an island at the southern end of what used to be called either the Persian or Arabian Gulf and is now in these enlightened times simply The Gulf. Part of the Sultanate of Oman, it used to be considered one of the less desirable RAF overseas postings: hot, humid, dusty, nowhere to go and little to do when you had time off. Working hours tended to be geared to transiting aircraft arrival and departure times. I have been to and through Masirah many times in my RAF career and I gradually became quite attached to the place.

RAF Masirah used to be an important staging post between the Middle East and Gan, an idyllic coral island in the Maldives, which was itself the final staging post before Singapore. Gan was well-known to the RAF long before the Maldives became known to thousands of holiday-makers. Those were the heady days when we British had bases all the way out to the Far East.

Apart from Masirah’s natural disadvantages, which in those days were admitted as such even by the islanders themselves, an addi­tional consideration from the air­crew point of view was that in the 1960s and 70s there was only one runway. That runway was a mere 7,500 feet long which was just about long enough for VC-10 transport aircraft and anything smaller but barely long enough for the Mark 1 Victor tankers that I flew in the 1970s. It is all different now. Masirah is a thriving place with two full-length modern runways at right angles to each other, acres of concrete, modern housing and roads, satellite television, and ….. but this tale dates back to 1972.

My crew on 214 Squadron had been selected for a Lone Ranger to Singapore. A Lone Ranger flight was one where a 5-man V-force crew plus an engineering crew chief flew off on their own and looked after themselves down the route at the staging posts. Lone Rangers were intended to provide crews with experience of operating on their own away from base in case that should ever have been operationally necessary. The five aircrew and the crew chief were supposed to do all their own servicing and refuelling with only the minimum of outside help.

In practice, Lone Rangers were great fun. They took the crew away from the restrictions of home base and allowed quite junior officers to make far-reaching and unilateral decisions. Of course, in those days there were no satellite telephones. Communications with UK were usually by means of telegraphic signal messages and it often took over 24 hours to get a reply to routine enquiries.

A 4-stage Lone Ranger to Singapore was a great prize and we were the envy of the rest of the Victor crews. Our route would take us from Marham in Norfolk to Akrotiri in Cyprus on the first day, then on to Masirah, Gan and Singapore on succeeding days, roughly five hours flying on the first, second and fourth days, but only about 4 hours on the third day from Masirah to Gan. Four days for the outward journey, two days off in Singapore for wining, dining and duty-free shopping, and then four days back to UK. The only difference on the way back was that we would stage through Dubai in the United Arab Emirates rather than Masirah. This was because in our Mark 1 Victor we could not take off from Masirah’s short runway with sufficient fuel to reach Akrotiri. Dubai had an enormous 13,000 feet long runway stretching out into the limitless desert even in 1972, long before it became one of the favourite duty-free airports in the Middle East. We could safely uplift a maximum fuel load from Dubai on the hottest of days. In 1972 Dubai was a good place for a Lone Ranger transit because it was manned entirely by civilians; RAF crews really did have to look after themselves – as we found out to our cost on the way home.

The aircraft they gave my crew, XH667, was the most disliked aircraft on the inventory of 214 Squadron at RAF Marham. There was nothing really wrong with it – as a matter of fact I always enjoyed flying it – but it was a very early model. It had non-standard fuel and electrical systems and crews tended to get out of practice with its particular idiosyncrasies. It had only two in-flight refuelling hoses whilst the more modern tankers had three, so 667 was less useful for tanking operations and that was why it was often used for pilot training and for lone rangers.

On day three, after a pleasant but quiet night in Masirah, we arrived at the flight line where our aircraft was parked at about 0700 planning on an 0800 departure. Unlike airline departures which are push-back times, our departures were wheels-off-the-ground times and we always tried to achieve the scheduled time to the nearest second. In those days the Flight Line consisted of a few tin huts and a large expanse of poor quality concrete surrounded on three sides by desert. An early start before the temperature started to climb too much, was essential. We needed to uplift as much fuel as possible for our long flight down the Indian Ocean to the tiny speck that was Gan. Taking off in a high temperature on a short runway required a delicate balancing operation. In the Victor Mark 1 we quite often took off in circumstances where our take-off speed was higher than our stopping speed. In other words, there was an awkward and worrying gap in the middle of the take-off run where, had we had an engine failure or other major emergency, we were going too fast to stop in the remaining runway and yet not fast enough to get airborne. Fortunately civilian airliners are not allowed to operate under such conditions! As a matter of fact, I don’t think any RAF aircraft operate under such conditions these days either.

In accordance with normal practice, our own crew chief supervised the engine starting procedures from outside the aircraft whilst connected to the aircraft’s intercom by means of a long lead so that he could talk to me. Once all four engines were running he unplugged himself and started to climb into the aircraft to occupy his seat behind the navigator. Suddenly I heard his voice on the intercom again.

‘Hang on a minute, Captain’, he called urgently. ‘There’s someone pulling my leg.’

