Aircrew servicing at Masirah - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

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As soon as the immediate fuss had died down and I knew the aircraft was safe, I went across the airfield to Operations to compose and send a priority signal to all interested parties to tell them what had happened. The operations staff, at my request, sent off suitable telegraph messages to the British Embassies and High Commissions further along our intended route advising them that our diplomatic clearances, essential for permission to overfly foreign countries, would have to be put on hold.

We were all thoroughly despondent, as well as shocked, because we assumed this would be the end of our planned trip to Singapore. Not only would the aircraft need a replacement engine and a repair to the hole in the wing, for all we knew there might have been internal burning to the airframe.

It was late evening Masirah time before we got a reply from UK. The message, from the engineers at HQ Strike Command, simply instructed us to search for the defective turbine 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 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 for it the following morning.

Overnight several more engineering signals arrived, one telling us that a replacement engine and a fitting party were on their way from UK. Our own Crew Chief, Pete Hogg, a cheerful portly gentleman of the old school of RAF engineers, said that to save time we might as well start removing the damaged engine ourselves. This suggestion was received by my crew with considerable incredulity. We were competent, and confident, to refuel the aircraft, top up the engine oil and re-pack the tail brake parachute – we expected to do those things on Lone Rangers – but no-one had ever suggested that aircrew might be required to dismantle and remove engines.

"It’s quite easy," said Pete, in that charmingly condescending way that Crew Chiefs used when talking to aircrew about technical matters. "The difficult bit will be fitting the new engine, but the experts coming out from Marham will help me with that."

Once we had removed several panels above and below the wing, it turned out to be quite easy to sever all the connections holding the engine into the wing and by early afternoon we were ready to start lowering it onto the cradle. To my great relief we managed that without any disaster and at about 16.00 hrs Pete decided that we’d done enough for the day.

Before we left for the Messes, we looked in awe at the hole that had been burnt right through the solid engine casing and then through the relatively thin aircraft skin. We could only imagine the force with which the turbine blade had flown off its mounting. That blade could so easily have flown off in directions other than straight up through the top of the wing. It could have flown off one way into the adjacent engine, or in the opposite direction into the main fuselage fuel tank where it would have caused an instant and catastrophic explosion. It didn’t bear thinking about.

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