Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  ‘Let’s go over there and have a look,’ I said.

  As we approached the door flew open and out dashed a chap with a twelve-bore shotgun and let fly at us. One could see the flashes from the barrels, but we were still a couple of hundred feet up and he couldn’t do much damage. Leaning out of the door, Inspector Brunson returned fire with a .38 Webley revolver, and he had even less chance of hitting anything. We radioed the position of the hut and flew overhead while an army of policemen closed in on it. One of the Poles was captured nearby, and the rest a few days later. It was an excellent example of what the helicopter could do in public service, and gained widespread publicity thanks to the photographer’s work, which delighted my employers at Westland.

  We formed a good relationship with the Daily Express, as a result of which they used the Westland S51 many times in their news-gathering. I flew again with Bellamy when we were hunting for a couple who had committed suicide in undergrowth on Epsom Downs. Their naked bodies were found by someone who, in a state of shock, failed to mark the spot, and it was virtually impossible to find them at ground level. We found them in five minutes from the air, of course, and the pictures duly appeared in the Daily Express. Eventually the Daily Express bought its own Westland WS51, and some innocent soul at the Air Registration Board, the forerunner of the Civil Aviation Authority, gave it the registration G-ANAL. There was consternation at Westland when this was discovered, and I was detailed to break the news to the owners. I phoned the company, and after explaining the problem six times to ever more senior managers who dropped me like a hot coal, was put through to Lord Beaverbrook himself.

  ‘What’s all this about arseholes?’ asked the great man.

  I explained once more, adding: ‘Of course, sir, we can have the registration changed if you so wish.’

  Beaverbrook chuckled. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I rather like the idea that I’m getting up some people’s arseholes. Leave it as it is.’

  So G-ANAL it remained. The Daily Express employed Alan Green, one of the Naval pilots I had trained on the R-4 at Portland, to fly the helicopter and I gave him some lessons at Yeovil. Some months later I received a phone call from Quintin Hogg QC, later Lord Hailsham, who had been retained by Lord Beaverbrook to defend Alan Green against a charge of dangerous low flying. Would I appear as an expert witness?

  I asked to see the area in which the alleged offence had occurred and was taken by Quintin Hogg to Woolwich Arsenal, over which Alan Green had flown with a photographer on some news-gathering sortie. It was clear that Green had been below the minimum legal height of 500 feet, but on surveying the site I could see it was possible to demonstrate that he had chosen an unobstructed path across the area, and had he suffered an engine failure it would have been possible for him to land the helicopter safely without compromising anyone on the ground. I agreed to testify on Green’s behalf.

  He was appearing at Southwark Crown Court in South London, and early in the proceedings I was called upon to give evidence. I repeated what I had told Quintin Hogg – that in my opinion there was nothing dangerous about Green’s flying as at any time, he could have landed the helicopter without danger to persons or property on the ground. The case lasted only a few minutes after that, and Alan was sent packing with a caution. ‘They couldn’t do anything more in the light of your evidence,’ Quintin Hogg told me. Green came round, shook me by the hand and thanked me for my contribution, and that was the last I saw of him until he came to work for me five years later.

  Beaverbrook became a vocal supporter of the helicopter industry and his newspapers faithfully reflected his position. The Daily Express was there when, in another major publicity coup for Westland and for the helicopter, I delivered food to the Wolf Rock lighthouse keepers who had been cut off by storms for a month. Three marooned men were surviving on emergency rations as no boat or breeches buoy had been able to reach them. Westland’s chief service engineer Les Swain and I loaded the helicopter at Yeovil for the flight to the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose in Cornwall, where we would refuel. Looking around for things I ought to take, my eyes fell on a pair of bolt croppers. ‘They might come in handy – better take those with us,’ I said to Les. Sensing a story, the Daily Express sent down a Dragon Rapide aircraft with Walter Bellamy aboard.

