8am was the earliest I could get Customs to the Airport . They, on the other hand, had given me special dispensation to leave only 80 miles south of North Cape, due to my 1943 war bird, rather than the standard departure from Auckland, to go foreign. Maurice is truly grateful.
Sir Francis always broke a whole bottle of good French brandy on the hub of the prop., before crossing stretches of the Tasman Sea. I made do with a quarter bottle and even that had been subjected to a random but somewhat lengthy quality test, two nights before.
NO DRINKING the night before.
Flying the 8 hour rule is nonsense and quite misleading…….even 24 hours after some of us can be detected as still, “under the influence’….not due to blood levels but due to its lasting effect, days for some, on the grey cells in your head causing you temporary (if you are lucky) loss of memory and to be slow in thought and action.
Out over the cliffs of North Cape I only had little over 400 miles to run so it was time to test the long range system. You can always calculate the “point of no return” variable with wind speed and direction or the exact halfway point with no need, whatsoever, of multiple thought processes, slide rules, drift calculations and the like. All you need is a good ear because, as sure as eggs are eggs, the old donkey will start to miss and run rough to tell you. For some reason, once the newly injected adrenalin has circulated the bloodstream for a few minutes and is now being broken down to give you the uncontrollable tremors, only then do the irregular beats and vibrations from the engine mysteriously drift away leaving you drained of energy and powers for reasoned thought.
Yes, this time she did better, the engine stopped.
No speed to height ….dive, dive, dive, keep the old fan turning as there was no option in this cumbersome survival suit to get out of the aircraft, stand on the wheel and hand swing….I was far to close to the water!
As, always, in cases of self preservation matters, forces for you come out of nowhere. Like, for example, when recently, the judge had ordered me to produce witnesses there and then, without due notice. Following the removal of a dead rat from my pocket, I thought his resting place appropriate being our local chamber for the cabal of corrupt lawyers, generally financed by the tax payer, there being no effective audit in the UK on such matters. I had swung round, near to panic to see who was in the well of the court …but that is another story for later.
I went for all fuel cocks on for each wing tank, mixture rich, throttle linkages and mag switches both on? No, only one mag on, possibly knocked off in the panic within such a cramped cockpit.
No “go juice” had to be the reason soon to be confirmed .
Once back in level flight, I decided to talk to the, always so friendly, passing airliners at 30,000 feet. I reached for my newly installed vhf only to find the first knob, needed for frequency change, was snapped off at the root and any time spent trying to change frequency with pliers from a multi knife was quite futile.
WARNING to others…the cumbersome survival suit, making me look like Mr Michelin, and my total lack of physical strength caused me to be unable to reach the hand held that had slid away, on the floor. Nor could I reach to rectify an air lock, up front, in the long range fuel system. Power to the GPS terminated at that point leaving me well over a 100 miles to run. Intricate and methodical log keeping, together with a steady and reliable weather forecast for 5000 feet, allowed me, an hour and a half later, to just detect a silhouette of two islands to emerge out of the low status of cloud before me . There’s nothing worse than seeing an island that is not due to be there! This one was Norfolk Island, gracefully adorned with the many Norfolk Pines, so much admired by the first aviator to visit.