Hunter.
Rolls Royce engines
THE FIRST ROLLS ROYCE COMPONENT that came up for service was an Avpin (volatile liquid that ignites under pressure) powered starter motor for the Hunter engine. With care the starter motor was taken apart, serviced and reassembled. Only one ‘O’ ring needed replacing at a cost of six shillings and eight pence. The starter was back in service in one day, saving months in time and thousands of pounds in shipping and servicing costs. This, and many more experiences in the servicing of components, built up enormous confidence. But then came the Rolls Royce engines themselves.
In Air Force stores there were only a couple of reserve engines each for Hunters and Canberras. This meant that no time could be wasted when the first Hunter engine was removed for overhaul. It had to be stripped completely for an in-depth inspection of every component to determine what needed replacing. The engine then had to be rebuilt and test-run. My recollection is that Chief Technicians Brian Fletcher and John Swait were initially baffled when having to split the heavy casings of the awkward-to-handle jet engine. A galley was noticed but it disappeared into the bowels of the beast and, being curved, there was no way of seeing where it went to, or what was at its end. A medical gastroscope was acquired and having been run down the galley revealed a bolt head at the end of, and in-line with, the galley. By trial and error a flexible wrench was fashioned at Station Workshops and a series of sockets were manufactured by Chief Technician Graham Harvey who, eventually, made one to fit the non-standard bolt head. Once the bolt was removed, the engine was successfully dismantled. Whereas the engine was found to be in pretty good shape, dust and small stone chips from high-speed air ingestion had pitted the leading edges of all impeller and turbine blades, as is normal with any jet engine. Reference numbers were taken from the highly specialised blades and passed to the ‘sanctions busters’ to source and procure. All replacement components and primarily seals were inspected, measured and referenced, again for the attention of ‘sanctions busters’.
Like these RAF Hunters of No 8 Squadron seen over the Kariba dam wall on a visit in happier times, Rhodesia’s Hunters just kept flying.
No component on the first engine gave cause for concern, so it was reassembled and satisfactorily test-run. It was then returned to service at 30% of its normal time between services to establish in-flight performance and gauge rates of wear and deterioration when the next major service was undertaken. The engine performed normally, giving confidence for the next engine strip-down. By the time the third Hunter engine was handed over to Engine Refurbishment Section (ERS), all essential spares had been acquired. Although these had been sourced at considerable cost the overall savings to Rhodesia, vis à vis the Rolls Royce route, were substantial. Just as important were the quick turn-around times that rendered our small reserve of engines adequate for our needs.
Canberra engines followed a similar path to that of Hunters and high levels of sophistication developed rapidly. First-class engine-handling rigs made maintenance technicians’ work easier and safer. Purpose-made tools were manufactured in-house for difficult tasks such as the removal and replacement of turbine blades. Women were brought into ERS and did a wonderful job alongside the men. They all took great pride in turning out engines that ran more smoothly than those previously received from Rolls Royce. Much of this was due to purpose-built balancing rigs to trim each rotating assembly meticulously for vibrationless operation. Inadvertently the British Labour Government had made us more than self-sufcient and our jets were never limited for the want of engines.
Not long after receiving the Canberra B2 bombers, the Royal Rhodesian Air Force had asked Rolls Royce if compressed air could be used to start Canberra engines instead of the large cordite cartridges that powered starter motors. Rolls Royce considered the issue but assured our Air Force that this was an absolute impossibility. However, with the difficulties we faced after 1965, our technicians decided to do what Britain’s top engineers had said was impossible. They not only succeeded in developing an adapter to make the cartridge starter function from high-volume-flow compressed air, they also retained starter motors’ ability to use cartridges when operating from places where large compressed air bottles were unavailable. The system served us for fifteen years with enormous cost savings. A similar system was used to start the Hunter Avon 207 but was discarded because of the need to have an airline permanently fitted in the air intake.
No 7 Squadron
SQUADRON LEADER OZZIE PENTON WAS coming to the end of his tour as OC 7 Squadron when I joined him for the second time. He was to be replaced by John Rogers who was then undergoing his helicopter conversion with the South African Air Force.
On the last day of January 1966 I flew my first training flight in an Alouette III with Mark Smithdorff. I cannot say I enjoyed flying helicopters initially because it was so different from fixed-wing flying. In forward flight the aircraft felt and handled in typical fixed-wing fashion though the controls were very sensitive, almost too sensitive in fact.
Apart from the difficulties in learning to hover, I found descending turns with the speed falling off very disconcerting because I was expecting the helicopter to stall and flick over like any fixed-wing aircraft would do. It took time to accept that all flying speed was in the fast-turning rotor blades. Once I had overcome the instinctive fear of stalling, helicopter flying became a little more enjoyable but learning continued to be hard work.
Kyle Dam.