  The next day I was refused permission to fly by the Commanding Officer at Culdrose as the storm raged unabated. After two days of continuous gales I could stand it no longer. I wasn’t in the Navy any more – I could fly when I thought it was safe to do so. On the third day Les and I lifted off at first light and set course for the lighthouse, eight miles off Land’s End, with a sixty-knot gale on the nose. Severe turbulence made it difficult to hold position over the eighteen-inch-wide lantern gallery as Les lowered three bundles of supplies with the rescue hoist. The first two sacks were quickly taken off the hoist cable by the grateful lighthouse keepers, but when Les lowered the third sack, for some reason that has never been explained one of the keepers clipped the hook to the gallery rail. In an instant the helicopter became almost uncontrollable, and as I struggled to stave off disaster with the front wheel bouncing off the lantern roof I screamed at Les: ‘Cut the fucking cable!’ Les grabbed the bolt croppers and chopped through the wire, and freed from the rail the S51 soared upwards away from Wolf Rock like a champagne cork. Back at Culdrose the CO was livid and gave me a severe reprimand for disobeying his order not to fly, claiming I had endangered life. He was probably right. The Royal Aero Club awarded Les and me their Silver Medal for Valour. Walter Bellamy’s photographs, taken from the Rapide, appeared in the Daily Express and hundreds of other newspapers around the world and won an award for the best news photo of the year. Wolf Rock later became the first lighthouse in the world to have a helipad built on top of it.

  Les Swain flew with me constantly as I demonstrated the S51 to Trinity House, to police forces, to the BBC, international airlines and anyone else who was interested in buying one. Later on, Les became my daughter Lynda’s godfather. He looked after me when I set the London to Paris speed record, flying from the Metropole rooftop car park in Olympia to the Place des Invalides with the BBC’s air correspondent Charles Gardner in the back. Gardner had been a Coastal Command pilot during the war but he’d never been in a helicopter. We also had on board Mossy Preston, general secretary of the Royal Aero Club, representing the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, and I was slightly worried that attempting a speed record with such a heavy load would overstress the helicopter. I had a word with Les beforehand. ‘We’re going to be operating outside the redline,’ I told him. ‘If you feel any unusual vibrations, just tap me on the shoulder.’

  On the day of the record attempt I was working on some last-minute details on the Metropole roof when I was approached by a slightly built man in civilian clothes who said he was interested in helicopters, and asked whether I could tell him something about them. I asked him how he’d got up there, and he told me he was the accountant for the Royal Aero Club and also for Bunny Dyer, who had the Olympia car park concession. My mind was full of the task in hand, and I suggested that we meet some time later. He readily agreed.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Russell Fry,’ he said. George Russell Fry and I were to become lifelong friends and business partners. His modesty was such that it took me a long time to find out he was a former Lancaster bomber pilot who had been decorated with the DFC and AFC. More than once during my enforced absences George was destined to run my business for me.

  The wind was in the north and the visibility unlimited, perfect for a record attempt. As Les finished preparing the aircraft Charles Gardner interviewed me – what height would I fly at, where would we cross the coast, what time would we reach Paris – then we jumped in and took off. Crossing the coast at 1,500 feet our indicated airspeed was 108 knots with the wind adding about twelve knots. Over the Channel, where there was no turbulence, I increased indicated speed to 115 knots. I was happy to operate up to fiftee
n per cent beyond the published design limits of the aircraft, but as we approached Paris I felt Les Swain’s cautionary tap on the shoulder. I could feel nothing unusual. We were almost on final approach to the Place des Invalides, on which an enormous French Air Force roundel had been painted for the occasion, so I elected to continue and landed a few minutes later. On the ground, Les found a crack in one of the main rotor blades where the fabric covering had parted on a split in the wood about two thirds of the way out from the hub. Fortunately, the stainless steel leading edge spar showed no sign of damage. Westland had to send out a new blade.

  Mossy Preston, who refereed the record attempt, was also destined to become a friend for life. An ex-colonel of the Coldstream Guards, Mossy was an art expert who often accompanied me to Sotheby’s and Christie’s when I wanted to buy paintings, and his advice was very valuable. He refereed a second speed record attempt when a letter was conveyed from the Lord Mayor of London to the Mayor of Paris in forty-six minutes. Bristol’s test pilot Eric Swiss picked up the letter at St Paul’s Cathedral in a Sycamore helicopter and flew to Biggin Hill, where Bill Waterton was waiting in a Gloster Meteor jet. Bill flew to Le Bourget and handed the letter to me, and I flew the S51 to the Place des Invalides where the Mayor awaited. The record was never officially registered by the FAI because it involved different classes of aircraft, but it was all good publicity for the helicopter industry.

