LIFE AFTER THE TECH

My father, who worked for the Admiralty at Fox Hill, was now posted to Rosyth Dockyard in Fife. As a consequence, I spent the next two years at Dunfermline High School. It was most definitely not a very happy experience. The school was situated near the local gasworks, earning it the unofficial title Gasworks Secondary. It was co-educational and had three times the number of pupils as Bath Technical School. I was never happy there. The Scottish teachers still used the leather strap freely in those days and yet discipline was often non-existent. Uncontained riots in the classrooms were not uncommon. Discipline wasn’t the only problem. I remember myself and another English boy having to explain to the physics teacher how to answer a question we had been given in our GCE ‘O’ level exam papers in England. Solving the question seemed to be beyond him even, though he was supposed to be teaching it to Higher standard. In 1963 I finished my schooling with a fistful of Scottish Highers and I had to set about finding work. In September of that year, one month after my eighteenth birthday, I took a train south to London to start work in the Ministry of Aviation Accountancy Service. I was based in an office in High Holborn, not far from Holborn underground station. I had the job title of Executive Officer, but in reality I was little more than a junior clerk. Living and working in London was something quite different to the life I had led until then. I enjoyed my new-found sense of freedom, but the job wasn’t exactly a bowl of fun. Can you imagine sitting in an office, day after day, going dizzy with page after page of figures about the costs of aircraft production? It almost sent me round the bend. To begin with, I spent one day in the MoA office and the other four days at the Handley Page factory at Cricklewood. The one bright spark in the job came when I was given the chance to work away from London for four days a week. Sometimes I went to Hawker Siddeley’s factory at Chadderton near Manchester - what had once been the Avro manufacturing base. Other times, I went farther north to the one-time Blackburn Aircraft factory at Brough in Yorkshire, later also gobbled up into the Hawker Siddeley combine. This was 1963-64 and the most up-to-date computation equipment available within the job was mechanical and hand-driven. Calculations were more often made in the head and the answers hand-written. During this period, I lived for a year in a hostel near Earl’s Court tube station. I made some good friends here, and some bad ones. It was here that I learned to drink beer. Living in London was expensive and I was on a low salary, so I saved money by walking a lot during that year. Sometime later in 1964 I moved into a flat attached to a hostel near Wimbledon Common, and my life took on a more sedate pace. Instead of busy city streets, my walks now centered on the miles of open space on Wimbledon Common. By the end of the summer of 1965, after two years working in the MoA Accountancy Service, I decided that enough was enough. I was fed-up with wading through pages and pages of accountancy figures. It was time to move on and do something different. One day, while I was reading a copy of Flight International, I saw an advertisement for Air Traffic Control Officer Cadets. I hadn’t a clue what that job was all about, but it seemed like a possible avenue out of accountancy. So, tongue in cheek, I applied for it. Surprisingly, I got the job and in November 1965 I boarded a train from Waterloo Station to begin my training at the School of Air Traffic Control at Hurn Airport near Bournemouth. The next stage of my life was about to begin. The School of Air Traffic Control (it became a college some years later) was housed in a new building at the entrance to Hurn Airport. In a way, the start of the cadetship was a bit like being a new boy at school all over again. The big challenge ahead of me was the prospect of three years of study and exams. To start with, I had to settle back into classroom work and that was quite a lot like being back at school, except that I also got to play with air traffic control simulators and - later - real aeroplanes. An air traffic controller should have some understanding of a pilot’s job so, in the cold snows of January 1966, I travelled to Cambridge Airport with a group of cadets who would learn to fly at the local Aero Club. We were the first cadets to be trained at Cambridge and I think the flying instructors were very much finding their feet with us. I was allocated to a suave old ex-RAF pilot called Bill Hinkley. Pulling on his pure white gloves as we taxied out in a little two-seat Cessna 150, he would say in a laconic voice, “Try not to hit anything when you take off, old boy. Tends to make a bit of a mess of the aeroplane and they are quite expensive.” To begin with all the instruction was dual. Then, one day, after we had spent an hour doing ‘circuits and bumps’ I taxied back towards the crew room and Bill said to me, “Leave the engine running, old boy, and I’ll just hop out here. You do another circuit and landing on your own.” That was it. Time for my first solo flight. Now alone inside the Cessna, I taxied out to the take-off point, went through all my pre-flight checks and drew a deep breath. Here we go. Apply the power smoothly and keep an eye on the aiming point at the end of the runway. Watch the airspeed indicator. There it is: rotation speed. Pull back on the control wheel and we’re away. Climb straight ahead to five hundred feet and then make a ninety degree turn to the right. Level off at one thousand feet and turn downwind. That’s when I had time to think. Down on my right hand side was Cambridge aerodrome. It was a thousand feet below me and I had to get the aircraft safely back down there, with no help from anyone. But the thinking