We took off from the area around the Isle of Wight. No problems, take off fluid for well over an hour and was pretty impressed with it. And when I came back into a carriage for landing. They called me from the safety boat on the water saying. We have had a wind change. So we got to change the landing lane. And we'll have to sweep the landing lanes as either. There's no debris on it. And that will take us quarter of an hour. And I said sorry, I haven't got the fuel, used so much. They said alright. Better we quick confer and they we will have to take the chance. So I landed touchdown. Was running along about 100 miles an hour on the surface of water and beautifully running and suddenly. out of the corner of my eye. I saw ahead of me down there. A black object. It was, as it turned out, a full length mast from a yacht which had been this mastered and masts like icebergs. well are mainly 2/3 of the surfaces under the water. There was nothing I could do anyways on 100 mile an hour run and um. It hit the foreplane of the aircraft and the body of it. Knocked a hole four feet square and that and then under the pressure of the body, shot out like a bullet and knocked The starboard float off the aircraft. The sequence of events she just could not cater for And um I held the wing up as long as I could, but eventually I had to drop, and when it did, we just cartwheeled. And um rushing it along at about 85. miles an hour which I had the cockpit hood open, but there's a lot of water getting in at the time and then when we came to a grinding halt I thought fine. I'll just drop out of this and swim away. But my. parachute, for some reason I know not, was jammed. And um. So I had to unhook my parachute. Leave it in the cockpit and get out. And by this time, I had been swallowing a lot of water. And when I got out, every time I thought I'd pop to the surface, I found I was under the wing. And eventually I just lost consciousness. And the chief test pilot of Saunders-Roe called Jeffrey Tyson. Very well known testpilot. Was in his nice suit and everything. He didn't hesitate. He leapt out of the launch, grabbed me and holding me to the launch. So I was very lucky. To this day, we've sought for that. But the search, believe it or not, it's still going on. I get reports on it and they just cannot find a damn thing. They're huge tidal races around this area and at the moment they haven't found a thing. Wow. So did you buy your friend a new suit? Sorry, did you buy your friend a new suit? Oh not quite. Not quite. I bought him a few beers though. I'll put it to you this way. um. I think you were. tense all the time in that sort of work and come back, you're not tense all the time. The reason we were doing this was um. we realized after the end of war we were gonna have to get. Every country was going to go into the Civil Aviation field. And there if they were Jet operated they'd be flying at high altitude even of uh. You know, such as 40,000 feet. And the Thunderheads that's where they. Hang around, particularly in the far Est, of course. But so therefore we had to find out. What the actual structural stresses were. You had a feeling. There was just nothing you could do about it. You were tossed around like a rubber ball. The one thing I was told to do and which was the best advice you could have in these circumstances. Clap/Clamp on your eyes onto the artificial horizon. Just keep the airplane as near as possible level. Don't worry about how much it goes up or down or over this way now. just try and keep it back into a latterly level position. And eventually you will be spewed out of the cloud and hopefully in a a reasonable position and state. But there are so many things going on like Saint Elmo's fire. Lightning strikes. And the acrid smell. You get with when you're struck by lightning. It's quite extraordinary. And um then. There's some pretty big bangs go on in the air. And. I would put it down to one of the most unpleasant flying experiences I've ever had. Yeah. The spitfire was specially chosen because of course. its got A break fracture 10G. Civil airlines aren't going to stand anything like that. So we was this aircraft was fully instrumented and we got records of. Amount of G's, we're talking about and uh. 6-7 were pretty normal. Now we are.. passengers aren't going to enjoy that. I mean airliners are Way below that. So. it was. Absolutely essential work. But I'll put it this way to you very demanding. You are tired physically because you're doing this all the time, trying to keep level. Ah. But I think you are mentally exhausted by all the fireworks going on around you all the time. I mean the prop. Has Saint Elmos fire a circle of it all the time and uh. it's quite distressing because one of the things is you're trying to you're in pitch blackness, you're trying to fly on instruments and um. Yeah, you choose the light in the cabin very carefully and then suddenly you get this huge glow ahead of you. And that can be quite dangerous to destroy your night vision. that type of thing. its a uh, it's a Harry experience. You're landing on a skid and. You cannot afford to land on runways with that, you've got to land on grass. And um until it was unstable on one skid. So Farnborough we had some some captured German scientists. Who wanted to devise a transonic fighter for research And they In their design they had twin skids. But which retracted beautifully into the into the fuselage. So. The landing speed of the aircraft was estimated at 160 miles and hour. Now the landing speed on the 163. As I would say about 100 to 110. You're coming in at 125 and you ease off the decline and plunge down. So there was a gap, yeah. And they wanted me just to push up the landing speed and. See if it would hold it tight. So we chose a large grass landing field. At Whittering of the RAF Whittering and um, Moved started off with about 130 miles an hour, moving up to 158. When the Skid collapse at 158 and. Two things happening when it collapsed the aircraft toppled over on the left, wing started veering off to the left and the Skid, the main Skid. Came straight up through the cockpit. Caught my legs. And took them up. I was very fortunate. If it had just gone on with them, I think I'd have lost my legs. But I was jammed solid. Up against the underside of the of the instrument panel. Couldn't move. There was no fire. We didn't have any fuel aboard. But it took about an hour and a half to cut me out. You know? And um ? I had a very black spine at the time. Blue spine apart from that. No damage done, to me anyway. Now we at the end of war, we invited British aircraft manufacturers to come and see some of the booty that we've captured. And De Havilland in particular were fascinated with the 163. But I may say the aviation world was fascinated by the 163, mainly because of its huge number of innovative features. De Havilland saw this, said right, we'll go one better. Instead of 23 degrees sweepback we'll have 45. And instead ofa rocket engine, we'll go for a jet