Tales of Lancasters and Other Aircraft

3

LOST OVER THE IRISH SEA

HOW A SPROG NAVIGATOR NAVIGATED AN ANSON AIRCRAFT TO THE WRONG CITY

The Avro Anson had its maiden flight in December 1935, and served the RAF until 1968. It was a low-wing monoplane with two radial engines (cylinders arranged in a circle). If one engine failed in flight, it was difficult for the aircraft to remain airborne.

The wings were made of plywood and spruce and the fuselage of steel tubes covered in fabric and plywood.

At one time it was fitted with a dorsal gun turret for the use of Coastal Command and intended for marine reconnaissance and search and rescue.

However, the Anson was used much more for the training of navigators, bomb aimers, wireless operators and pilots. The original dorsal turret with its machine gun was then removed, except of course when the aircraft was used for training air gunners.

Avro Anson 652A Mk I (Reg. ZK-RRA, S/No. MH-120) at Ardmore Aerodrome de Havilland Mosquito Launch Spectacular, 2012. (L-Bit/Wikimedia Commons)

It has many square windows - hence its nickname 'the Flying Greenhouse' - which made it excellent for navigational training. It was also known, because of its relatively long life, as 'Faithful Annie'.

Its undercarriage was retractable, but had to be wound up by turning a handle at least 147 times - a very tedious task. Sometimes pilots with no one aboard to do the donkey work left the undercarriage down, which reduced speed by about 30 knots. A warning horn sounded when that happened but frustrated pilots sometimes disconnected it. This was the very first retractable landing gear in the RAF. The one pictured above was with the RCAF.

Pilot: 'I'm still flying on the first course you gave me, navigator; the one you provided before take-off. Have you worked out a new one yet?'

Me: 'I'm afraid not, sir. I want to get some compass bearings but all the headlands and islands we're flying over are covered in cloud. I can't see anything that I can use for getting a bearing. Below us, there's stratus cloud everywhere.'

Pilot: 'Yes, I can see that. Have you tried to get a radio bearing?'

Me: 'Yes, sir, but the wireless operator says the radio has just gone kaput.'

Pilot: 'So what are you going to do?'

Me: 'I wondered whether you could descend to just below cloud level for a few minutes, sir. I'm sure we're flying near the coast, where there are plenty of headlands and rocks that I can use. I'll then be able to fix our position very quickly, and calculate a new course in a jiffy.'

Pilot: 'Not a chance, navigator. I'm sure we're flying near the coast, but I'm not going to take any risks to make your life easier. Have you anything else in mind?'

Me: 'At the moment, no, sir.'

Pilot: 'Then we'll just have to assume that we're on the way to Fishguard, won't we? And like Mr Micawber, we'll have to hope that something turns up.'

And, in fact, something did turn up.

***

I had expected to be sent for training to what I saw as one of the more glamorous, and drier, parts of the world - Rhodesia (as it was), Arizona or Canada - the destination of most other trainee navigators. What happened to me would never have occurred, for instance, over the sunny plains of Alberta.

I'd groaned when I heard about my posting. I knew nothing about the Isle of Man, except that it was being used for the internment of people thought to pose some risk to Britain's security. (In fact, the vast majority of internees, I'm sure, were loyal, patriotic citizens who happened to have Germanic names. War makes some unfair decisions inevitable.)

With about twenty other trainee navigators, I was stationed at an RAF aerodrome at the very north of the island - Jurby, near the Point of Ayr.

Scotland's Mull of Galloway, a long, fat, pointing finger of land, was visible to the north-west, and the massive St Bees Head, westernmost point of the Lake District, to the east. The Mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland could be seen to the west, on a fine day.

Jurby would be our home for the next six months, in Nissen huts, which consisted of long, semicircular, corrugated-iron slabs, fixed to a concrete floor. During the winter, the stove in the centre roasted airmen within a few yards, while almost everyone else was freezing cold.

On navigational exercises, we would fly in an Anson aircraft. We would be navigating for about six months to every part of the Irish Sea, up to Scotland's Outer Hebrides, and at the end of that period I hoped to be a qualified navigator.

