Monday 25th October

Called over to Keevil Monday afternoon to make the best of what might well be the last good weather for a while and arrived shortly after a couple of unscheduled Apaches.  Whilst we were all waiting for them to finish their practice (I say ‘all’ – there were more of us there than you sometimes find on a weekend!) a small plane made what was clearly an unscheduled landing. The Apaches shuffled off to one side whilst it came down on the main runway and we watched its progress as it taxied around the peri track and stopped just short of the tower. It turned out that it was a Slingsby Firefly from the Lyneham Flying Club. Apparently they were flying inverted when the engine oil filler cap came off and all the oil started draining out! Being clearly calm professional types they quickly turned the right way up and landed at Keevil (after getting Lyneham to alert the Apaches) to sort things out.

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What a mess!

Tony Woodhouse produced some spray detergent and Ken Simpkins had one off those rolls of cleaning tissue, so the pilots set about cleaning it all off whilst they waited for more oil to be flown down from Lyneham. Nice sorts and we had a good natter with them whilst they waited for the oil. (As soon as the Apaches cleared off we sort of lost interest and after checking with them that they were OK with us flying we got down to some flying of our own again.)

Just caught this one of the two planes taking off on their way back to Lyneham.

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