Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  He took me to the Tube station to see whether or not service had been resumed, but as I walked down the steps I felt a heavy dread come on me, I began to sweat and I knew I had to get out. Mr Dundas drove me home, all the way to Woodford. Next day, I found I could not force myself to get on the train. I began to get debilitating attacks of claustrophobia, even in a bedroom with the curtains closed. Walking down enclosed stairwells and getting into lifts became a real problem. I could manage a couple of floors, but soon I’d begin to feel as though the whole world was crushing down on me and I’d have to get out into the open.

  My demob money, pooled with Jean’s, provided enough funds to buy a second-hand Hillman 10 car in remarkably good condition, and thereafter I drove to the office. I soon discovered that successful selling meant being on the spot to close the deal, and I used the Hillman to travel to aerodromes to meet clients face to face. But claustrophobia dogged me from that day on. I haven’t taken a Tube train since. I made a second attempt a week after the accident but came out of the station in a near-panic. Many times this caused me problems, and once it almost cost me a contract, but I’ve had to learn to live with it.

  I thought initially it might affect my flying. Sitting in small cockpits in cloud, or at night when the world around you can feel very small, with nothing but blackness beyond the dim cockpit lighting, can be constricting, but it has never triggered an attack of claustrophobia. I put it down to the fact that there was always a sense of movement, a feeling of being out in the open and able to breathe. I would also be preoccupied with the task in hand – my brain was in a different phase.

  And there was quite a lot of flying to be done at R.K. Dundas. He ran a sideline delivering war surplus aircraft to Egypt and Israel. I’m not sure whether the business was strictly legal, but he had a piece of paper from the Department of Trade that seemed to satisfy everyone. The RAF were selling off war surplus machinery – mostly non-combat aircraft like the Douglas Dakota, Percival Provost and Airspeed Oxford, but on one occasion Dundas managed to get hold of a fully operational Boston fighter-bomber, I don’t know how. He needed pilots to deliver these aircraft to customers, and as my pay was marginal – I lived mostly on commission – I was very happy to join his flying staff.

  There would be three pilots on each delivery, even in the small single-engined Proctor, so it was never necessary to stop other than to refuel. I would get a piece of paper on a Thursday night instructing me to go to an airfield and pick up such and such an aircraft, and take it to Alexandria, Cairo or Beirut. I’d meet two other pilots at the aircraft, and we’d fly day and night to our destination – I was always expected back in the office on Tuesday morning.

  We would always refuel in Nice, where Dundas had an arrangement with a local agent who’d be waiting for us when we touched down – we’d be in and out like greased lightning. The Dakotas would go to Lebanon, where they’d be picked up by another crew and flown on to Israel. The Boston went to Egypt, and for some reason we had two full crews on board that day; most of the Oxfords also went to Egypt. We would land in Alexandria to be met by as shady an Egyptian as ever bought a second-hand military plane. He wore a linen suit and spoke perfect English, and I think he’d been an Army officer. He’d give us ferry tickets up the Nile to Cairo for scheduled flights home. On the Lebanon trips, we’d fly back from Beirut on DC-4s, and a return trip was very lucrative – delivering a Dak was worth about £100 to me, paid in cash. It was a long weekend’s work, but I was young and I was always ready for the office on Tuesday.

  I thought Dundas must be making quite a killing, but after about six months the flying started to tail off and I faced the risk once again of subsisting on what I could make selling airfield kit. There didn’t seem to be much of a future in it. But after a return flight from Tripoli in Lebanon, where I’d been delivering a Dakota, I found a letter from Westland Aircraft inviting me to attend an interview if I was interested in employment as a helicopter test pilot. I sent an immediate acknowledgement saying I would keep the appointment.

  I didn’t think the Hillman would stand the journey from Woodford to Yeovil and back, so I caught an early morning train from Paddington and hired a taxi to arrive in style at the Westland main gates. On the way, I thought to myself that there couldn’t be many pilots better qualified on helicopters than myself, and I was confident of my ability to answer most technical and aerodynamic questions. But by the time I got to the Chief Test Pilot’s office, which had been converted into a waiting room, I discovered that that there were at least twenty other candidates. Most of them were in their late forties and two had qualified on Cierva autogyros.