time didn’t last. I went through the downwind checks and then turned base leg. Power back so that I was settled into a smooth descent and then turn finals. Nicely lined up with the runway. Watch the speed and height. Over the fence. Wait until I could make out the blades of grass beneath me, then start the round-out. The wheels creased back onto the grass runway with as smooth a landing as I had done all day. I taxied back to the crew room feeling pleased with myself. I hadn’t damaged anything. Navigation wasn’t my best subject, so I got hold of a map showing all the railway lines in the area, and followed them whenever I was off on a solo crosscountry. They actually had railways lines scattered around the countryside in those days. I went up one morning with Bill Hinkley to practise stalls and spins. It involved the aircraft falling out of the sky, straight down with no power, and spinning on its axis. It was a very stomach-churning session and I ended up being airsick into my map case with its valuable stock of local maps. It was only when I got on the ground again that I remembered I had forgotten my own chart case that morning and had borrowed another trainee’s! I seem to recall he had difficulty navigating that day. One morning we arrived at the aerodrome with snow clouds looming in the area. The chief instructor told me to fly off on a solo circuit and report back on the conditions. I was airborne, on my own, flying downwind to the runway when I spotted a bank of huge cumulo-nimbus cloud creeping towards me. It looked like touch-and-go who would get to the end of the runway first, me or the cloud. I did a tight circuit and just made it. The snow hit me as I landed. I wasn’t the best pilot in my group, but I was the first to qualify for a private pilot’s licence. With my flying training complete, I took a train north to Scotland where I reported to the ATC Field Training Unit at Prestwick. The others in the group followed me in dribs and drabs as they completed their flying training. It was still bitterly cold, even more so in Scotland. Along with three other officer cadets, I stayed in a bleak lodging house on Prestwick seafront. I seem to recall the snow was to dominate much of our experiences at Prestwick. The FTU was housed in old wartime huts on the edge of the airfield, and it was equipped with make-do aerodrome simulators comprising flight progress strip displays built onto old kitchen tables. We spent the next few weeks pretending to be aerodrome controllers handling aircraft in the Prestwick circuit. We never got to see the real thing in the control tower because we had yet to complete a proper course in aerodrome control. After a few weeks, as the cold weather began to ease, we returned to Bournemouth for that all-important Aerodrome Control course. At the end of it, when the warmer weather finally arrived, I and four other cadets returned to Prestwick for some real aerodrome control experience, but we were to be disappointed. There wasn’t room for all of us in the Prestwick control tower. “You’ll have to go somewhere else,” we were told by the Unit Training Officer. “And it will be the Highlands and Islands. Any preferences?” I figured it was an opportunity to go somewhere I might never see again, so I opted for Sumburgh, the airfield farthest from Prestwick. And that was how I came to spend the summer of 1966 in the Shetland Islands. I arrived at Sumburgh aboard a BEA Handley Page Herald, suitcase in one hand and headset in the other. The old wartime control tower sat on a rise overlooking the main runway. I wandered over there and introduced myself to the ATCO/Manager. He looked at me, somewhat puzzled. “No one told me to expect you,” he said. “However, since you’re here, you’d better plug in and do something.” I sat at the control desk, sent the Herald off on its return flight to Aberdeen without any difficulties, and that was it. I was left to my own resources in the tower for the next two months. The manager, I later discovered, had been sent to the wilds of Sumburgh because he wasn’t too sharp an operator at his previous station, RAE Bedford. No wonder he was happy to leave it all to me, even though I was just a cadet. An example of his nature can be gleaned from a story he told about how he ended up with a permanent limp. He was, he claimed, a navigator on a Lancaster bomber during the war. The aircraft was hit on a bombing run over Berlin. The pilot was killed and he, although badly wounded in the leg, took control and flew the aircraft back to its base. I took in that story with a sense of awe. One day when his wife popped up to the tower and she stopped to chat to me. “I suppose he told you how he got his limp?” she said. “Yes,” I replied with some sense of admiration. “Don’t believe a word of it,” she went on. “He broke his leg when he got pissed one night and fell over a stile.” He did, however, save the Civil Aviation Authority a lot of money. He was suspicious of the high usage of electricity drawn from the airfield generators. One day he ordered everything to be switched off, and yet electrical power was still being drawn at a high rate. He investigated further and discovered that every house in the area was wired into the airfield generators, and the locals had been drawing free electricity since the end of the war. From that day on, they had to pay for their electricity. That summer, the manager borrowed a Jodel single-engine aircraft from the Wick flying club. It sat on the tarmac for several days and Les seemed reluctant to take it back to its base. “If you fly it back to Wick for me, you can bugger off on extended leave,” he told me. On the surface, it was a good offer and I was initially interested, until the Station Telecommunications Officer gave me the full story. “The engine keeps cutting out, the radio doesn’t work properly, and the boss