Funny time for a joke, I thought. But it was no joke. Two airmen had been on the dispersal watching us start engines. It was so boring on Masirah that watching a Victor start engines was probably one of the highlights of their day. I learned later that one of those two airmen had just arrived on the island on posting from the UK while the other was the old hand showing the new boy around. New Boy had noticed some black smoke issuing forth from the top surface of the Victor’s starboard wing and he had pointed this out to Old Hand.

‘That’s quite normal’, said Old Hand confidently. ‘It’s the liquid oxygen blowing off.’

But New Boy knew that the Victor Mark 1 did not use liquid oxygen and in any case who had ever heard of black oxygen? He had grabbed hold of my crew chief’s leg just as he was disappearing inside the cabin.

‘You’d better close down quickly, Skipper’, said the crew chief breathlessly a few seconds later. ‘There’s a bloody great hole burnt in the top of the wing.’

I needed no second bidding – you do not wait around too long when a tanker aircraft is on fire. Pausing only to give Air Traffic Control an emergency call on the radio to let them know that we were apparently on fire, I ordered the crew to abandon the aircraft. But I was talking to myself – the three rear crew members and my co-pilot were already on their way! I pulled the four engine throttles back through the locking gate thereby shutting off the fuel supply. After rapidly disconnecting myself from my ejection seat, I switched off everything else in sight before following my crew out onto the dispersal where we all ran to a safe position upwind.

The fire crews arrived within seconds and deployed their equipment in a most efficient and expeditious manner. The firemen seemed rather disappointed to find that the aircraft was not going up in flames. However, there was indeed a hole burnt through the top surface of the starboard wing. I dissuaded the firemen from emptying their entire supply of foam down the hole and thereby I sank even lower in their estimation!

When the danger had clearly passed, we all climbed bravely onto the wing to view the damage. By that time most of the station’s personnel had heard the emergency messages on the Tannoy system and had turned out to watch. The hole in the wing measured about 8 inches by 8 inches and was right on top of number 3 engine – the inboard one. We guessed, correctly as it later transpired, that an engine turbine blade had broken loose and smashed its way to freedom through the wing surface.

I sent a priority signal off to our UK base to tell them what had happened and several hours later back came a message telling us to search for the broken blade so that it could be returned to the manufacturers for analysis. The trouble was that no-one had any idea how fast the blade would have been travelling when it broke free and so we had no idea how far it might have travelled laterally on its journey under the influence of a not inconsiderable centripetal force. Since we were parked literally right on the edge of the desert, searching for a nine-inch piece of metal was a bit of a thankless task and we made only a token search.

But that was later. I thanked the two airmen for their vigilance and that was when I learned that one of them had thought we carried liquid oxygen. The other airman, the new arrival, had probably saved all our lives. There were no fire detection units in the aircraft anywhere near the point where the turbine blade had penetrated the wing. Had New Boy not reported the black smoke, the crew chief would have joined the rest of us inside the aircraft and we would have taxied out for take off. Whilst taxiing on low power, there would not have been much smoke issuing from the hole and in any case the starboard wing would have been on the blind side of anyone watching from Air Traffic Control. However, when we put on full power for take off, and assuming the damaged engine kept going, the hot air from the turbine escaping through the top of the wing at around 700 degrees Celsius would undoubtedly have set fire to the entire wing and ignited the fuel in the large fuel tank contained within the wing. By the time that we in the aircraft, or the air traffic controllers in the Tower, had noticed anything unusual, we would have been going too fast to stop in the remaining runway and we would have ended up as a burning heap on the rocky outcrop just off the end of the runway.

Oh yes, New Boy at Masirah saved our lives that day. I put him up for a commendation and I was pleased to hear some weeks later that he got one from his Commander-in-Chief. But what of the old hand? What did he learn from this incident? Well, we have a saying in the RAF, ‘If in doubt, check’. Not a bad maxim when you think about it. I like to think that particular over-confident airman learned a salutary lesson from the incident.

Sometimes things did happen at Masirah! In fact we had to remain on the island for several days more while a new engine was flown out from Marham and while the airframe people patched the hole in poor old 667’s wing. Then, much to our surprise, we were given permission to continue with our Lone Ranger to Singapore – but neither Masirah nor 667 had yet finished with us.

	This is the hole through which the turbine blade escaped as viewed from inside the fuselage once the engine had been removed.. (click on any of these thumbnails to downlaod a larger version)
	This is the hole on top of the engine casing with the characteristic shape of a turbine blade cross section. The match box (empty!) is there to provide a scale.
	Removing the engine needed one member of the crew inside the air intake to unscrew things (that's an aircrew technical expression). It was exceedingly hot in there - hence the green tube pumping ice cold air from the refrigeration unit.
	We resumed work after dark because it was then much cooler. It turned out that we had removed far more screws, brackets, and other bits and pieces than necessary. In trying to help the fitting party that had not yet arrived from UK we had actually made their work more difficult! They were not best pleased when they surveyed our handiwork.
	The work was now in the hands of the UK fitting party. This image shows the new engine arriving on the dispersal prior to installation.
	Our Command HQ back in UK had told us to search for the missing turbine blade so that it could be analysed by experts. But where do you start searching when you are surrounded on three sides by desert? We made only a very brief token search. Naturally, we found nothing.

Back to top