  Just before lunch I was called in to the interview panel, which consisted of the chief test pilot Harald Penrose, the technical director Arthur Davenport, the chief designer (fixed wing) Mr John Digby, a lady from the public relations department, the works director Ted Wheeldon and a gentleman from the Ministry of Supply. As panel chairman, Arthur Davenport welcomed me to Yeovil and asked me where I lived, was I married, had I a family. Harald Penrose then got down to business. How many hours had I flown on helicopters? How recently had I flown the Seafire and Sea Fury? Would I be prepared to spend up to a year on a test pilot course at the Sikorsky factory in America? I answered all his questions, and he seemed satisfied. Davenport turned to the other members of the panel and asked them if they had any further questions for me. The row of heads shook.

  ‘Thank you for attending, Mr Bristow,’ said Davenport. ‘We’ll let you know.’

  And that was it. I made my way home on the train. Jean was waiting for me when I finally arrived in Woodford. ‘Well?’ she asked.

  ‘They’ll let me know,’ I said lamely. It was something of an anticlimax.

  Within a week another letter arrived from Westland thanking me for attending the first interview and inviting me to return to Yeovil for a second. This time, Westland’s future helicopter designer, a gentleman called Mr Fitzwilliams, would be in attendance. Mr Fitzwilliams was a disconcerting chap, six foot two with one brown and one green eye, which looked in different directions. This time the field of applicants had been whittled down to eight, and the other seven looked ex-RAF.

  Mr Fitzwilliams opened with a question:

  ‘Mr Bristow, what experience do you have of descent in the vortex state?’

  In fact, I probably had more experience of it than any other pilot in Britain. ‘Under normal flying conditions,’ I said, ‘it’s an environment one should try to avoid. The deeper one gets into a vortex ring state, the higher the rate of descent becomes, and with it comes a loss of control. When measuring flight control response it is important to begin the experiment above 2,000 feet.’

  Mr Fitzwilliams seemed satisfied. ‘And what experience do you have of power-off landings?’

  I had made at least fifty of them from every survivable position – in the hover, from a controlled descent, with and without forward speed. But his interest peaked when I mentioned the tail rotor failure in the R-4. He leaned forward and took in every word as I described the sudden yaw, the curved descent, and the water landing.

  ‘What damage was caused?’ he asked.

  ‘Beyond the fractured delta hinge, none,’ I said.

  The interview came to a close when Mr Davenport asked me what salary I would accept. I was singularly ill-prepared for this question. In fact I’d probably have done the job for nothing, at least for a while. The best answer I could think of was: ‘I will take £50 per annum less than you’re offering!’

  ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Bristow,’ said Mr Davenport. ‘You seem to have a good grasp of the theory of helicopter flight. We’ll let you know.’

  Once again I returned disappointed to Woodford and the prospect of a career selling fire extinguishers for Dundas. I was overjoyed and not a little amazed to receive a phone call from Harald Penrose next day. The directors had decided to offer me the job at £700 a year on the condition that I was prepared to go to America at short notice to f
ly the Sikorsky S51 and to learn all that was required to make me a good helicopter test pilot.

  Harald Penrose was a superb test pilot and a delightful man whose interests extended from ornithology to writing short stories and designing forty-foot sloops. He was a master of aerodynamics and aircraft handling, an analytical, clear-thinking fellow who like me, loved to sail. He designed and built his own boat, the Penrose 34, a lovely sloop that he kept in Poole Harbour. We got on very well. Over a sandwich lunch in his office a year after I’d joined Westland, he confided in me that the only reason I had got the job was that I had impressed Davenport by accepting £50 per annum drop in salary. As I came to know Davenport and his robust attitude to costs, what Harald said made good sense.

  I have to make it clear at this point that despite rumours to the contrary, Harald Penrose was not the father of my daughter Lynda. Jean went into labour with our first child when I was in Brussels demonstrating the S51 to potential customers, and it was Harald who drove her to the hospital. Thus when the midwife pressed the swaddled newborn into his arms with the words, ‘It’s a girl, Mr Bristow,’ it was nothing more than an understandable error. But you know how these stories get distorted in the telling.