  Later the WS51 was demonstrated at the Paris Air Show, where I met the beautiful Jacqueline Auriol, daughter-in-law of French President Vincent Auriol. Jacqueline was an accomplished jet jockey, the first woman pilot outside America to break the sound barrier, and she was very keen to experience helicopter flight. It is true that during the flight we happened to pass through the arches of the Eiffel Tower, where there was ample room for it; I do not consider it to have been a dangerous manoeuvre, although the authorities complained that the wingover above the Trocadero was an unnecessary flourish. Anyway, it was all done at the insistence of Mme Auriol, and they could hardly arrest the President’s daughter-in-law. As we walked away from the helicopter I put out my wrists to be handcuffed, but the gendarmes sternly waved me away.

  I flew all over Europe demonstrating the helicopter, but life was not an endless round of parties and promotions. There was a lot of air testing to be done at Yeovil as Westland’s own machines started to flow from the production lines, and the life-expectancy of a test pilot in those days was not very good. Pete Garner was killed when he was testing the Wyvern, which was having a lot of trouble with contra-rotating propellers. I happened to be flying near Cerne Abbas when Pete put out a ‘pan’ call, one step short of a mayday. He was at 20,000 feet and was having trouble with the transrotational bearings in the double propeller. ‘It looks like they’re about to seize,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to put in down in a field.’

  ‘All right, Pete, I’ll follow you down,’ I said.

  The ground was flat, but no single field in the area, around Piddletrenthide, was big enough to take the Wyvern. It had been agreed between Harald Penrose and Garner that it would probably be best to land wheels-up in such circumstances to reduce the ground run, but when Harald landed the Wyvern in a wheat field near Taunton after the same bearings failed some months before, he elected to put the wheels down. Pete made a beautiful deadstick approach with quite a high rate of descent – the Wyvern weighed twelve tons – and clipped the first hedge at about ninety knots, flaps down. When the Wyvern touched the ground a prop blade sheared and smashed through the canopy, cutting off his head. After making sure there was nothing that could be done for him I flew back to Yeovil to fetch Harald, who was more shocked than I’d ever seen him. Harald insisted on taking the factory nurse along with us in the helicopter, even though I told him Pete was beyond help.

  I never understood why Pete didn’t turn the aircraft out to sea and bale out. Maybe he was trying too hard to preserve the prototype – it was thought at the time that Westland’s future depended on it. Perhaps it would have been better to put the wheels down as Penrose had done. At least the prop would have stayed clear of the ground. Pete was a good friend and an excellent pilot, a graduate of the Empire Test Pilots’ School, and I was very angry when he died.

  But then, getting killed was an occupational hazard. Pete’s replacement, Mike Graves, was killed the following year, also in a Wyvern crash. Graves’s replacement was killed within three months flying a Seafire. I was told by Geoffrey de Havilland that about twenty-five per cent of the test pilot population was wiped out every year in the latter stages of the war. In the immediate post-war years there were a lot of prototypes in development at a lot of companies, but few ever made it into production. Geoffrey himself was killed flying the delta-winged DH 108 Swallow. Bill Waterton quit Glosters in a fury, accusing them of putting money before pilots’ lives. We all used to meet up in the Test Pilots’ Tent at the Farnborough Air Show, and every year there would be absent friends. In 1948 a group of test pilots, led by the likes of Bill Pegg and John Cunningham, negotiated for higher salaries with the Society of British Aircraft Constructors. As a result, salaries virtually doubled overnight, and my £700 suddenly became £1,400. That was a red-letter day. Even the great people flying the Britannia and the Comet had been doing so on pittances.

  They were also flying, according to some, with inadequate qualifications. There was something of an outcry when it was revealed that many test pilots were flying on private licences and it was decided we should all get commercial papers pretty quick. Penrose called me in. ‘Alan, get yourself down to Hamble and do the CPL course, will you? There’s one on now – it’s only been running for a couple of weeks, but I’m sure you could soon catch up.’

  Down I went as instructed, and catching up after missing the first two weeks of an eight-week course was no small feat. When everyone else was going out for a drink, I was burning the midnight oil with the books. Dead reckoning plotting I was good at, meteorology was no problem, and the technical paper posed little difficulty, but as for Air Law ... what was that? Despite the late start I passed, and was sent to Stansted to do the Instrument Rating test. Only two of us passed the IR that day, out of eight candidates, but I went back to Westland having quelled the criticism. Later, when I was chief executive of British United Airways, I was asked how I was proposing to fly a VC-10 on the strength of my helicopter Air Transport Pilot’s Licence, and I was able to produce my fixed-wing CPL/IR, gained on that course.