is afraid to fly it back over open water.” I politely declined the offer and the boss had to fly it back himself. Early in 1967, after taking two Area Control courses (radar and non-radar) I was sent to Preston Air Traffic Control Centre for some operational experience. That particular ATC Centre no longer exists, except in the memories of older controllers like myself. It was housed in an old mansion house called Barton Hall, a few miles outside of Preston. The operations room was built in what was once the inner courtyard. As the summer approached, I was detailed to go to an operational radar unit in Northern Ireland for further training. Ulster Radar was a joint civil-military radar station, a part of RAF Bishop’s Court. I telephoned the civilian boss there, asking him to book me into some suitable local accommodation. He told me I would be staying at The Downs Hotel in a local village. That was where I met my future wife, Fionnuala. Her mother ran the hotel. My three-year cadetship ended in November 1968 and I was posted to Belfast Airport as a qualified controller. Regrettably, my time there was an unhappy experience. I arrived as a naïve young Englishman knowing little of the fastdeveloping problems of Northern Ireland, despite my previous short detachment to Killard Radar Station. To start with, I shared a house in Belfast City with a couple of other young controllers. It was an old red-brick terrace house in an area that would later fall victim to the troubles that blighted Northern Ireland for nigh on thirty years. There had been a build-up of trouble for some time until, eventually, it exploded into what was, to all intents and purposes, a full-blown civil war. The military were called in to deal with it, and I was the aerodrome controller on duty the day the RAF first ferried thousands of troops into the province. I remember working a five-hour morning shift and coming back that same evening for a long ten-hour night shift. It was all non-stop troop movements between RAF Lyneham and Aldergrove Airport. It’s probably best not to linger over what went on in the streets of Belfast at that time. The catalogue of bombing and killing doesn’t make pleasant reading. The inbound route from England to Aldergrove ran overhead Belfast city. Pilots would report the fires and explosions they could see below. We would track them on radar and try to identify the targets from what we had heard on radio news reports. “I can see a big fire about a mile away on my port side.” “Oh yes, that’ll be a factory on the outskirt of Antrim. It was bombed earlier this evening.” In 1969, Fionnuala and I were married. Towards the end of that year, I finally got away from Belfast Airport and was posted back to the Killard long-range radar station again. It was known as a JATCRU, a joint air traffic control radar unit. Owned by the RAF, it had four civil radar consoles in the main operations room. The civilian job there involved tracking aircraft coming in off the North Atlantic and feeding them into the national airways system. Later in 1970, Fionnuala and I bought a bungalow on the outskirts of Downpatrick, the county town. In 1971 she was taken by ambulance into the local hospital. That night I was woken up by a loud explosion. I dived towards the bedroom window in time hear another explosion and to see flames and debris flying into the air. It seemed to be coming from the hospital. Shivers of horror! In fact it was the county courthouse nearby that was attacked. It was the first time I had actually seen a building blown up and it told me that the tentacles of fear and violence orchestrated by the IRA were now creeping very close to where we lived. Things went downhill after that and I was quietly told the IRA was checking out who lived in our road. The inevitable tensions grew alarmingly. At work, we often managed to get our heads down for an hour or two on a night shift. I took to bedding down behind the filing cabinets in one of the offices, with some sort of vague hope that the metal cabinets might stop any stray bullets. One evening I was left as the sole civil controller on duty, along with a young female assistant. I had only one or two aircraft on my frequency, nothing demanding, so I told her to pop along to the crew room and make us each a mug of coffee. She arrived back ten minutes later, a mug of coffee in each hand, and tripped on the steps beside my radar console. The contents of both coffee mugs went all over me, leaving me soaked to the skin. I couldn’t leave the radar, so I sent the girl back to the crew room to dry my clothes over a heater. Those high-flying 707 pilots would have had no idea that they were being controlled by one junior controller sitting in front of a radar tube in his underwear. Out on the streets, the violence got steadily worse. One evening, in July 1972, I turned on my television to see the carnage of the Oxford Street bus station bomb in Belfast. The victims were all innocent bystanders who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I remember feeling utterly sickened to see on the television screen bits of human bodies being scraped up into plastic bags. It became known as Bloody Friday, and it gave me cause for some serious thought. Did I really want my children to grow up in a place like this? Did I really want my family to live amongst such malevolent hatred? Being a very junior air traffic controller, my salary was nothing outstanding and, when my battered old Ford Anglia gave up the ghost I resorted to driving to work on a Honda motor cycle. Later, I bought a brand new Fiat 500. It was the cheapest new car on the market. It was small and tinny but, being new, it was my pride and joy. It was the first brand new car I had ever owned. Meanwhile, things were no better in Ireland. The crunch came when I went on duty one Sunday afternoon. By then