reusable aircraft. So that it was at the beginning. And. It was built very rapidly after the war did its first flight 1946. Chief Test pilot Jeffrey De Havilland. and the company felt it had the potential to break the world's speed record, which at that time stood at 616 miles an hour. The meteor. Um. So Jeffrey was told. In those days too you had to do the runs for the world's speed record at 1100 feet a metric reason. So he was told to start at 7000 at 10,000 feet. Sorry. Full power run. My fall was well I'll come down a 1000 feet at a time. And he was running at 7000 feet. And. around about Mach .8. When without any warning the aircraft totally disintegrated. And the wreckage. Landed. At the place called Egypt Bay, in the mouth of the Thames. Jeffrey's body landed nearby. And he had his parachute on. But it was unopened. We tested it immediately after, nothing wrong with it. So that was a bit of a mystery. While we were puzzling over that, the docs were examining him. And they suddenly announced. That his neck had been broken before he left the aircraft. So. the hunt was on. What would have caused this? And. We know that. with tailess aircraft, although this wasn't totally tailess, it had a vertical tail. We do get pronounced longitudinal and instability. And particularly in bumpy weather. Anyway. The whole world was very interested in what had caused it. So we consulted Lippisch A German designer of the delta wing and also the designer of the 163, William Messerschmitt didn't design the one, he built it, but he he didn't design it. And Lippisch said oh. They've got the CG too far aft. If you have a tailess aircraft, you must keep the CG well forward. So armed with this information. Decided to build. A third GH108. There was a slow speed one in between. And. We were going to strengthen the wings. And and these were the two main because there were al lot of little things we did to strengthen the wings and fit and ejection seat. So in the wisdom. The whole of aviation kept bothering Britain. What's the cause of this and that? And the pressure really was on. And eventually we decided to hand it over to RE and said You conduct the actual investigation. RE said there's only one way doing this will have to repeat exactly what Jeffrey did. We've got very strengthened wings ejection seat. So I I was head of aerodynamics flights at that time. So I obviously had to do the job and um, I was repeating what Jeffrey did. Full powers one started with 10,000 coming down and I was much slower than Jeffery I was down to 4000 feet. And higher speed too, about .88. And um? Suddenly, same thing happened. A violent run away oscillation. And it was so violent that they subjected me to plus 4 minus 3 G, three times every second. So that is explaining why this other airplane said he could only see a blur. but the wings held. And um This went on for seven seconds with full instrumentation aboard. And. I realized we couldn't get out of this, so the ejection seat, but under 4G I couldn't get my hands up. To pull the blind. And they were both stuck down here, so I had one on the throttle and one on the stick. And after 7 seconds. I just pulled the two of them slowly back together. And then suddenly, as it had started it stopped. We don't think it was what I did, we think it was because we just ran into calm air. So I'm not claiming any magic there. Just within we hadn't been in violently bumpy air but, Slightly bumpy air. And um. With all this data, of course. Where a restriction was put on the aircraft. For my successor at Farnborough when I left there. Carried on the work. And. He knew the restrictions, but it was felt like he possibly decided to have a little bit of a go anyway, and. Same thing happened. Fatal accident. (cough) There were three built. All three had fatal accidents. The other the other one. When we did the wind tunnel tests, we found this airplane had extremely bad spinning characteristics. Uh. And um In the thing there you'll find I was asked to. do a stall using a thing called a trailing static, which is a long rubber lead with a thing like a bomb, a little bomb in the end of it. This gives a true air speed reading all clears of the. Fuss and what another around the airplane And. The wind tunnel thing showed that it snapped into a vicious left wing. Um. Stall. And if it wasn't counteracted immediately, it would go into an inverted spin. So I was told to try and keep the wing up for as long as possible with the opposite aileron, but be ready for the worst. Ah. I couldn't stop it and it when it went it really went. We turned over in and inverted spin and this huge 100 feet of rubber tube wrapped itself around the rudder. So we couldn't get out of that. Shall we say the initially we couldn't get out of it, but desperation drives you to and I've. Push the colossal foot load on it. It's on record somewhere, but stretch this rubber tube enough to make the other effective. Got out of it, so all was well. So it was a really nasty little airplane. And as I've said, the third pilot, one of mine again was killed again during a spin, but the airplane, the slow speed version had at each wing tip had had a parachute. So if you've got in a spin, you pop the two wings step parachutes, which jerks you out of the spin. He got into a spin, popped the parachute. Only one opened. I always think there were two things that helped me. Firstly, I was meticulous about preparation. I when I joined Farnbrough, the accident rate in most test pilots was utterly, utterly appalling. It was over 25%. And. I saw the attitude was. Pilots were posted from fighter squadrons to be test pilots, with no test pilot school at that early stage. And the attitude was, Kick the tires, light the fires and the last one off a sissy. It really was like that, and they were going up there. Being confronted with things which. They ought to have known a lot more about. That is the result of indifference of talking to the boffins. I was a sort of academic test pilot to be honest with you, and I loved uh talking with the Boffins. I was one of them rather than one of their pilots and. There you learn such a lot. I've wondered, why aren't these guys interested? It's their lives. They've got families to look after, I mean. If you're gonna be a good test pilot, you mustn't get a health and safety attitude about it. You've got to understand its a risky gain, but you assess the risks. And. When you assess those risks, you do everything you can to. put them within your Control. And if you do that, you will last along time. I think the other thing that contributed to my. Survival was my stature. Um, twice. I can think of occasions where I could have lost my legs. We talked about one of them in the 163. And one a number of crashes I was in then I was able to tuck my legs under the seat. Also, you see guys today six feet two, they can barely get in the cockpit. When they eject, their knees get cut off by the canopy. So stature. And I feel like preparation and the two things I would say.