  Helicopter test-flying at Westland was left entirely up to me; all the other test pilots were engaged on the Wyvern. One of them was Derrick Colvin, who bet me £50 I couldn’t land the Dragonfly engine-off in a tennis court. Now £50 was an awful lot of money at that time, but I would have taken the bet for five shillings, and I knew I would probably win it. The rules were that I had to be at precisely 700 feet in cruising flight, and the engine would be cut at the whim of my observer, which of course was Colvin. Descending at close to 2,000 feet a minute I’d have about twenty seconds to set up a pinpoint landing, with no second chances. Tennis court lines were painted on the concrete apron of the airfield, and I picked a day with a fresh southwesterly wind for the attempt. Luckily, I was flying downwind when Colvin called the engine failure and chopped the throttle, so I was able to crank the machine rapidly around into wind, flare off the rate of descent just ten feet off the ground and make an inch-perfect landing squarely in the middle of the tramlines with less than a yard of run-on. Colvin paid up with good grace.

  I was probably one of the world’s most experienced pilots at landing helicopters with dead engines. Quality control at Alvis, the company that made the engines for the Dragonfly, was normally very good, but problems still arose quite regularly in the early days. It was far from unusual for me to set out in a helicopter and return in a taxi, having force-landed the brand new machine in a Somerset field. While running through the test regime I always kept an eye out for suitable emergency landing sites, and in all those engine-off landings I never dam
aged a helicopter so that it couldn’t be flown away once the fault was rectified. After a while I’d had so much practice I felt I could have landed a pogo stick on a church steeple. My record was six engine failures in one day, none of which caused injury, much less threatened my life.

  The payment system for Westland was straightforward – when I delivered a helicopter to RAF Boscombe Down I was given a docket that the company presented to the Ministry of Defence, which then paid for that helicopter. On this day I was called in to Managing Director Johnny Fearn’s office.

  ‘Cash flow is tight, Alan,’ he said. ‘We’ve got six helicopters ready to go. The company needs to get paid for them. You can do your tests en route to Boscombe Down. I’ll have a plane waiting to bring you back for the next one. Don’t forget the dockets.’

  My observer Les Swain and I jumped into the first Dragonfly and took off to begin the production acceptance tests. I hovered backwards and sideways – the control responses were good and there were no unusual vibrations. The translation from hover to forward flight was smooth and I raised the collective and gently brought the azimuth stick back to commence a full-power climb at fifty knots, which I was required to hold up to 6,000 feet. We never got there. I was dodging around clouds at 2,000 feet – the weather was not good – when there was a shocking bang! The oil pressure gauge dropped to zero and there was a dreadful clatter from the engine bay behind me. I instantly lowered the collective and rolled into a steep turn. The Dragonfly had fairly good autorotational characteristics; the rotor speed could be varied from 105 per cent to 90 per cent, but if it got any lower than that the blades would cone upwards, lift would be lost and the aircraft would spear into the ground with no prospect of recovery. One had to be quick to lower the collective. I don’t know exactly where the irrecoverable edge was but while I must often have come close to it, I never slipped over. The most critical part of an engine-off landing was judging the flare – the point at which one pulls back the azimuth stick to wash off speed and rate of descent in order to arrive on the ground relatively gently. Again, I’d had enough practice to be able to judge my arrivals perfectly every time. I managed to land the helicopter back on the airfield and Les lifted the engine cowling. Oil everywhere. A bolt holding a cylinder head to the crankcase had failed. The maintenance crew wheeled the machine back into the hangar – they would have a new engine installed within a couple of hours – while Les and I jumped into the second helicopter. This time we had successfully completed the full-power climb and levelled off for a cruise at full power, holding 105 knots for five minutes, when ten miles from Yeovil there was another bang and the oil pressure gauge once again fell to zero. This time I autorotated into a field next to the main Dorchester road. Landing out wasn’t like landing without an engine on the airfield – you never knew what you were landing on, and you had to make sure the helicopter wasn’t moving forward when you touched down because it could dig one wheel into the ground and roll over. Ground that looked level from 1,000 feet could be very rough when you got down there. On the way down I radioed Yeovil air traffic control and asked them to send a car for us. We landed the right way up. Once again, the cause was a failed cylinder head bolt.