the troubles were totally out of hand. Whereas in 1969 they had been largely confined to Londonderry and Belfast, now they had spread farther afield. The events of that day still stick in my mind. It was a bright Sunday afternoon. Traffic routeing through the Ulster Radar airspace was light and we were able to take breaks sitting outside in the sunshine. Into this idyllic setting crept the first signs of the encroaching troubles. Halfway through the afternoon, we were told that a busload of vandals – a Republican heavy mob - had come down from Belfast and they were causing trouble. Rioting had started on the road between the radar site and the nearby RAF domestic site. Cars were being stoned and mob rule had taken over. The supervisor had intended taking an ‘early go’ leaving me in complete charge. When he heard what was happening, he quickly changed his mind and told me I could go home early, he would stay. The rest of the ATC staff looked at me somewhat expectantly, wondering what I would do. “No problem,” I said somewhat casually, in a manner which belied a feeling of utter horror. “I’ll try a back road.” It was a road I had never used before, but I knew roughly where it would lead me, and it seemed the safest bet in the circumstances. The RAF corporal at the main gate waved me out and rapidly slammed shut the high security gates behind me. I was now on my own. I paused at the end of the access track. Away to my left was the road to the RAF domestic site and the rioters. It was also the route I would normally use to drive home. I turned right. A little way along that road I turned again, along a narrow country lane banked by high hedges which used to be a feature of that part of Ireland. At least it was heading in the right direction. And then I came upon the one thing I had hoped to avoid. A car was stopped laterally across the road, and two groups of men stood watching me, one each side of the vehicle. It was certainly not an army or police road block, but who were these people? They might have been the Ulster Volunteer Force, or the Ulster Defence Association, both protestant extremist groups. Or they might have been IRA activists who would, no doubt, have been pleased to make the acquaintance of an Englishman in the employ of the British government. I had no way of determining for sure who they were. I decided the worst thing I could do now was to turn and run. That would be asking for a bullet up the exhaust pipe. I had to bluff it out. So I kept going. For a couple of seconds, I tried to produce a few words in an accent that sounded vaguely Irish. “Ah’m goin’ into Downpatrick, so I am,” I mumbled to myself. Even to my own ears, it sounded pathetic. And then, amazingly, the car blocking the road was pulled aside and I was waved past. I did not understand what was happening, but I had no intention of stopping to find out. I stared straight ahead, put my foot down and raced away, as much as one could race away in a Fiat 500. I was puzzled. How had I got away with it? I knew one man who might be able to shed some light on the matter. He was a watch supervisor who lived next door to the local chief of police – a man who kept him well informed about local politics. As he was the supervisor on duty the next day, I asked him. “Well, old chap,” he said slowly and carefully. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but I was very worried about you buying that little Fiat. You see… I think I know why they let you through… the local IRA brigade leader has an identical car to that.” Suddenly I no longer felt remotely safe. That feeling was in no way lessened by a subsequent experience on the streets of Belfast. I had to travel to Preston for a course at the Preston Air Traffic Control Centre. I decided to take a bus from Downpatrick to Belfast and, from there, another bus to Aldergrove Airport. Unfortunately, the buses did not use the same Belfast bus station and, rather than pay for a taxi I began a half-mile walk through the city. I should explain that taxis in Belfast operated a rip-off system of picking up several passengers at once and charging each of them the full fare. I couldn’t afford to subsidise that. It was a Saturday morning and weekend shoppers were out in force, making the pavement seem crowded for a man with a heavy suitcase. Until, quite suddenly, I was alone. One minute I had been in a crowd and then, a moment later, the street was deserted. Except for me. My isolation did not last long. An army Saracen vehicle screeched to a halt right alongside me and combat troops leapt out, taking up offensive positions all around me. Two of them were crouched in a shop doorway, their rifles aimed at targets somewhere behind me. One was stretched out flat on the pavement almost at my feet. He rammed a round into the breech of his weapon. Two more soldiers took cover beside the vehicle and aimed their rifles at some point farther down the street. Standing on the pavement, at the centre of all this activity, was me. No other pedestrians. Just me. So I put my head down and ran. This was just getting too far out of hand. The time had come to opt out. To my way of thinking, many opportunities were open to me, but not nearly as many actually appealed to me. An interview with my boss did not help as his line was quite clear: “If you want out, you’ll have to go where we send you. And that will be London.” I had no wish to move to London. I began examining the various other options, until one seemingly heaven-sent answer appeared. It came in the form of a vacancy notice which asked for applications for posts at Aerodrome Managers at Scottish Highland and Island airfields. This, I decided, was to be my way out of Northern Ireland. My application went in and, within weeks, I was summoned to the Civil Aviation Authority divisional office in Edinburgh for an interview. I got the