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CHAPTER 1
THE TIGERS – 74 SQUADRON
THE BOYS
Sqn Ldr Alan Colman
National Service, joined in 1949. Trained on Meteors at 205 AFS, first tour on 74 Sqn, CFS, 211 FTS instructor, Ferry Training Unit, subsequently 216 and 51 Sqns Comet. Left the air force in 1976 to fly Comets for Dan Air.
Flt Lt Sir Paul Holden
Enlisted in 1942, trained in the US, 287 Sqn Hurricane, Spitfire and Tempest, 74 Sqn Meteor, demobbed 1946, later joined RAFVR and flew Harvard, Spitfire, Vampire, Chipmunk and Tiger Moth.
Flt Lt Derek Morter
Joined in 1948 as a wireless fitter, pilot's course 1949. Trained on Meteors at 205 AFS, first tour on 74 Sqn, instrument rating examiner, 79 and 541 Sqns Meteor, OC Station Flt Oldenburg/Ahlhorn, 229 OCU Chivenor, 14 and 20 Sqns Hunter, HQ MEAF, retired 1968.
Gp Capt Derek Rake
41 Sqn Spitfire 1945, 20 Sqn Spitfire and Tempest 1946, 74 Sqn Meteor 1946, CFS, followed by tours on Hunter, Lightning, OC 192 Sqn (later 51 Sqn) Comet/ Canberra 1958-1960, as OC Wyton flew 58 Sqn Canberras and 543 Sqn Victors, retired 1976.
EARLY DAYS
Following the Meteor's successful introduction to service with 616 Sqn, it is somewhat curious that the unit was disbanded by renumbering as 263 Sqn in August 1945. Nonetheless the Meteor force had started to grow and Colerne near Bath in Wiltshire was chosen to be the RAF's first major Meteor station. By late 1945, it was home to 74 and 504 Sqns (which was quickly renumbered 245 Sqn) and for a brief period, 1335 Conversion Unit which soon moved out to the former USAAF station at Molesworth in Huntingdonshire. All three units were equipped with the F.3.
Of these new units, arguably the most famous was 74 Sqn, which had converted to Meteors just as the European war was ending and it would become the squadron to fly the Meteor in its original day fighter role longer than anyone else, just over 11 years in fact. Their motto is 'I fear no man' but they were – and indeed still are – better known simply as the Tigers from the animal's head on their original badge dating back to World War One.
For pilots posted to fly Meteors in those early years a major challenge was the fact that there was as yet no two-seater in which to give them instruction. Having just completed a tour flying Spitfires and Tempests with 287 Sqn, Paul Holden was posted to Colerne where, in December 1945 he had four sessions in a Link Trainer to prepare him for the Meteor – and for 74 Sqn.
"I started on the Meteor at 1335 Conversion Unit at Molesworth in February 1946. The conversion course was less than a week. It consisted of one hour in an Oxford doing simulated wheeler landings and asymmetric flying, some lectures on jet-engine handling, and then it was four flights in a Meteor. Two were sort of air experience flights, one was a high altitude flight and one low level exercise with a single-engine approach. We didn't do any circuits and bumps or anything. One of my fellow pilots on the conversion course got carried away by the thrill of flying at low level. He consumed far too much fuel and arrived back at the airfield with his cockpit aglow with red (low fuel warning) lights! He made a quick and dirty dart at the first runway he came to and was in such a hurry to get it down that he flew right into the ground without levelling off first, thereby collapsing the nose wheel and skidding down the runway on his nose. Fortunately he was unhurt, but it didn't do the aircraft any good at all. I can't remember what happened to him after that but, after my three exciting Meteor flights at Molesworth, I reported to my new squadron at Colerne as a qualified jet pilot – I don't think! I really learned how to fly it after that.
