Whoever heard of black oxygen? - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

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I needed no second bidding – you don't 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 on fire, I ordered the crew to abandon the aircraft with the immortal words, "Everybody OUT!" 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 throttle levers back through the safety 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. I can’t now be certain after 40 years, but I suspect neither my co-pilot nor I replaced our ejection seat safety pins (two for each seat) before hastily vacating the aircraft.

The fire crews were already arriving as I jumped down onto the dispersal. They deployed their equipment in a most efficient and expeditious manner but the firemen seemed rather disappointed to find that the aircraft was not going up in flames.

When the danger had clearly passed, I asked my co-pilot, or maybe it was the Crew Chief, to check that the ejection seats were safe and then 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 public address system and had turned out to watch.

Two off-duty airmen had been close by on the dispersal watching us preparing to depart. It was so boring on Masirah that watching a Victor start its 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.

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

There were no fire detection units inside the fuselage 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 wouldn’t have been much smoke issuing from the hole and in any case the starboard wing would have been on the blind side of those watching from Air Traffic Control. However, as soon as we started the take-off run on full power, and assuming the damaged engine kept going, the hot air from the turbine escaping through the top of the wing at around 700 degrees Celcius would undoubtedly have set fire to the entire wing and ignited the fuel in the large 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 – if the aircraft had not exploded before we got that far.

Oh yes, New Boy at Masirah saved our lives that day. I put him up for an immediate commendation and I was pleased to learn, 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.

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