  Jean and baby Lynda came home to a lovely detached farm house in Charlton Mackrell, near Ilchester, which I rented from a local landowner, but we weren’t to be together as a family for long. Westland had been licensed by the American company Sikorsky to build the S51, and I was immediately sent to their factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to find out all I could about the aircraft. Learning my trade as a test pilot at Sikorsky was an enormous privilege because not only did I fly with the great test pilots of the time – men like Jimmy Viner, Bob Decker and Jim Thompson – but I was able to attend technical lectures on the theory of helicopter flight given by leading rotary-wing designers of the day. At the same time I enjoyed superb accommodation and a busy social life at the Bridgeport Country Club, where the old standards of behaviour and service still prevailed.

  Breakfast at the country club was a special event. I was seated at a large round table with university professors and leading industrialists, who always sat in the same chairs and always read the local newspaper, which was neatly displayed on a stick. One of the university professors, who sat next to me every morning, would routinely enquire of the young waitress: ‘Do you know what I want today?’

  She would routinely reply: ‘No, sir.’

  In a clear and quiet voice he would say: ‘I want a waffle with plenty of maple syrup, and well-done bacon.’

  When my turn came, I ordered a waffle with plenty of maple syrup and well-done bacon, and I developed a life-long liking for it.

  Staying at the country club with me were two senior engineers from Westland, chief draughtsman Tony Yates and John Perkins, head of the jig-tool department. Getting to work without a car wasted a lot of time for all of us, so I decided to use my expense account to buy a four-door Oldsmobile, which was advertised for sale at the Sikorsky factory as the property of the wife of one of the Sikorsky designers. The running costs were largely subsidised by Yates and Perkins, who contributed handsomely as if it were a taxi.

  Presiding over the factory was the great Igor Sikorsky himself, the founding father of helicopter design, who had one thing in common with me – he would rarely go anywhere without a hat. I don’t know whether his reasons and mine coincided, but to this day his trademark fedora has pride of place in his preserved office in Bridgeport. In charge of flying at the factory was Jimmy Viner, who apart from being a truly excellent pilot – he had performed the first-ever helicopter hoist rescue when he lifted two men from a drifting barge in a storm in 1943 – was Igor Sikorsky’s nephew and son-in-law. Dmitry ‘Jimmy’ Viner was an excitable little man, Russian through and through, and when he was tearing you off a strip his command of English would fail him and he would lapse into Russian. You wouldn’t understand a word, but the sentiment would be perfectly clear.

  During my training I started to display all the signs of the overconfident student, flying very steep turns with the R-4 just a mile or two away from the factory. The local residents complained and I was given a full English-Russian bollocking by Jimmy Viner, ending up with the punchline: ‘Any more of this and I’ll send you home!’ I thoroughly deserved the admonishment and modified my behaviour to make sure I was not sent back to Westlands in disgrace.

  I was therefore nothing more than an innocent bystander when I witnessed Jimmy’s greatest explosion, which was directed at his own test pilot Jim Thompson. I was drifting around one day when Jim stopped me and said: ‘I’m making my last flight today, Alan. Do you want to come?’ I was always happy to learn from a more experienced man and readily agreed. It turned out that Jim had suddenly become rich through inheriting a lot of real estate and was leaving to take over his father’s business.

  We took an R-6, on which Jim had done all the development flying. It was to my mind the first good-looking helicopter, capable of 100 mph, although it was quite small and both Jim and I were fairly broad fellows. We climbed to about 4,000 feet and Jim started throwing steep turns and wingovers. He handed the controls to me and I followed his example. After about half an hour it was time to go home, and Jim took control again.

  As we got back to the factory Jim came down low, perhaps 200 feet, and flew in tight circles until Sikorsky workers started to drift out of offices and workshops to see what was going on. When he was sure he’d drawn a crowd, Jim nipped smartly up to 2,000 feet and put the helicopter into a near-vertical dive at the hard-standing outside the hangar, pulling up a few feet above the concrete into a perfectly formed loop.

