WING WALKING AND SKY WRITING

Last month I was bitching that nothing interesting happened for a couple of years and then suddenly there was a string of engine failures. And immediately after that I had some really unusual flights – let me tell you about a couple of them.

IT MAY COME AS A SURPRISE to the Gleitch that wonderful aeroplanes and interesting people were around long before the cell phone and words ‘like’, ‘awesome’ and ‘cool’ became part of modern communication.

I’m going to be in much trouble for saying that. But toughies.

Near the beginning of 1970 the tikkie-box in the Algoa Flying Club rang and an important British voice wanted to know if I could tow a banner. Although I had no idea how to do this I told him it was well within the scope of my capabilities.

“Thank you so much, old boy,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”

He turned out to be one of politician Helen Suzman’s yes men. His job was to wave the Progressive Party’s flag and make sure the voters flocked in to scrawl their crosses in her box. The Progs were the forerunners of today’s DA.

I should mention that the internet hadn’t been born yet. It was a sort of embryo thing that the military and some universities poked at while it was floundering in its first trimester. This meant that my ignorance on how to tow a banner would remain profound until I had spoken to people who knew what they were doing. And as I couldn’t find anyone who had info on such matters, I had to start from first principles.

To this end I recruited my tubby mate, Bernie Marriner, to help me scratch the turnip. Bernie worked for the Ford Motor Company as a rally driver and builder of rally cars. He was good with his hands and we could sneak into the company’s workshops and make whatever was needed.

Bernie Marriner had the busy job of squirting oil and giving me directions.

We suspected that if we tried to tow a banner from the Tiger’s tailwheel it would probably swizzle round in the prop’s slipstream, get tangled in the rudder and cause a monstrous nonsense. What it needed, we decided, was a stake at the front of the banner that would be held vertically by being attached, top and bottom, to one of the lift struts. But this scheme needed the cautious approach that us aviators always strive for.

Jim's efforts deserved a cartoon.

I must break this exciting narrative for a moment to remind you of a previous incident that involved too much drag in the lift strut area.

Eric Blomkamp, who was a sort of hippie-ish pupe of mine suggested it might be a good idea to do a bit of wing walking on my Tiger. I remember him well, partly because he paid for some of his flying with a very fancy guitar – which I haven’t quite mastered yet. I instantly realised that wing walking was exactly the sort of thing we should be doing, but being the cautious pilot that I am, I was concerned about the asymmetric drag. What if I got airborne with him sitting on the wing, hanging on to the strut, and then realized that I didn’t have enough rudder to keep straight? Far better, I decided to find someone to sit on the other wing to balance things out.

I knew exactly the guy we needed - Trevor Jones. He was a sort of tie-wearing office bod who worked at Table Top and wore thick glasses. A quick silver-tongued phone call and we had our drag asymmetry problem roughly solved. I say roughly because Eric was of a longish spidery construction, while Trevor would have been described by his tailor, if he had one, as portly short.

The scheme seemed a solid one. There was little chance of my pax falling off as they had the struts to hang on to; the drag problem was sorted and the Tiger should handle the weight with ease. What could go wrong?

A bug spray bottle pumped oil into the exhaust for smoke.

Half an hour later we were accelerating along the grass runway 20 at George’s old airport. The first hint of a problem presented itself when the aircraft seemed a bit reluctant to fly. No matter, 20 was an exceptionally long runway.

Now, a Tiger will normally lift off at around 45 mph and climb away happily at 60 mph.

We were now at 50 and she really wasn’t interested. Strange, I thought, certainly we might have been a bit on the heavy side, but the current aversion to flight was most un-Tigerlike.

I had the tail up and could see nicely ahead while I mused on the old lady’s lack of enthusiasm for flight. So I could see that the runway fence was starting to feature fairly prominently in our lives. We now had 60 mph and were light on the wheels – but still not really flying. Some of my audience who are not regular Tiger flyers might have forgotten that these aeroplanes are brakeless, meaning that by the time I woke up it was too late to abort. I had two options, the first was to close the throttle and barge through the barbed wire fence – a course of action that my passengers would probably veto had I been able to consult them. The second was to grit the teeth, try to make the bod light in the seat, and hope that Mr de Havilland would find that extra little nudge to hoik us over the fence.

I glanced at my fellow travellers to see how they were bearing up. The fools were laughing and waving their silly hands, seemingly unaware of our peril. That fatuous saying ‘at least they died doing what they love’ passed through the mind as the fence slimed by just inches below their feet.

I won’t bore you with details of the next few minutes, other than to mention that the aeroplane never gained more than 20 feet and the ailerons didn’t work at all. I sweated out about half a bucket of persp while my ignorant pax were deliriously happy, swinging their stupid legs and waving and shouting to passers by. They obviously thought I was keeping it low for their enjoyment.

The more devout members of my congregation may be curious to know why the aeroplane behaved so badly. Imagine how a boat leaves a V shaped wake behind it, well that’s what my excursionists were doing to the airflow behind them. So large chunks of wing were simply not doing any lifting, and the ailerons, which occupy the area immediately behind my fellow travellers, floundered uselessly in turbulent air.

Fragrant moments, as my mate, Bob Emmitt, would say.