job and in October 1972, I was given one month’s notice to pack and sell my house and report to Tiree Aerodrome as the new Aerodrome Manager. Killard radar station stumbled on for some time after that but, eventually, the civil element had to be closed. It was just too dangerous. The RAF element remained a bit longer until the IRA fired five mortar bombs into the site. Amazingly, no one was killed, but that was the end for Killard. The whole site was closed down. Today, you’d hardly know that the radar station had once been there. A piece of local history has been lost. On the duly appointed day, I flew to Glasgow by BEA Viscount where I connected with the daily Tiree Heron service. The pilot had elected to fly visually beneath the cloud, thereby giving the passengers a view of the wild countryside along the west coast. The aircraft flew at no more than five hundred feet over the swirling whirlpool in the Strait of Corryvreckan, probably the most dangerous waterway around the British Isles. Shortly after, it passed over the holy island of Iona. Off to the right, I could see the black lump of Staffa, the small isle which inspired Mendelssohn to write his famous overture, The Hebrides. In the distance, a low flat island crept into view and the Heron rumbled on towards it. It gradually showed itself to be a barren patch of grass-covered sand. In the flat centre of the island, I could make out a triangular array of runways, and very little else. Tiree Aerodrome was built during the Second World War as an RAF base and continued as such until the middle of the nineteen fifties when it was handed over to the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation. BEA (British European Airways) had been flying passenger services to Tiree from the end of the war. My first reaction to life out there was one of relief at getting away from the violence of Northern Ireland. It seemed like a whole new world. The island is about ten miles long, two miles wide, has a population of around nine hundred and is not that easy to find on the map. My working life for the next three years would be centred around the old wartime control tower. I was the senior officer in the establishment, but in reality it was largely organised by a clerical assistant called Chrissie MacLean. She was a highly efficient lady, a little older than myself. In her own quiet way, she kept me on the right lines, ensuring I did the right thing at the right time. As I sat at a late breakfast after sleeping in, Chrissie would phone me at home and say, “The group manager was on the phone for you. I told him you were out doing an aerodrome inspection.” Of such stuff are capable office staff made, and I was highly delighted when I learned she had been promoted after I left the island. I soon learned that Tiree was probably unique as a Highland and Island airfield. Where other ATCO/Managers suffered the problem of drunken or lazy staff, I was lucky to have the cooperation of competent workers. I could afford to laugh at the plight of a colleague on another island who had asked the Divisional Fire Officer to fly out there to sort out his drunken fire crew. The great man was met at the aeroplane by the scheming fire crew who escorted him to the nearest pub, filled him up with whiskey until he knew not what was up and what was down, and drove him back to the aeroplane. No disciplinary action was taken. What was the point? I arrived at the aerodrome at a comparatively busy time. I use the word ‘busy’ advisedly in the context of Tiree. The Royal Navy, in the form of 819 Squadron based at HMS Gannet, Prestwick, used the airfield as a forward refuelling base for their Sea King helicopters. They had decided to build an operations base on the aerodrome. The building was to be a prefabricated hut which would be transported to the island by an army landing craft. It struck me as somewhat out of keeping for the army to transport, by sea, a building to be used in connection with naval flying operations. But I assumed they knew what they were doing. When the landing craft arrived, it tied up at the island’s main pier, a mile away from the main village. I drove down to the pier to meet the captain of the vessel and liaise over the final arrangements for off-loading the building. In the wardroom I flopped down into the most comfortable seat and, unwisely, accepted a large gin. At that point the ship’s captain entered the wardroom and proceeded to nod his head to one side while fixing me with a most peculiar stare. Not being well acquainted with military customs, I was quite unaware that I had prostrated myself in the captain’s seat. I watched his strange head contortions for some minutes, trying to puzzle out whether it was a form of greeting, or an immoral proposition, before I decided to do the only reasonable thing in the circumstances. I contorted my head back at him. Maybe it was my failure to vacate his purloined seat that made him suggest we go out to survey the beach where the landing craft would be brought ashore and the hut off-loaded. The following evening was suitable for a beach landing and I decided to watch, having never before seen a landing craft in action. Sadly, there were problems in store. I heard, late in the afternoon, that the vessel had been brought ashore on the wrong beach and was now ‘drying out’ four miles away. The Tiree roads are all single track, punctuated with lay-bys to allow vehicle to pass. In addition, the roads bend as sharply as a dog’s hind leg. As the hut was well in excess of forty feet in length, there was some speculation about how it could be transported to the airfield. In the event, the problem never arose. I drove down to the bay where the moon lit up a scene reminiscent of a Keystone Kops comedy. With the help of a local handyman and a set of caterpillar-track trailers borrowed from the