Passage To India Part 1 - My Father's Flight To India In 1934
In 1934, my father's commission in the RAF ended
, and he joined the Bristol & Wessex Flying Club at Whitchurch as an instructor having been a flying instructor in the RAF. His first pupil was Lady Blanche Douglas, the sister of the Duke of Beaufort and the widow of the late George Scott-Douglas. She wanted to learn to fly so she could fly to India in a new Miles Hawk Major she was in the process of buying and wanted my father, Micky, to be her co-pilot.She thought flying would be cheaper than hunting. She was the guardian of the son of the Maharajah of Cooch-Behar who was attending public school in UK and wanted to take up an invitation to visit his father.
The intention was to follow the route of the 1934 Australia race as far as Calcutta as fuel had been provided by Shell.
By now, Lady Blanche had taken delivery of a Miles M.2F Hawk Major as new, registration number G-ACWY, on 4th September 1934 which she owned until 27th March 1942. She kept the aeroplane at her home address - Manor Farm, Sherston, Wilts although it was maintained at Whitchurch by the Club. Apparently she had her own landing strip in one of her fields and did not use the larger grass runway to the west of Badminton Hall on the Duke of Beaufort's land. This latter landing strip now has a system of landing lights and can handle fairly sophisticated twin engine aeroplanes, either belonging to local landowners or used to fly members of the Royal Family on visits to the Duke of Beaufort.
They set off with moderate visibility from Bristol on November 20th at 8am and crossed the Channel via Lympne. There they flew into mist and were forced to land at St Englevert, north of Boulogne. After 2 hours, they carried on to Abbeville where they were forced to stop as the route to Paris was fogbound.
Next day they carried on to Paris where they nightstopped due to oil trouble. Next day they tried to fly on to Lyon but halfway there were forced to land in a field near what they later discovered to be Paray-Le-Monial. They were very close to the airfield there and they then took off again at tree top height and eventually found the airfield after the Guardian had lit a beacon on the ground.
After waiting there for an hour or two, they continued on to Lyon where the weather was better and then on to Marseilles having flown over the clouds and the mountains. However my father got a frost bitten face. They left Marseilles next morning, refuelled at Nice and then crossed to Corsica and flew along the rocky coast and then to Sardinia to Elmos, a distance of 147 miles, whilst bitterly cold.
There they found it warm and then crossed to Tunis, then onto Cairo, following the North African coast. Here they spent a couple of days sightseeing and seeing the pyramids at Giza.
Then on through Palestine, and onto the Rutbah Wells following the Trans Arabian pipeline to Baghdad and then to Basra and Bushire.
While climbing from Bushire and about 60 miles south of Bushire, Lady Blanche reported via the voice tube that oil was spurting into the front cockpit. Oil pressure was going down and Micky advised that they climb higher to 8000 feet but eventually Micky had to switch the engine off otherwise it would seize.
They had hoped to be able to glide to the next place but that was not to be. Micky started looking for a forced landing site and within a few minutes had found a perfect landing site and did a perfect landing. Here they were somewhere between Bushire and Bandar Abbas in what is now Iran marooned........
Copyright (c) 2009 Michael Ogden
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