And that brings us neatly back to the matter of banner towing. Those who were paying attention may remember that Bernie and I were planning to attach a banner to one of the wing struts.

Obviously we couldn’t take off with the banner trailing along the ground, so we did some cunning boy scoutery with ropes and toggles. The banner was furled, I believe that’s the term, against the strut. The plan was that once we were safely airborne, Bernie, in the front cockpit, would yank on a couple of lanyards and the banner would stream out behind us.

Fortunately Tigers have an excellent turn and slip indicator.

I mentioned the wing walkers incident because it made me wary of too much unwanted drag on one side. With this in mind we had an emergency jettison system that consisted of a couple more sheets or halyards, which Bernie could tug on in order to release the whole damn thing.

Sadly, I have to report that our first, and only, trial run was a disaster.

We got airborne from 08 at Port Elizabeth – yep that’s what it was called then – Gqeberha indeed – and climbed out strongly towards the military base. I bellowed to Bernie, through the Gosport tube, that he could let rip. He hauled on the control lines and the VOTE PROG banner streamed happily out behind the wing. There was a brief period of about half a second when our spirits soared. Success. Or so we thought. Then almost immediately I realized that I had full right rudder and we were not managing to keep straight. There was nothing for it but to dump the load instantly before it dragged us into a deadly spiral.

Now, I did mention that the country was heading into an election and this always causes the population to become bitchy and bad tempered. Factions become polarized and make nasty faces at each other. It doesn’t take much time for tempers to flair. In fact it was no more than ten minutes after landing that I had the commandant of the military base bellowing at me down the phone in Afrikaans. At first I was unable to make head or tail of this outburst but the words ‘vote prog’ were quite frequently mingled into the general racket. It slowly dawned on me that he thought I had inserted the message into his camp in order to recruit members of the Nationalist contingent of foot-stampers under his command to jump ship.

Eventually I just put the phone down – it had been a long day.

Banner-towing having defeated us, Bernie and I turned our great minds to the possibility of sky writing with smoke. I quickly realized that neither the Tiger nor I was up to flying the sort of aerobatics that would result in a squiggle that looked like VOTE PROG. I mean just the initial V would require about 100G at the bottom and how the hell you do an E…? You understand the problem. And even if we could do it, can you imagine what it would look like to people on the other side?

Then it dawned on us that we could write it flat, rather than vertically, and that would look fine from anywhere below. Or would it? If I wrote it normally it would look fine from above, but as the majority of people in the Eastern Cape live at ground level, it would still be a mess – actually mirror writing, from below.

And another thing – once you start writing it’s impossible to see what you have written. Imagine you are commissioned to write an advert on the grass of a cricket pitch, could you do it using only one eye at ground level? Well, that’s what it’s like doing sky writing. All the smoke that chuffs out of the exhaust simply sits on the horizon – because it’s at your level. It has no form or meaning – it’s just a messy smudge and there’s no way to judge how to join the next stroke on to it.

If you get it right the people should see this.

But the people looking from the other side will see this.

Happily the Prog party was very happy with the result.

While I worked on this problem Bernie’s job was to make smoke. He did this by welding a stub of thinnish pipe into the exhaust and then attached that to one of those hand pump things you use for spraying bugkilling muti on to cabbages. The idea was to touch the SAAF for some of their special smoke-making oil that they use in aerobatic displays. We practiced a bit with Bernie sitting in the front cockpit, pumping up pressure and then turning the tap on to squirt oil into the hot exhaust.

Meanwhile I found the only way to lay down the smoke was to do the whole thing on instruments. If you cast your mind back to answering stupid exam questions about rate and radius of turns at different speeds and bank angles, you’ll see what I was up against. And I’m not good at sums so it took every ounce of brain beef to figure out how much territory a rate 3 turn would cover while trying to make the round bit of a ‘P’.

We drew it all on graph paper and turned the drawing into headings, distances (times) and four severities of turn:

Trying to work out how fast to turn to make the lettering.

We didn’t use Rate 1s. Rate 2s was for a full height letter like an ‘O’. Rate 3 gave us half a letter height like for the round bit of a ‘P’. And Rate 4 was pretty much max rate for yanking it round the tightest turns. Fortunately Tigers come with a very neat turn and slip indicator, compliment of Messers Reid and Siegrist, which tells you when you are doing each of these turns.

Planning how to do the sky-writing

From the graph we made a sort of motor rally list of instructions which Bernie would shout out. It read something like this:

Steer 030. Smoke on for 22 secs. Smoke off

Rate 3 left on to 150 smoke on for 22 secs. Smoke off

Rate 4 left on to 070 for 10 secs. Smoke on. Rate 2 left for 55 secs. Smoke off.

And so on. That would complete the V and the O.

It was a busy time – particularly for Bernie. He had to keep pumping to maintain pressure in the tank, shout instructions to me, keep a stop watch running and remember to switch the smoke on and off at the right times. I guess his rally experience came in useful.

The whole thing turned out to be a roaring success. It stopped the traffic in PE, Dispatch and Uitenhage. The British Prog fellow was delighted and paid well for the job. He also took Bernie and me out for a slap-up dinner with champers.

It’s not easy being a pilot in Africa, you know.

Jim Davis as a callow youth, but unexpectedly good sky-writer.