airfield, the army crew had already brought ashore one section of the hut. They had not been too careful in the way they handled it and, sadly, it was now in three times as many pieces as it should have been. The wreckage lay on the beach as they tried to manoeuvre the second section out from the bowels of the vessel. Contradictory instructions were bellowed in English and Gaelic as the long load emerged. I watched in wonderment and seriously considered whether it was wise to let soldiers play with boats. On the streets of Belfast, the troops had my undiminished admiration, but they seemed to be quite out of their depth here on the Tiree beach. With a quiet chuckle, I went away to my bed. Meanwhile, back at the aerodrome, I was settling into a daily routine. I decided to arrange a liaison visit to Barra. Apart from the experience of landing on a beach, there was a particular lady I wanted to meet. Her name was Kitty Macpherson, a name known to many pilots who had reason to fly around the Western Isles at that time. To all intents and purposes, Kitty was Barra aerodrome. She sold the tickets, wheeled out the boarding steps, inspected the beach and, in her own inimitable manner, she passed the weather information to pilots with the aid of a small VHF pack radio. I never failed to be amused at the wording of those reports. “The beach is wet as opposed to dry. The tide is out as opposed to in. And the cloud is at the top of the hill.” Such wording made my own formal met reports seem so mundane. It was a sad day when, two years later, Kitty was retired from her post, but not without just and due recognition from BEA. The beach at Barra is one of the largest I have seen, a huge expanse of sand overlooked by rugged hills. One particular hill creates such problems from downdraughts that, with the wind blowing from that direction, BEA aircraft were warned not to attempt a landing with the winds-speed in excess of seventeen knots. That’s a very low wind-speed in Hebridean terms. One pilot told me of how he ignored the warning and tried to land with a wind-speed in excess of twenty knots. On final approach the aircraft became uncontrollable and he tried to overshoot, but he couldn't climb away. Barely holding the aircraft level, he shot across the beach towards the hut where Kitty was watching apprehensively. As the aircraft roared closer, the door of the hut flew open and Kitty, skirts flying, raced away from what she expected to be a demolition job on her hut. Fortunately, the pilot was able to claw his way over the top of the small building and, once clear of the beach, climb back to a safe height. He told me all this when he arrived back at Tiree, gasping for a cigarette and time to recover his nerves. Rarely have I seen a more ashen appearance. In January I returned to Northern Ireland to collect my Fiat car and drive it to Oban to board a ferry to Tiree. A fairly seasoned traveller, I am not normally travel sick.I was on this occasion. Once the ship had emerged from the shelter of the Sound of Mull, huge waves broke across it. It heaved and pitched from cavernous troughs to towering crests. The few other passengers were seated at fixed seats around the sides of the main lounge and hung on for grim death. I had made the mistake of taking a comfortable armchair in the middle of the lounge, one of a group of seats the other passengers had wisely vacated. When the first violent waves hit the ship, all the loose seats were sent sliding across the floor in unison, with me looking ridiculously foolish as I sailed along majestically in that armchair. The seasoned passengers were obviously used to the problem as they lifted their feet onto the seats beside them, thus avoiding having their legs crushed by the loose chairs now careering around like dodgem cars. As we ploughed into even worse seas, my stomach began to protest and I made my way, very unsteadily, to the lavatory. I spent the next hour stretched out on the lavatory floor with my head in a bowl. In a moment of madness, I stood up and ventured out on deck with the idea of vomiting over the side of the ship. The crew quickly waved me back inside. There was too much risk of me being washed overboard. The tired old steamer continued on its journey. The hull rose and fell, crashing into walls of foaming water, rolling from side to side as she fought her way through the stormy seas. Finally, Tiree came into sight. In the lee of the island, the Loch Seaforth was sheltered from the worst of the rough seas, but she still rolled and pitched as she staggered towards the pier. Out on deck, I could seeFionnuala standing at the end of the pier. Thank God that journey was now over, or so I thought. Then horror set in. The boat was moving back away from the pier. A clerical man, who I later learned was an island missionary, was stood beside me. “They’re having problems,” he said. “It’s the wind. It’s blowing us away from the pier.” And so it was. The crew tried again to berth the ship, but again they were blown away from the pier. Again, I saw my family receding away from me. Then the captain gave up, turned his ship away from Tiree and headed back out into the storm. I was utterly dejected. The Loch Seaforth staggered back into Tobermory Bay where it took shelter for the night at the village pier. By now I was prostrated on one of the seats in the lounge, and alone. The rest of the passengers had slipped away to somewhere else, presumably somewhere more comfortable. No one bothered to tell me where they had gone. The following morning the storm had abated and, by daybreak, the Loch Seaforth had slipped out of the Sound of Mull and was headed back into the open sea. There was still a heavy swell, but by now I had my sea legs and I stood on deck to watch the dying stages of the sea’s anger. From Oban to Tiree is a scheduled journey of five hours. On that