Once I had flown solo and gained confidence from many entries into the tightest of landing places with high trees or rocks all around, helicopter flying became progressively easier. It took time for my brain to adjust to new flight sensations and make arms, legs and eyes co-ordinate automatically. Thereafter flying a helicopter became more enjoyable than fixed-wing. I found low-level map-reading particularly demanding and a great deal of practice was needed to master the art. Even at the relatively slow speed of 95 knots flying 100 feet above ground, the aircraft crossed over 1:50,000 scale maps very fast. The need to change maps quickly was made difficult by the fact it had to be accomplished with the left hand only because at no time could one let go of the cyclic control. With open doors the problem was compounded by air turbulence that could whip one’s map through the rear door in a flash.
I could not get over the fact that Mark Smithdorff always had his map facing north no matter the direction of flight. Like all the other pilots, my map was turned to face in the direction of travel. If Mark tried this he became as confused as I did with the map the right way up when flying on any heading but north. Mark had another peculiarity. When writing on a blackboard, he would stand at its centre writing from left to centre with his left hand before transferring the chalk to his right hand and continuing uninterrupted in identical neat style towards the right-hand edge of the board.
Cargo slinging, hoisting slope landings on mountain ledges.
Mountain flying was by far the best part of training. On my first time out, Mark had arranged for us to route via Mare Dam in the Inyanga area to collect young breeder trout that we were to release into pre-selected pools in the Bundi Valley high up in the Chimanimani mountains. Rex Taylor had done this previously with fingerling trout but platanna frogs had devoured all of them. We were trying larger fish. There were about fifteen six-inch trout sealed in plastic bags that were half-filled with water and blown to capacity with oxygen. Each bag was in a cardboard box and about thirty-odd boxes filled the rear cabin. It was necessary to fly the one-hour leg directly to Chimanimani to limit damage that fish could cause each other.
The beauty within the mountain range astounded me because previously I had only seen the side of this range from Melsetter village. Hopping from one pool to the next we emptied the trout into the cold water and saw them all swim off strongly. These fish survived and more trout were flown in for National Parks over time. By early 1970 all the pools within the Chimanimanis, both within Rhodesia and Mozambique, carried good populations of large trout.
On completion of basic training, I flew my Final Handling Test with Ozzie Penton who declared me ready for the Ops Conversion phase. My instructor, Mark Smithdorff, was one of nature’s natural pilots who made everything look so simple. When he hovered, the helicopter remained absolutely static no matter how the wind gusted or how high the hover.
Cargo slinging, hoisting slope landings on mountain ledges, forced landing precisely on any point of my choice – all so smooth and unfussed yet always too good to be repeated with Mark’s precision and ease. I was fortunate to have had such an instructor to prepare me for my final handling test.
The final test was conducted by Ozzie Penton who had been promoted to Wing Commander as OC Flying Wing at New Sarum. By this time Squadron Leader John Rogers had returned from South Africa.
Sinoia operation
Squadron Leader John Rogers (left) takes command of 7 Squadron.
FOR BECOMING THE RRAF’S FIRST wholly trained helicopter pilot, I was made squadron standby pilot for the next seven days. Because of this I was the one called out following a report of terrorist activity near Sinoia. My flight technician for this trip was Ewett Sorrell. We set off for Sinoia not knowing more than an attempt had been made to blow down pylons on the main Kariba to Salisbury electrical power-line at a point just north of Sinoia town. Sinoia lay some sixty miles northeast of Salisbury on the main road to Zambia via Chirundu. The town served as the commercial hub and rail centre to large farming and mining communities in the region. It was also home to the Provincial Police HQ, which commanded a number of outlying police stations.
Superintendent John Cannon DFC was very pleased to see us on our arrival in his HQ building and invited us to lunch with his charming wife before getting to the business at hand. I had not met John before although I knew that he had served with distinction as a Lancaster pilot during WWII.
In his quiet, precise manner, which I came to know quite well over the next couple of days, John gave me a detailed briefing before we flew off to inspect the pylons against which sabotage had been attempted. The inspection revealed a very low standard of training by the ZANU men who had tried to knock out the country’s power supply. They obviously knew nothing about pylon design or how to use explosive charges to shear steel structure. Damage at the points of detonation was so minor that no repair work was necessary. At some points scattered chunks of TNT showed that detonators had been thrust into the end of the Russian-made TNT slabs and not into the purple dots which clearly marking the location of primer pockets. All that ZANU had achieved was to show us that they intended to do harm.
John’s information was that seven men known as the ‘Armageddon Group’ were one component of a group of twenty-one ZANU men who had entered the country together some ten days earlier from Zambia. This group was responsible for this job. Where the remaining fourteen men were John had no idea but he said they could not be too far away. All the same the Armageddon Group, having shown its hand, was the one we had to locate and destroy.