"We didn't do any gunnery in my time; there was some problem with that. We did a lot of demonstration flights, squadron formations over air shows and that sort of thing and for some reason unknown to me, we specialised in landing, with 46 feet wingspan aeroplanes, in vics of three on a 150 feet wide runway! It was quite a tight exercise, but we took it in our stride. We did a lot of aerobatics, a lot of formation flying and the occasional low level sortie. I remember one flying over North Devon (I was a very keen amateur cine photographer) and I had my clockwork-driven 9.5-mm black and white movie camera taped to the gunsight. I filmed flying at low level along the railway line towards Barnstaple flat out at about 200 feet.
"The Meteor was fantastic. All my flying until then had been on single-engine aeroplanes sitting behind a ruddy great engine when you couldn't see out of the front, until you got your tail up. Suddenly, you get into a Meteor and you drive it along looking out the front and you can see where you're going. You get on the runway, open up the taps, let the brakes go and it pushed you in the back and roared off. First time off, I was at about 2,000 feet doing 250 knots and halfway into the next county before I got my breath back and the wheels up! It was tremendous, a wonderful aeroplane. "Funnily enough, after hundreds of hours flying single-engine aircraft, I'd never had any engine failure at all, never a cough. The only engine failure I ever had was in a Meteor, which was surprising because basically jet engines are more reliable than piston engines. It was a problem with the barostat; when you're up at high level, it controls the amount of fuel going into the engine so that it uses a lot less fuel at high level than at low level. Apparently the barostat stuck, so that when I came down I got a flame-out in the starboard engine and couldn't light it again. I'd been at about 30,000 feet and was over 8/8ths cloud, so I made a 'PAN' call (declaring a problem) on the distress frequency and asked for a homing to base, which they gave me. The next thing that happened was that all the power failed, because the only generator was on the starboard engine. Unknown to anybody the battery was no good. When the engine was running you didn't need it and when the engine failed, shortly afterwards, so did the battery. All the electrics went out, R/T went off, no contact, no lights, no anything. After the one 'PAN' they tried to give me further calls and there was no reply, so there was a certain amount of panic and concern on the ground obviously. Everybody on both squadrons was alerted to the fact that there was a major problem.
"Fortunately, on the way home following the original homing bearing, there was a hole in the cloud. I managed to get down underneath it and map-read my way back to Colerne. I flew over the runway at about 1,500 feet waggling my wings as a request for an emergency landing. All the stops had been pulled out and fire engines were racing up and down the runway and everybody on both squadrons had turned out to watch. The particular concern was that a week before one of the chaps on the other squadron, doing simulated single-engine landings, had undershot and opened up the engines too quickly. The engine that was live opened up to full power, the engine that was idling grumbled and sort of stalled and didn't build up, so he turned over and went in on his back from low level on final approach. He was quite seriously injured, so there was a certain amount of concern about me doing a single-engine landing for real. I came in with about 20 knots to spare and 100 feet extra in height and landed a bit fast – about half-way down the runway and used a lot of brakes to stop by the other end. Lots of cheering, but when I got to the end of the runway, I found it was absolutely impossible to taxi a Meteor on one engine, because there's no steering on the nose wheel and the engines are immediately over the brakes; so you could either go round in circles or stop! I therefore had to sort of park it against the hedge and wait to be rescued; so there was a certain amount of hilarity all round.
"Two incidents stand out in my memory from this period; the first through my own clottishness. It arose after a discussion in the crew room whether it was theoretically possible to fly a perfectly straight loop on the basic turn and bank indicator alone. This was before the days of fully aerobatic artificial horizons (which are the gyroscopically controlled instruments used in blind flying to show the pilot his attitude in relation to the real horizon, when it can't be seen because of cloud or darkness). In our time, you had to 'cage' the artificial horizon before performing aerobatics to prevent it toppling and damaging the sensitive bearings and gimbals on which it is mounted. So my next flight, when I had the opportunity, found me with my head in 'the office' concentrating on trying to keep the turn needle centred during a series of attempted perfectly straight loops. I should explain, in self-defence, that such manoeuvres in a jet at high altitude tend to mean that you wander all over about three counties; this is how I almost became an unexplained fatal accident statistic.
