Stranger than fiction
Headset review
Stranger than fiction… Arthur W J G Ord-Hume recalls an aviation coincidence that defies belief…
W
hile we are all still in lockdown, staggering around in facemasks and generally starting to fret over when the next time will be that we will feel air beneath our wings, here’s a really odd aeronautical tale from the 1950s that may just about make your hair stand on end or, assuming that you may still have some (mine fell out long ago), change colour. First though, I have to set the scene, so sit comfortably and meander back with me to those carefree days when things were greatly different from today. At Bembridge on the Isle of Wight, I had joined John Britten and Desmond Norman, initially with the sole purpose of building the Druine Turbi for the then Popular Flying Association. Now, John and Desmond had another business, which was agricultural aviation – crop spraying to you and me. Once the Turbi was built, I began to devote more and more of my time to this aspect of aviation. At that time, the best aeroplane for the job was the Tiger Moth – they were plentiful (ex-RAF ones flooded the market) and they were dirt cheap. I had just bought four for £25 each; two were immediately flyable, the third needed a bit of doing up before it could be ferry-flown back to the Island, and the fourth we broke up for spares. Today it would have been only a matter of a couple of weeks’ work to make it flyable, but priorities were different in those far off times. Seeing an opportunity to develop this ag flying side of
40 | LIGHT AVIATION | March 2021
Main A typical British Tiger Moth, G-AMVF, engaged in crop spraying, this time with wing-mounted Britten-Norman rotary atomisers.
aviation, I formed a company with business acquaintances and one time ag pilots Danny Speck and Roy Matthews, and we moved into a bunch of Nissen huts and a doorless blister hangar at Panshanger. Anxious to bypass the rather cumbersome rigmarole of having to get Air Registration approval and special test permits to fly for the evaluation of everything we designed and needed to test fly, it was suggested that my little company ought to apply for design approval to operate under the coveted ‘B’ Conditions, enabling us to bypass the normal Certificate of Airworthiness procedures. My name went forward as Chief of Design – and was approved. We were duly authorised to fly uncertified aircraft under the markings G-44. This privileged position opened many useful doors and certainly speeded up product development. Sorry for this long preamble but it’s rather necessary in order to explain what happened next. Now, one of the drawbacks of using the faithful old Tiger Moth for crop spraying was that, in those days, many of the chemicals we had to spray were not just poisonous, they were also highly corrosive. Today, fortunately, most of those chemicals are now banned on a litany of valid grounds, but back then you had to live with it. Ground crew were encouraged to wear facemasks (and we all know what they are now, do we not?) and avoid splashing the jollop onto bare skin. For the aircraft it was equally bad news. The stuff often ran down inside the fuselage, between the steel tube