During the first afternoon at Sinoia I found that, for all my training, I had not been properly prepared for operations. To fit a helicopter into an opening in the trees with no more that six inches to spare was fine in training, yet here I nearly fell out of the sky when landing full loads of Police Reservists (PR—mostly portly farmers) and their equipment. The enormous reserve of power available from the Alouette’s jet engine, small though it was, was sufficient to destroy the main-rotor gearbox if the calculated maximum collective pitch angle on the rotor blades was applied too long. I exceeded the gearbox limits during a number of landings by yanking on excess collective pitch to check the helicopter’s descent for a soft landing. This necessitated the removal of a magnetic plug on the gearbox casing to check for telltale iron filings. Fortunately nothing was found, so no damage had been done. But it took a number of exciting ‘arrivals’ on terra firma before I got the hang of making full-load landings safely, particularly on sloping ground.
Having established the right techniques I vowed to myself that, when I was instructing on helicopters, I would prepare future pilots better than I had been prepared myself. This in no way reflects on Mark Smithdorff’s instructional abilities because mine was the first genuine operational deployment for a helicopter.
Tony Smit proved the difficulty some months later as seen in this crunch-up from his botched ‘slope landing’ in training.
Once the PR had been taken to their assigned locations I decided to take a look around the search area with Ewett Sorrell who had remained on the ground whilst I deployed the PR. It makes me shudder to think how, having first orbited suspect locations and old roofless buildings, we moved close in hovering to inspect every nook and cranny. Within six years this would have been suicidal and no pilot would have been so foolish as to think of terrorists simply as peasant farmers with guns.
During the early evening of 27 April, John Cannon received hot intelligence from Police General Headquarters in Salisbury to say that a ‘Police source’ was in contact with the Armageddon Group. This police undercover man, operating within the ZANU organisation, was due to meet up with the group near Sinoia the next day when the gang would be changing into black dress for their first planned attack against a white farmstead. The contact man was delivering some supplies and written instructions from ZANU HQ. He was not expected to be with the gang for more than ten minutes.
The contact was going to travel by car from Salisbury to Sinoia where he would be met by one of the gang at about 11 o’clock. He had been briefed to proceed along the main road to a point where the old strip road went left off the main road. Along this road he would find a member of the gang who would take him to the gang’s night camp. He understood that the gang would be between the main road and the old strip road. For us this was a gift for both planning and execution of a classical police-styled cordon and search operation.
It seemed ‘too good to be true’ because the relevant sections of main road and strip road, each about one-and-a-half kilometres’ long, formed an acute triangle with the Hunyani River forming its short base of about half a kilometre. The Hunyani River ran south to north on Sinoia town’s eastern flank and both roads came to the river from the east. The only advantage the terrorist group would have was the heavy bush covering the entire area within this triangle. But the bush posed a real danger to the Police Reservists wearing their highly visible dark-blue fatigues.
Great secrecy was required concerning the police source. This contact man was not to be spoken about nor was there to be any indication of his being followed on the journey from Salisbury. I recommended that a helicopter should be employed to tail the contact vehicle all the way from Salisbury. The pilot would be able to do this and witness interception by the man from the Armageddon Group as well as the point at which the contact was taken into the bush. Just as important was the need for the helicopter pilot to let us know when the contact was clear of the target area. I assured John that a helicopter flying at great height would not upset the contact man or the terrorist group because it would appear too high and insignificant to constitute a threat to anyone.
Agreeing that this was a better option than attempting to follow the contact in another vehicle, John sought and gained PGHQ approval. I contacted Air HQ and arranged for the high-flying helicopter and also asked for three additional helicopters. These were to land at Banket, twelve miles from Sinoia, after the contact vehicle passed that village.
Hoffy, with Mark Smithdorff, had recently returned to Rhodesia from his Alouette conversion course in South Africa and had just completed a short OCU with Mark Smithdorff. I was told he would be following the contact vehicle.
Murray Hofmeyer and Mark Smithdorff.
Both John and I felt that the Army should conduct the operation, as a firefight seemed certain. The Commissioner of Police, Mr Barfoot, would have nothing of it. Notwithstanding the fact that the Armageddon Group was armed with automatic weapons and hand-grenades, he insisted we were dealing with
law-breakers requiring armed Policemen and Police Reservists to kill or apprehend them; Army would only be involved if a state of war existed.
The dawn of 28 April 1966, like most Rhodesian mornings, was cool, bright and clear. Soon a stream of private vehicles started arriving at the Police Sports Club where men changed from civilian clothing into their dark-blue uniforms. These uniforms were intended to give high visibility for riot control but certainly not for bush warfare where the wearer presented an easy target to armed men in hiding.
Thick black ammunition belts set at various inclinations accentuated the corpulence of some amongst the PR, most being farmers and miners. They looked an unlikely bunch of fighters appearing too relaxed for the purpose of their gathering. In their clumsy uniforms the very wealthy and the poor were indistinguishable, their inbuilt courage hidden, as John Cannon arranged them into seven groups under regular police Officers.
Winds of Destruction Page 21