"Without noticing it, I suddenly found myself entering the top of a cumulonimbus (thunderstorm and very rough) cloud, upside down, and two thirds of the way round a loop. Try as I might, by use of this basic turn and bank indicator only, I could not get the aircraft back under control and into straight and level flight again. Instead, I fought my way up and down this wretched thundercloud, watching the altimeter needles spinning first clockwise and then anticlockwise and the airspeed winding alarmingly up and down the clock. In the end I just throttled back, more or less let go and waited, hoping that the aircraft would just right itself. Instead, it came screaming out of the base of the cloud at about 4,000 feet, pointing almost vertically towards the ground. On instinct, I pulled the stick back into my stomach about as hard as I dared and instantly blacked out under the high 'g' loading. When I released the stick enough to be able to see again, I was climbing steeply through about 1,500 feet, still fully throttled back and doing about 20 knots more than the maximum permitted airspeed for the aircraft. So, highly mortified by the experience, I nursed it gently back to base and gave my colleague in the tower a practice QGH whilst I got my breath back before landing. As there was no doubt that I had seriously overstressed the aircraft, I reported it to the Flt Sgt in charge of maintenance on the squadron – but the aircraft looked all right – that afternoon. It was a different and very sorry sight the next morning, however. It seems that I had bent the main spars beyond their elastic limit and overnight, they gradually resumed their proper shape. As a result, the whole skin on the underside of the wings and fuselage was rippled (where it had been stretched and was now too big for its proper size) and rivets were popped out all over the place. It had to be flown carefully back to Glosters for a total rebuild."
In the autumn of 1946, both of the former Colerne Meteor squadrons were moved to Horsham St.Faith just outside Norwich, which is where Derek Rake joined the Tigers.
"When I came back from the Far East after the end of the war, they sent me to Horsham St.Faith. I was only there for a few months, joining 74 Sqn in September '46, we had Meteor F.3s and I flew a total of about 23 hours on them. There were three other squadrons on the base, 245 and 263 with Meteors and 695 with target-towing Martinets. Our aeroplanes seemed to be unserviceable a lot of the time, but I'm not sure why. We didn't have any dual jets of course, we were just given the Pilot's Notes, then we did a blindfold cockpit check and then they sent us airborne. We flew up to Acklington to do air-to-air firing and air-to-ground firing; it was the first time I'd flown a jet. This was very interesting because I'd been flying Spitfire 14s, Tempest 2s and 5s out in the Far East and the Meteor F.3s were about 100 miles an hour faster when we were attacking the target drogue. So we were always worried that we were going to shoot down the aeroplane that was towing it – we'd frequently shoot the drogue off! The shells would hit the wire that held the drogue; it was quite fun. My average score for air-to-air firing was 7.2% and that was considered above average, while my air-to-ground average was 14.5% and that was considered below average.
"We did a lot of formation flying, single-engine flying and stuff like that – we didn't have any problem with the aeroplane. We did flypasts occasionally, but I'm not sure where. It was exciting at the time because it was the first jet that we flew. It was lovely, a very easy aeroplane to fly after the Spitfire 14, which had so much torque. That Spitfire mark had virtually the same airframe as the Spit 5s but you had the Griffon engine with just about twice as much power in the airframe as you had with the earlier Spits. The torque on takeoff or any time you opened the throttle was terrific, and it had to be counteracted obviously. So, we found the Meteors very easy to fly, as they just went. Before my first trip, they told me what to do and the squadron commander Jim Cooksey told me what it was like, but it did surprise me when I took off. It accelerated so fast compared with a piston-engined fighter that you had to tuck the undercarriage up before you exceeded the undercarriage speed, and then you were really going very fast. You cut the power back and all the noise disappeared; in fact I thought I'd had a double engine failure and by this time I was over the centre of Norwich. It was just after the war of course so we used to fight the other squadrons and do air-to-air combat against them with cine guns. I enjoyed the air-to-air and air-to-ground firing with the Meteors, and the formation flying, but it was all a bit of a bore after the war was over."