occasion it took twenty nine hours. And I was not even remotely aware of just how unseaworthy the Loch Seaforth would later show itself to be. It happened just a few weeks later. The island’s doctor had requested a routine duty for two of my fire crew. An elderly lady needed to go to hospital. As it was a non-emergency case, she would be sent by boat to the hospital in Oban. That meant the use of the aerodrome ambulance to take her to the pier very early in the morning. There she would be put aboard the Loch Seaforth on its return trip from the outer islands. I was roused from my sleep before six the next morning by a telephone call from one of the firemen. “It’s the Loch Seaforth,” he said. “She’s gone aground and some of the passengers are missing. You’ll need to open up the airfield for the air-sea rescue people.” When I arrived at the control tower I telephoned Scottish Centre at Prestwick and discovered that an RAF Wessex helicopter was already in the area and a Royal Navy Sea King was about to be sent off from Prestwick. I had the Wessex transferred to the Tiree Tower frequency and learned from the pilot that he was searching the seas off the north east coast of Tiree, looking for a missing lifeboat. The full story came to me later when the two firemen at the pier returned to the airfield. The Loch Seaforth had been on the return leg of a round trip from Oban to the Outer Hebrides and back. She had left Barra the previous evening and was headed for Tiree, which she approached from the west. In order to get to the pier on the eastern side of the island, the ship was navigated through the narrow stretch of seaway between Tiree and Coll. She was sailed too close to rocks which lie dangerously submerged in that area, and the ship went aground. Was that a foolhardy attempt to make up lost time? Or was it because the captain was drunk in his bunk and the first officer was drunk at the helm? Probably, it was a combination of all three factors. The order was given to ‘abandon ship’ and passengers and crew were loaded into the lifeboats. The passengers were put into a boat on one side of the ship, most of the crew on the other. From that point, the story seems to have taken on a somewhat farcical turn. The lifeboat in which the crew abandoned the Loch Seaforth headed straight towards Tiree. The other lifeboat, the one carrying all the passengers, headed out to sea, rapidly becoming lost to sight. That was the boat the RAF Wessex was searching for. It and the RN Sea King would spend most of the morning searching. As in all good comedies, the stricken Loch Seaforth failed to sink. The crew was able to get back on board and sail her round the island to Tiree’s pier, which is where she was headed in the first place. But she now had no passengers. I cannot recall which helicopter eventually found the missing lifeboat. I received a radio message announcing that it was seen, and I passed it on to the coastguard. One of the helicopters remained with the boat as it battled its way back towards Tiree. By now, the press had got hold of the story and was busily hiring charter aircraft to take them out to our island. Technically, the airfield was still closed to civil traffic and they should have requested special permission to land, but no one bothered. They just turned up and landed anyway. I think they may have been trying to avoid paying the landing fees. I was not at the pier the next day when the next act in the story played itself out. Just as the Loch Seaforth failed to sink when expected, so the obtuse old lady played her next card with stubborn abruptness. As she sat at the pier, her internal bulkheads collapsed and, with no warning, she gave up the ghost and dropped down to the sea bed. When I next saw her, only the upper superstructure was showing above water. Below the water, I could clearly see cars which had been sitting on the deck, just as our own little Fiat had been a few weeks before. The ship looked pathetic, and it completely blocked Tiree’s pier, the island’s shipping lifeline. A diver had been sent out to Tiree by charter aircraft as soon as news of the emergency broke. He was standing on the pier when the ship sank and, straightaway, he went aboard to ensure no one was trapped below deck. He staggered along corridors, shoulder deep in sea water, searching each cabin as he went, until he came to a cabin that was still occupied. On an upper berth, just inches above the water line, a man lay asleep. When woken he was completely oblivious of what had happened, having boarded the ship in a drunken stupor. He had not booked a berth, but had staggered around drunkenly until he found an empty cabin where he fell asleep. And he slept soundly until woken by the diver and told the ship was underwater. The Tiree posting was pinned at three years right from the start, and wisely so. There was a very real risk of an ATCO/Manager becoming island-fixated. After three years working out in the wilderness I was convinced I really had to get back into the thick of air traffic control once again. So, in 1975, I volunteered for a posting to the Scottish Air Traffic Control Centre at Prestwick. Having worked at an area control radar station in Northern Ireland, I had all the right qualifications. Redbrae was an old Tudor building on the edge of Prestwick Airport. It had a wartime concrete extension glued onto one side. That extension was the Scottish Air Traffic Control Centre, where aircraft were controlled in their en-route phase. In general, area control was the busiest and most demanding job in ATC. In Scotland it was hampered by poor equipment and antiquated methods of control. There was a radar site at Gailes, just a few miles up the road, but its old wartime radar was unreliable, frequently failed, and controllers often had to fall back on red pens, strips of paper and a good deal of