STRANGER THAN FICTION

Arthur W J G Ord-Hume recalls an aviation coincidence that defies belief…

While 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 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

airframe and fabric covering. Even practised ground crew working on a quick turn around could not avoid slopping some of the muck going over the side of the big liquid tank that occupied the front cockpit.

Normally, after each day’s operations, the Tiger was hosed down with water, but this did not touch the stuff that had trickled down inside until the damage was done and the tail was about ready to fall off.

All this cleaning by the ground crew took time but was obviously not very effective.

I began to think about this and decided that the fabric on the rear fuselage of the Tiger was not essential and, if you stripped it off, and placed a simple short between longerons fairing behind the cockpit, the Tiger could still fly with a semi-stripped body.

My idea was a bit radical, but it would allow the steel tubular structure to be thoroughly hosed down at the end of each day. Besides aiding inspection for corrosion, it also permitted regular paint protection.

To do this clearly involved a major adjustment to the aircraft’s specification, so I discussed my plans with a ‘man from the Ministry’ and also an inspector from the Air Registration Board.

Gradually it materialised that my idea was not totally original, there was a farmer in Australia who used a Tiger Moth to spray his crops and, faced with the same corrosion problems, he had done exactly what I was proposing and removed the fabric from the rear fuselage so the structure could be inspected and washed down regularly. And, being but a farmer, he had gone through all the expensive procedures necessary to convince the authorities it was a good idea that would work.

Remarkable story

Now, that news was useful and I immediately contacted the CAA in Australia, and they very decently sent me copies of the Australian Tiger Moth’s certification and copies of all sorts of test reports that the farmer/operator had had to provide. All this was going to be most useful to me. The Australian paperwork was just what I wanted and, suddenly, the Aussie aircraft had an identity! There with the paperwork was a copy of the Certificate of Registration and a picture of the actual Tiger Moth – VH-BUM. Rather a memorable registration and one we all ought to remember in order to appreciate the rest of my quite remarkable story.

Within days of receiving this wonderful package of paperwork from Melbourne, I decided to write to the farmer and owner of VH-BUM, purely out of courtesy and to tell him I was about to try out his modification in Britain.

I posted the airmail letter to him and decided to drive down to Portsmouth Airport next day to see Ted Hawes at Hants & Sussex Aviation, to deliver to him a pair of Tiger Moth spray booms and a windmill pump. His useful little company, situated on Portsmouth Airport, used to do our aircraft conversions for us. We would deliver an aircraft and the bits to him and, several weeks later, collect a complete spray plane. He was waiting for these bits in order to complete a job which was almost finished.

The following day dawned dreadful! It was extremely wet, the rain simply teemed incessantly from a leaden textured summer’s sky. We had a Commer Cob two-seat company van, and I had the aircraft spray bars tied across the roof rack and the spray pump and its windmill blades in the back.

I started off from Hertford to drive around central London and onto the main A3 Portsmouth road. It was Below VH-BUM, the Australian Tiger Moth operating with no fabric on the aft fuselage. 1959, long before this main road had been straightened and re-routed to become the A3 of today, which bypasses so many villages and lesser townships such as Esher and Ripley. Those days were still in the future. It was, therefore, a slowish road that took a lot of heavy traffic.

The rain was pretty heavy and travelling fast was just not possible as I drove through Esher and on towards Ripley, Guildford and all points South to Portsdown Hill, from which you caught your first sight of the sea and the Isle of Wight.

One of the things that I very seldom did as a motorist was to stop and pick up hitchhikers. Usually, I did not have room but, on the rare occasions when I had picked up a happy wanderer, I had been forced to experience several dim hours of uninspired ‘conversation’ with, usually, pop-loving football fans.

And so, what happened next just wasn’t my normal reaction to things. As I drove in traffic slowly down a hill in a village, I spotted two girls huddled under a roadside tree. They were soaked through and the body language suggested they were quite fed up. The important thing is that neither of them was thumbing a lift or even eyeing the traffic with hope. I assumed they had gone through that stage and were now in the state of dismal resignation. Something made me pull over and stop, lean across and wind down the passenger window, and call out ‘Want a lift?’

The two girls were on holiday and this was their last day in England. They were trying to get to Southampton for an evening sailing back to Australia. I explained that I was going to Portsmouth but that I could drop them off on the top of Portsdown Hill on the main road to Southampton, where I felt sure they could get a second lift. They were relieved to be on their way at last, having been under the tree, I gathered, for a good hour or so. Eagerly they climbed into the van, one volunteering to go into the back and sit on the floor.

“That’s an aircraft spray pump, isn’t it?” she said. “And those look like Tiger Moth spray bars on the roof.” “Yes”, I said, and told them briefly what I was doing and where I was going and why. “My dad runs a crop spraying business in Australia,” said one girl.

Rather taken about by the unusual specialist knowledge of my two wet passengers, I loosened up and told them about my current negotiations with the Australian authorities over flying a Tiger with no fabric on the rear fuselage. “Ah!” perked up one. “That’s my dad!” Whereupon she reached into the breast pocket of her wet shirt, took out a small wallet, opened it – and pulled out a snapshot. It showed the two girls who were there in my company van, their mother and father – and right next to them a Tiger Moth with no fabric on the fuselage. It was clearly registered on the tail – VH-BUM! ■