COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

COMBAT AND COMPETITION
operations at Heathrow were suspended. Pinkie took one of the BLEU
Varsities there and carried a series of fully automatic landings, day
and night, in Cat3C 10 conditions. This time there was some roll out
guidance, a crude head up display, using a zero reader and an
epidiascope. When the Varsity returned to Thurleigh it was so
blackened and filthy that the whole outer skin had to be treated with
a special cleaner. There was much still to be done. But the scene was
set. Scheduled blind landing was on the way.
We visited a fog tunnel at the University of California. You sat in
an aircraft cabin, suspended on cables like a ski lift, with a suitably
scaled lighting system laid out ahead. Artificial fog was pumped
through a series of nozzles along the sidewalls of the tunnel, until an
infra-red visibility measuring system showed the correct figure. Then
the aerial chariot was released, and you tobogganed down the glide
slope.
Great fun in a way, and possibly useful in developing better
lighting systems for low minima operation. But for us, trying it out in
passing, the whole thing seemed highly subjective and open loop. Pilot
participation was needed to make it effective but the cost would have
been astronomical.
On the way home Pinkie and I found time to look up an old
Canadian Typhoon chum, Johnny Brown, a citizen of Toronto.
We got talking about old times and the unsolved mystery of Johnny
Baldwin. Commanding 'A' Squadron at Boscombe Down after the war
he had arranged for Pinkie to join him. Later, after he was attached
to a USAF fighter wing and reported missing in Korea, Pinkie tried
to find out what had happened. Only to be faced with a wall of silence.
Eventually he ran an ex Korea POW to earth, a Canadian, who
could have been in the same camp as Baldwin - had the latter ever
been captured. On detachment to Edmonton, for Arctic trials, Pinkie
was given permission to see this man.
"They told me that I could only put one question - and that I must
not query his answer. So I asked him if he had ever come across J.R.
Baldwin of the RAF while he was a prisoner. He replied, 'No, I did
not! 1 So that was that - and from then on I always assumed that he had
been killed."
Pinkie wanted to know more and continued his own investigations.
In the end it seemed that Baldwin was flying number four in a section
of Sabres. They were letting down in cloud over high ground, and he
called a warning to the formation leader:
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