ingenuity. And more than a modicum of good luck. In its latter days, Redbrae’s roof leaked and I recall struggling to keep abreast of the traffic because rainwater was dripping onto my flight progress strips and the ink was running away. I recall, on one memorable occasion, losing my telephones and radio about the same time the radar controller announced his equipment had also failed. I grabbed at a battery-powered standby radio, but it didn’t work either. Thank God the travelling public never knew what went on. Outside of the central area of Scotland, radar was (in those days) non-existent below 25,000 feet and the weather and winds made pilot’s reports and estimates rather unreliable. I remember, while controlling traffic over the Western Islands, trying to help a pilot who was lost. I asked him what he could see below. With a cry of joy he said that he could see the Forth Bridge. Now, the Forth Bridge is on the east coast of Scotland and my radio cover didn’t extend that far. Fortunately, my experience of that part of Scotland gave me a flash of inspiration. He was actually near Oban on the west coast and looking at something called the Connell Bridge, a much smaller cantilever bridge. Getting lost is bad enough, but you should at least know which side of the country you are flying over! In the winter of 1977, I attended a course in Bournemouth, preparatory to new ATC systems being introduced. The trip south served as a reminder of how pleasant was that part of the world. By the time the Scottish Air Traffic Control Centre moved into a new building in 1978 I was a watch training officer. I enjoyed that particular task and decided to do a five-year tour as an instructor at the College in Bournemouth. So, in the winter of 1979/80, we were on the move again. By early 1985 I should have gone back to operational ATC after five years as an instructor, but I had a serious heart attack and my controller’s licence was withdrawn. A heart attack at age thirty nine? Well, I was just plain unlucky. I didn’t smoke, drank only in moderation and didn’t cavort with loose women. On the other hand, I ate all the wrong foods and didn’t exercise enough, so my arteries probably got clogged up. After a spell in Westminster Hospital they told me they wouldn’t do any repair work as that part of my heart was no longer working and heart muscle doesn’t regenerate itself. “Go away and enjoy life firing on three cylinders,” they told me. So I did. I eventually got my controller’s licence back, along with a pointed suggestion that I should never again try to practice the privileges of the licence as an air traffic controller. The stress of the job would not be good for my health. Fair enough. I stayed on at the college as an instructor and became a part of the furniture: a sort of ‘Mr Chips’ of air traffic control. That was about the time I first became known as the ‘professor’ and the nick-name sort of stuck. When I took over the training of ATC instructors, it gave me the opportunity to run a few courses overseas. Running a course in the Ferringhi Beach Hotel in Penang was great, so was the course in Hong Kong. It was the first time I saw people take out their lunch boxes, set up a picnic on the desk, and start eating – all in the middle of one of my lessons. Imagine doing that in one of ‘Bill’ Hayman’s lessons at CBTS! The course I ran in Frankfurt wasn’t such a hot experience – I didn’t realise the Germans could be so brutal towards their trainees. I asked one of the managers about the training techniques they used. He said (I swear this is absolutely true) “Ve haff only vun technique. We sit zem in ze hot seat unt ven zay make mistakes, ve kick arse.” And I actually saw it happening! I had long been a believer in the European Union… until I saw it from the inside. I was appointed to a European committee in Luxembourg, aimed at bringing about harmonizing of European ATC training methods. On the first day of the next committee meeting, the chairman decided that our financial support must be attended to before any business began. We were asked to write out how much we wanted from EU funds in respect of our expenses. The UK was very strong on ensuring that expense claims were totally legitimate, so I duly brought out my receipts and evidence of the hotel costs, which I took along to the cash office. I passed all my evidence to the cashier, who pushed it all back at me. “How much do you want?” he asked. “I’ve listed all my costs and the evidence,” I replied. “No, no.” He gave me a knowing look. “How much do you want?” I took only what I was legitimately entitled to. One lunchtime, I was with the rest of the committee eating in a restaurant at the top of the European parliament building. It was reserved solely for EU bureaucrats. We sat at a table with a ‘No Smoking’ sign above us, clearly written in English, French and German. Most of the assembled committee members were smoking. Being anti-smoking, I pointed to the sign. “What about that, guys?” I asked. They laughed at me. “The trouble with you Brits is that you think we should all obey the rules. You should be like the rest of us. Agree to the rules in public, and then quietly ignore them. It’s the only way the system will work.” They carried on smoking. I took early retirement from ATC in 2003 and settled into a life of writing books. At the time of writing this account I have had more than thirty novels published. In addition, I have given various talks about writing. The most common question I get asked is, “Where do you find all those ideas for stories?” The answer? I get the ideas from the life experiences I’ve been through. Simple as that. Which is why I have written aviation stories, and my latest novel, The Girl From The Killing Streets is set in Northern Ireland. What comes next is in the lap of the Gods          -        BAck to 1954-59 page.