Moderators: Guru's, The Ministry
Thanks for your post Peter. I've just spent most of the last hour looking at your website. I hope you don't mind me saying that I feel the whole nation owes the Airforce and Navy pilots of the Fifties a huge thank you. You were the true unsung hereos of the Cold War, often paying the ultimate price for your heroism. I counted at Simviation that 28 pilots and crew lost their lives in Oct '56 and that was a fairly typical month! :o Those are much higher loses (in a typical month) than was suffered in the Gulf War or Falklands, yet I feel you guys perhaps didn't get the proper recognition that you deserved. Thank heavens safety has moved on so much!!petermcleland wrote:I last visited HalFar in the 60s when I was a First Officer on Vanguards...Group Captain C. W. Coulthard AFC was residing in the old station commanders house and he kindly sent his staff car to collect me from the Phoenicia Hotel. I enjoyed a rather splendid visit with much reminiscing about our days on 266 Squadron. I'm not very well up on the airfield's history and did not know that it was RNAS
Well I don't know all the facts, far from it, but from what I've been able to peice together, Hal Far was built by the RAF, possibly in the 1930's but was in use by the Navy by WWII. As a shore base it was known as HMS Falcon until 1965.petermcleland wrote:Group Captain C. W. Coulthard AFC was residing in the old station commanders house and he kindly sent his staff car to collect me from the Phoenicia Hotel. I enjoyed a rather splendid visit with much reminiscing about our days on 266 Squadron. I'm not very well up on the airfield's history and did not know that it was RNAS
I got nil results searching for Hal-Far.zip...Do you have the actual file name?simondix wrote:AFCAD is now on Avsim
Yes, certainly the great progress from that time has been "Flight Safety"...We were all a bit Gung-Ho in those days and imagining all sorts of war scenarios. I spent four years in that Wing of squadrons, 5, 11 and 266 and I lost count of the number of funerals attended...I do remember that 5 Squadron lost 12 in 12 months and that included the Squadron Commander who just went missing over the Channel and was never heard of again. Flight Safety sort of crept in over that period and was emphasised and talked about in the monthly mags like "Flight Comment"...Rules were changed and tightened up and the old "Gung-Ho" attitude strongly discouraged. Of course, we tut-tutted as we were pushed back from our customary 200 yard spacing on stream landings and dogfighting altitude limits were pushed up etc. but it was all for the good and the accident rate slowly but surely improved :flying:NorthernKnight wrote: Thank heavens safety has moved on so much!!
