COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

COMBAT AND COMPETITION
must be high on the short list.
Italy, despite the efforts of Dr Alfredo Latour, the Rolls Royce
Correspondent in Italy, ably supported by his glamorous Hungarian
wife, turned out a dead loss first time round. Fiat, pushing their G91
light fighter for NATO, had no interest in any of our hardware, and
Alitalia were too committed to Boeing for the Elliott-Bendix flight
system on the VC10, and the new BAG One-eleven, to get a look in.
France was much harder than Sweden, reflecting the divide
between Latin and Anglo-Saxon, which always seems at it's worst
across the Channel. I was then, and remain to this day, a convinced
European. Yet how about the hurdle of Franco-British relations? As
Ron Howard once observed:
"Why on earth are the French, who live just across the water, the
most foreign and difficult people with whom to do business?"
Ron spoke with feeling. In 1956, just after I left to join British
Oxygen, Wally Monk had arranged for him to spend a short time at
Dassault. Whilst there he fitted a modified Lightning yaw
autostabiliser to the prototype Mirage, correcting what Col Rozanoff,
the chief test pilot, described as a tendency to 'shake my backside 1 .
Dassault subsequently abandoned the Elliott design as 'unsatisfactory 1
and the French 'developed' their own system.
After that my trips to Dassault were not exactly favoured by Jack
Pateman. As they were invariably marked by overt requests to reveal
all of our work on other projects, and an extreme reluctance to say
anything about their own requirements, I soon abandoned the idea. So
we saw little enough of the French aviation industry in those early
years - and our activities in France usually peaked in the run up to,
and during, the bi-annual 'Salon d 1 Aeronautique 1 at Le Bourget. This -
together with Farnborough and possibly Hanover - had become a key
element in creating an image abroad.
Farnborough, halcyon September days, near the end of the soaring
season, was a time for meeting and entertaining aviation friends. The
afternoons a treasure trove of well loved, well remembered, scenes.
Black sheds and Cody s tree - the glint of sun on perspex low down
over Laffan's plain - an aircraft shape erupting out of the distance in
utter silence - engulfing us all in sudden cataclysmic sound.
All flying life was there. Ted Tennant's virtuoso display with the
tiny silver Gnat. Bill Bedford slowly rotating a Kestrel on it's four
thunderous columns of hot air. The incomparable'Bea' winding his pot
bellied Lightning into a maximum 'G' turn, twin afterburners glowing
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