Tony Cunnane's RAF Years

Above: Extract from my log book for July 1958

The first of my three flying near-misses, that’s the three I know of, happened in the middle of the night flying from RAF Nicosia, Cyprus to RAF Luqa, Malta on 25 July 1958. We took off at 0145 hrs local time in Shackleton Mk 2 ‘Q’ (which at that time was really WL740) from Nicosia, then the only operational RAF airfield in Cyprus. After clearing the island of Cyprus we set course direct to our home base in Malta flying at 1,000 feet above the sea. “We” were three officers, the two pilots and the navigator, and seven of what the RAF dismissively used to call “other ranks” comprising a bomb aimer, a flight engineer and five senior NCO air signallers. I was by far the most junior signaller. En passant I mention that in those far-off days officers only spoke to ‘other ranks’ when they had to and then only either by aircraft position (eg “Captain to Port Beam”) or rank and surname (eg “Co-pilot to Sgt Cunnane, where’s my coffee?”), never by first name. I can’t recall ever having a proper pre-flight briefing with the entire crew. The senior signaller was briefed by the captain and the rest of us did as we were told.

Right: Two Shackletons flying at about 500 ft above the ground in close formation over Malta April 1959 - R (foreground) and Q (furthest away). I took this image from the starboard beam of WL759 during a practice on 7 April 1959 for a NATO flypast the following day. WL740 (Q), the one this post is mainly about, is the rear aircraft. (Click on the image to pop up a larger version.)

Virtually all of our operational flying on 38 Squadron was done over the Mediterranean Sea and we usually flew at 300 feet or less above the sea by day and at 1,000 feet by night. We normally flew transit sorties at those same heights because it kept us out of the way of civilian aircraft most of which, like the Shackleton, were unpressurised in those days.

On this particular night transit from Nicosia to Luqa we were indeed flying at 1,000 feet – but in cloud. The captain could have decided to climb above the cloud but for whatever reason, he chose not to. That was no problem in itself because there was no land in the way (except Crete, which I assume the navigators knew about) but it did lead to what could have been a disastrous midair collision.

Somewhere, about halfway through the trip when we were north of Crete and most of the crew were probably dozing, I was sitting at the rear of the aircraft by the window known as Port Beam. There was nothing to do – and nothing to see outside because of the cloud, except the reflection from our port wingtip navigation light. All of a sudden I heard a tremendous roar – from outside our aircraft. Now I have to tell you that the inside of the Shackleton in flight was one of the noisiest environments I have ever experienced and so for me to hear any noise from outside the aircraft, especially when I was wearing my flying helmet, albeit loosely, meant that the noise must have been exceedingly loud. Almost immediately we flew through a small amount of what the captain described as air turbulence. Nothing unusual about that – it happened all the time at low level over the sea. I asked on the intercom if anyone had heard the noise but no-one had – or no-one would admit to having heard it.

After landing at Luqa one or two of my fellow signallers admitted to me that they had heard the noise and that it had sounded, to them, like another Shackleton. “Better keep quiet about that, sergeant,” said my senior navigator, having overheard our conversation. So I did. I knew my place! I checked on the squadron’s flying programme to see which other crew had been flying and saw that another of our Shacks had flown to Nicosia that night and would have been north of Crete at the same time as us. A signaller friend on that aircraft told me, a week later when he had returned to Malta, that their crew had been flying in cloud at 1,000 feet and they had all heard what they thought was another Shackleton passing close by in the opposite direction and they too had experienced some unexpected air turbulence.

Thus, each aircraft had been close enough to hear the other inside what was then the noisiest aircraft in the RAF’s fleet and each had flown through the other’s wake turbulence. How close was that to disaster?

The asterisk in the right hand column of my official log book (top image), was added as a personal reminder of the incident after I had left 38 Squadron and is the only reference to the incident that I ever made – until today.

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