COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

COMBAT AND COMPETITION
performance still! Could the 403, he demanded, cope with a further
increase in span? It could, fortuitously, because the airworthiness
stressing requirements had just been relaxed, and became 19 metres -
the Olympia419.
This time he was so confident that he started to build three
aircraft. Two 419s and a clipped (15 metre) wing 403 with a shortened
fuselage, all of which he intended to offer the British Team for the
World Championships in Poland the following year.
Whilst they were still on the stocks, we attended some of
Twinwood's better parties which featured Ralph Maltby's charming
Victorian balloons. Tissue paper creations in the red white and blue of
Empire, they were gifts from Messrs Brocks the firework people, who
must have thought them a godsend when they turned up amongst some
long forgotten stock. For Ralph was an important customer. His wind
tunnel consumed vast quantities of artificial smoke.
Ralph could hardly control himself as he read out the the old
fashioned instructions:
"Two persons shall stand in an elevated position....." followed by an
excruciatingly pedantic diatribe about supporting the sagging tissue
walls until the paraffin burner had inflated the envelope.
Pause for much laughter - then Ralph again - "A person shall stand
under....." explaining at inordinate length how one must bend down by
the burner orifice to light the wick.
Those dreaded balloons were a handful in the lightest of winds.
Sometimes we used ladders to ease the strain on shoulders and backs,
and to make life easier for the crouching firemen down below. The
difficulties were greatly aggravated by the way in which Ralph always
insisted on repeating the old Victorian text, like some ham Music Hall
performer, reducing his assistants to uncontrollable mirth.
The failure rate was high, but we had some conspicuous successes
too. And what could be more evocative, on a quiet moonlit night, than
one of those gossamer shapes lifting upwards and away. The flame
strong at first, then fading slowly - until it became a mere pinprick of
light - lost forever in the mists of time and space.
On many an occasion Anne and I stood apart from the rest, in the
dark shadow of that familiar hanger, and watched them go. And the
shades of 613 Squadron who had introduced me to the air seemed as
supportive and benign as ever.
If the shades of 613 were peaceful, the same could not be said of
those elsewhere on the site. For the day came when the Local
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