"I was posted away to the central instructor's school at Little Rissington in December '46. I was quite pleased to go on to Central Flying School (CFS) where one learned to be an instructor all over again, then taught the up and coming generation as it were. Mind you, I was only about 25 in 1947 when I started at CFS, but we thought of the youngsters coming through as the younger generation. Quite a few of us went from the Horsham St.Faith wing to CFS – about half a dozen I think."
F.8 THE ULTIMATE METEOR FIGHTER
The F.3s did not last very long in the front line, being replaced by the improved F.4 during 1947/48, but that variant was also destined to have a short operational life. The F.8 was the ultimate day fighter version of the Meteor and began arriving on the squadrons in 1950, heralding a rapid build-up, culminating in it being the equipment of no fewer than 20 home-based regular squadrons, plus another 11 in the RAuxAF (see Chapter 3).
Having also pioneered the F.4 in service, once again 74 Sqn (still at Horsham St.Faith) was one of the early recipients of the F.8 getting theirs from October 1950. When Alan Colman joined the squadron they had had a couple of years to settle in.
"I was called up for National Service in June 1949 and first encountered the Meteor at 205 AFS Middleton St.George, which had the F.4 and T.7; that was January to May 1951. I then went to 226 Operational Conversion Unit (OCU) at Stradishall in Fighter Command, they too were still equipped with the F.4 – I didn't encounter the F.8 until over a year later when I got to 74 Sqn. I didn't go directly to a squadron at the end of my training because, due to the vagaries of National Service, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) contacted me at Stradishall and said 'Your National Service term is complete, you must leave the Service immediately.' I was a Sgt Pilot then and I said 'Hang on, I've just been to the 12 Group HQ at RAF Newton and been interviewed by the air officer commanding (AOC) with a view to the granting of a short-service commission. I'm waiting for the results.' The reply was 'Sorry, we have no record of that, you will be demobilised at once.' Subsequently, about nine months later when I was by then a civilian, MoD wrote to me and said: 'If you would be prepared to rejoin, you've been selected for a course at the Officer Cadet Training Unit (OCTU) at Spitalgate. If you pass the course, you will be granted a four-year short-service commission. If you fail, you may leave the Service again if you wish.' I passed the course.
"During the OCTU course, my father had died and my mother, living near Norwich, then suffered a nervous breakdown. So, at the end of the OCTU course in July '52, I was posted 'compassionately' straight to 74 Sqn at Horsham St. Faith. I was a brand new Plt Off and I arrived there not having flown any sort of a Meteor for over a year, let alone an F.8. Because of that, the exchange-tour USAF major who was the squadron CO was not pleased to see me! My life was saved because one of the flight commanders, Joe Maddison, had been a Meteor instructor at Middleton St. George, so we knew one another quite well. He told the 'boss': 'No problem, I'll sort him out' and he then gave me a quick 'refresher course' using the Station Flight Meteor T.7, renewed my instrument rating and then sent me off in a Mk 8 to familiarise myself with it. So I remained on the squadron – basically with his blessing. Compared with the F.4 and T.7, the F.8 was a much nicer aeroplane. I wouldn't say it was noticeably faster or more manoeuvrable, but some of the adverse trim changes and handling oddities at high Mach numbers affecting the F.4 (and the T.7 to a lesser extent) were not so pronounced. It also had the luxury of decent pressurisation, much more modern instrumentation and a bang seat. You felt that you'd moved up a cog by flying the F.8; I always said I could have taught my grandmother to fly it! Also, in place of the Derwent 5, it had the Derwent 8, which was a more responsive engine and less prone to compressor stall at height.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Meteor Boys"
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Copyright © 2016 Steve Bond.
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