  ‘Let’s do that again,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’ I advised him. So he did it again. And when we landed and shut down, Jimmy Viner was jumping up and down in a volcanic Russian rage. They made a comical sight, stocky little Jimmy quivering with fury and spluttering incomprehensible oaths, and Jim Thompson towering above him, leaning back and laughing fit to burst.

  ‘You’re wasting your breath, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘I quit!’

  When the time came for me to fly back to England, Jimmy Viner asked me into his office to give me a verbal assessment of my prowess as a test pilot. His appraisal ended with the words: ‘You’ll either make a very good test pilot or you’ll kill yourself very soon!’ I’m sure that many years later he was surprised at my continued survival.

  Back in Charlton Mackrell there was no more expense account or waffles and maple syrup, so I adopted various stratagems to supplement my meagre test pilot’s salary. I obtained a flock of chickens and sold eggs door to door, but greater success came with a used car business. There was a garage up the road run by a man called Peter Chapman, with his wife as his book-keeper. He was a very able mechanic and traded in used cars as well as repairing them. I would buy cars from him and advertise them for sale on the notice board at Westland. I specialised in selling the Morris Minor and Major, the Wolseleys, the MGs, and I turned a penny at it. There was a big market there, and I could sell a car a week. My negotiating skills seemed to be a match for anyone, and the price was what I thought I could get when the potential buyer turned up to look at it. If he looked good for £300, I’d ask £300. It was all a matter of feel, and I enjoyed the business of selling. Closing a deal gave me a real lift, whether it was a second-hand car or, later, a multi-million pound helicopter service contract. I would back my car sales with personal guarantees and sometimes had to do a little maintenance under warranty, or get Peter Chapman to do it. Morris cars were very straightforward and it was easy to take a gearbox apart and put bearings in. It often surprised me how little empathy some people had with machines. I could visualise the stresses in machinery, not just in cars but in helicopters and oil platforms, and see their weaknesses.

  What mucked the car business up was a thing called Glass’s Guide, which published maximum and minimum prices for different cars. All of a sudden every punter was an expert, and the art of negotiation
was compromised. A second factor was that as Westland’s sole helicopter test pilot, I was increasingly busy.

  There were several WS51s – the Westland version of the S51, later named the Dragonfly – on the production line, but the one and only Sikorsky-built machine was used for promotional work and pilot training. Harald Penrose took a couple of lessons, but he wasn’t really interested in helicopters and left me largely alone. Another Westland test pilot, Pete Garner, learned to fly the S51, but at that time he and Harald were working flat out test-flying the Westland Wyvern, designed by John Digby as a carrier-based fighter and torpedo carrier with a turboprop engine and contra-rotating propellers.

  In 1947 Pete Garner flew with me to London to demonstrate the S51 at Harrods’ sports ground by the Thames in Hammersmith. My job was to fly a lot of government and ministry officials, while Pete did some sightseeing flights up and down the river. I’m not sure he should have done – he had less than twenty hours helicopter flying experience. One of the people I flew was Pete’s father, who’d been a First World War pilot and was a police superintendent in Norfolk. Superintendent Garner was quickly convinced of the value of helicopters in police work, and he wrote an account of his flight in his local newspaper, the Eastern Daily Press, saying that one day ‘helicopters will be of wide use to the police in making arrests or rescues.’ Only a few days later we had a chance to prove it. Out of the blue Westland received a call from Norfolk Police asking whether they could provide a helicopter to help in the hunt for some dangerous prisoners on the run. Appreciating the promotional value of a successful hunt, the company sent me up to Thetford with the S51.

  There I picked up a police inspector, George Brunson, and a Daily Express photographer called Walter Bellamy. We were apparently looking for three heavily armed Polish prisoners who’d escaped from Norwich Prison and had gone to ground in the extensive woodlands around Thetford. I flew a ‘creeping line ahead’ search for several hours, but saw nothing. Then in the distance I saw a wisp of smoke rising from what looked like a gamekeeper’s hut in the woods. It struck me as unusual. It couldn’t be from an incubator – the pheasant breeding season was over – and I couldn’t imagine what else it could be.