To fix our position at regular intervals we would need to take three compass bearings of salient features such as Ailsa Craig, St Bees Head, and the Mull of Galloway. Or we could equally well fix it by taking bearings of the same object at various time intervals.

Each bearing would enable us to plot a 'position line', (somewhere along which we were travelling) on a Mercator chart. Three 'position lines' (two having been transferred to equalise the times) would (we hoped) intersect to fix our position.

We then had to compare our fixed position to where we would be if there was no wind (on an air plot of courses steered) in order to calculate the wind speed and direction. We would then use that to work out a new course to give to the pilot.

Finally, the day arrived when I would have my first opportunity to navigate an aircraft - an exciting prospect. I'd be able to put into practice all those procedures that had featured in the navigation theory I had studied for many months.

I was 18, and full of optimism.

But overshadowing my thoughts was the intimidating presence at the station of Flight Lieutenant Biss, responsible for assessing all charts and logbooks after every flight. Biss was as unpopular as he was unpleasant, with almost everyone, and on our return we would all, in turn, have to confront him, to hear his verdict on our efforts. If the slightest thing were to go wrong, he would come down on us like a ton of bricks - or so everyone said.

However, I was reasonably confident that nothing would go wrong. I'd thought of everything - or so I thought - and planned the flight with meticulous care.

In the event, however, my first navigation exercise was hardly the triumph I had envisaged because there was one aspect that was absolutely out of my control - the weather.

Until I heard the dismal forecast at the Met briefing, of 10/10ths stratus cloud (complete coverage of grey cloud), I was on top of the world. On the way to the aircraft, however, I had much to think about. How many landmarks would I actually see on a drizzly, grey day such as this? Perhaps there would sometimes be breaks in the cloud enabling me to take some bearings? I had to hope.

In the air, we novice navigators worked in pairs, taking turns to do the real work, the 'second navigator' playing second fiddle by winding up the undercarriage and occasionally map reading. We had to plot every detail of our work on the chart, including courses steered, track (path over the earth's surface) and wind velocity, and also keep a log of every activity we carried out. Flight Lieutenant Biss, we were told, would expect the highest standards - or else .

I made sure that I had everything I needed including an Omega watch, chart, logbook, 2H and 3H pencils (sharpened like chisels), a ruler, compasses and a square protractor, and I worked out my flight plan with provisional courses to give to the pilot, for each leg, based on forecast wind velocities.

It went wrong almost from the start, and there seemed nothing that I could do to save the situation.

The Met forecast was accurate: there was stratus cloud everywhere - a sheet of grey cloud with a base of about 2,500ft, which completely screened the earth's surface from view. A depressing sight and a miserable baptism for a fledgling navigator.

I gave the pilot a course for Fishguard, in Pembrokeshire. He decided to fly at about 3,500ft. Aircraft should always fly at an altitude of at least 1,000ft above any mountains within 20 miles of our proposed track. We had to take into account the various Scottish and Welsh mountains, the fells of the Lake District and the Mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland.

Hopefully, we were a safe distance from all of them, but we couldn't be absolutely sure until I had fixed our position - and that proved to be an intractable problem.

All I could see in every direction below our aircraft was a monotonous grey carpet, which completely screened the world from view. Somewhere below that carpet was a wonderful coastline of bays, estuaries, islands and headlands. So compass bearings, which were our priority, were out of the question.

I was therefore absolutely dependent on radio bearings - my only hope of saving the situation. So I spoke to the wireless operator, requesting a bearing. After a few minutes he contacted me to give me the bad news. The radio had suddenly given up. It was absolutely dead and there was apparently little prospect of any improvement. 'My God,' I thought, 'what's next?'

During this training stage we had no access to radar, and there was no other resource open to me, for the time being anyway. Had it been a night flight I would have used the stars. I had to fall back on my flight plan, based on forecast wind velocities. If the latter were fairly accurate, we might not be too far off track. I explained my predicament to the pilot and dared to suggest that he might oblige me by flying for a short time at least, a little below the cloud that was masking all my precious headlands and other landmarks, but he...