We finally reached Tengah, Singapore - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

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The stories of the Cunnane crew and our Lone Ranger to Singapore in Victor XH667 were apparently spreading like wildfire around the tanker fleet and beyond. We reckoned that the entire RAF contingent at Gan had gone out onto the airfield to watch our departure on 22 June 1972.

Thankfully, the remainder of the 4 hrs 20 min flight to Tengah on the northern edge of the island of Singapore was uneventful. For ‘political’ reasons we were not permitted to overfly Indonesian territory or airspace and so we had to route north of Sumatra and then down the Malacca Strait – thereby adding about 20 minutes onto the flight time.

Tengah had been an RAF airfield until the end of 1971 when it was renamed Tengah Air Base and handed over to the fledgling Singapore Air Defence Command. I had been to Singapore several times earlier in my career but this was the first time as pilot. I can’t actually remember much about our arrival at Tengah but I’m sure we all climbed down from XH667 with a considerable degree of relief.

Because of our late arrival, due to the lengthy delay at Gan, we were advised to submit new applications for all the diplomatic clearances covering the return flights. We were told that it was not permitted simply to quote the original clearances and add the necessary number of days to them. The original clearances had expired and they all had to be re-submitted.

We'd not planned to stage through Masirah on the way home (and how relieved we were about that!) because we knew couldn’t uplift sufficient fuel from there to reach Akrotiri in Cyprus. Instead we would be using Dubai which was then little more than a very long runway in the desert. The UK had ended its formal political and military relations with the Emirate of Dubai in December 1971 when the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had been formed. Initially the UAE was a loose federation of just two emirates: Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Later five more emirates, Ajman, Fujairah, Sharjah, Ras al-Khaimah and Umm al-Qaiwain, had joined the federation. Routing via Dubai instead of Masirah added roughly 350 miles to the leg from Gan. Since there were no international facilities or British military personnel at Dubai in 1972, I had been copying all my signals to the tiny British military unit which was still at Sharjah, 8 miles east of Dubai, requesting they made arrangements for our reception, refuelling and hotel needs for the planned overnight stay in Dubai. (RAF Sharjah had closed in December 1971)

The diplomatic clearances, which we had been warned before setting out from UK were very important, took several days to arrange and that delayed our departure from Tengah until 29 June 1972 – seven days after our arrival. By that time we’d had enough: we had run out of personal money, we had more dirty laundry than clean clothes to wear, we had had no contact at all with our families in UK for 17 days, and we were all getting a little irritated with each other’s company. Not as important to us, but back at base our own squadron, No 214, now had a new squadron commander.

As we roared along Tengah’s undulating runway, we certainly did not expect to be back there within the hour! Before we even reached our cruising altitude my AEO, Neil Flowerdew, reported that we had an alternator failure. It’s too complicated to go into details here, but the electrical system on the Victor B1A K2P was antiquated. There was an alternator on each of the four engines and the failure of any single alternator meant that 50% of the services on that side of the system were unavailable. It was possible to connect the port and starboard systems together in parallel but it was definitely not recommended because a fault on one side could easily have transferred the problem to the other side as well, with the danger, albeit remote, of a complete electrical failure.

Tempting though it was for a fleeting second to take a risk, I made the decision that we could not continue on a long oceanic flight in that condition and so I told the crew that we would return immediately to Tengah. We had to jettison about 40,000 lbs of fuel to get us down to our maximum permitted landing weight and we touched down just 40 minutes after our departure.

On spite of detailed engineering checks, no fault could be found with the electrical system and so we tried again after a 3-hour delay. Exactly the same thing happened shortly after take-off. It was easier for me to take the decision to return to Tengah this time. To have pressed on with the failed alternator was as good as accepting that I’d made a wrong decision earlier that morning. Another 40,000 lbs of fuel expelled to atmosphere.

We then had to bide our time over the weekend, with even less money to spend and getting more frustrated. By Tuesday 4 July our Crew Chief with the help of some RAF electricians based at Tengah had still been unable to reproduce the fault so the Crew Chief asked me to conduct an air test in the local area with a limited fuel load. I thought that was a sensible suggestion. This time the alternator did not fail although no fault had been found and therefore no fault had been rectified. We had to put the earlier problem down to ‘just one of those things that happens on old aircraft’. That was actually a very unsatisfactory outcome. No crew likes 'no fault found' on critical systems. Nevertheless, I decided that we would have to launch the following day to Gan. I then spend several hours with my crew sending out further updates to our diplomatic clearance requests but, since they were not forthcoming by morning, we could not depart from Tengah as planned.

By this time XH667 had become something of a fixture at Tengah and there were lots of curious visitors to the aircraft. We were told that we had to move out of Tengah because the accommodation we were occupying was needed for more 'deserving' personnel. Accordingly we moved into the luxurious Equatorial Hotel and we were there for seven days.

From time to time one or the other of used checked to see if the diplomatic clearance signals had arrived. In fact, it was not until the late afternoon of Monday 10 July that we got the answer that we were all waiting for. That was actually quite a ridiculous length of time, even taking into account the poor international communications in those days. We were still missing approval for our over-flight of Iran on the route from Dubai to Akrotiri but, to avoid losing another day, I persuaded the Operations staff at Tengah to look out for that and forward it to us at Gan by the fastest possible means. We took off from Tengah for the 4th and final time the following morning and set course to Gan.

Surely nothing more could go wrong this time?

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