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    To Fly!
    To Fly!
    To Fly!
    Ebook89 pages1 hour

    To Fly!

    By Brian Igoe

    ()

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    About this ebook

    "To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything."  So wrote Otto Lilienthal, the man who inspired the Wright brothers. "To Fly is Everything" is a compendium of stories about flying adventures of a father and son, the father in the RAF and the son in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Bill Igoe learned to fly an aeroplane in 1934, forty years after the death of the Wright Brothers' inspiration Otto Lilienthal. In the RAF, after a spectacular crash in 1938 which left him badly burned and ended his flying days, he was, as Senior Controller at Biggin Hill, closely involved in many WW2 dramas, such as the saga of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. And Bill’s son Brian learned to fly forty years after that, when the Concorde was around. Both shared Lilienthal’s sentiments and had a lot of fun and some stories to tell about their common addiction. These are some of the stories.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrian Igoe
    Release dateOct 20, 2016
    ISBN9781536580013
    To Fly!
    Author

    Brian Igoe

    You don’t need to know much about me because I never even considered writing BOOKS until I was in my sixties. I am a retired businessman and have written more business related documents than I care to remember, so the trick for me is to try and avoid writing like that in these books…. Relevant, I suppose, is that I am Irish by birth but left Ireland when I was 35 after ten years working in Waterford. We settled in Zimbabwe and stayed there until I retired, and that gave me loads of material for books which I will try and use sometime. So far I have only written one book on Africa, “The Road to Zimbabwe”, a light hearted look at the country’s history. And there’s also a small book about adventures flying light aircraft in Africa. And now I am starting on ancient Rome, the first book being about Julius Caesar, Marcus Cato, the Conquest of Gaul, (Caesar and Cato, the Road to Empire) and the Civil War. But for most of my books so far I have gone back to my roots and written about Irish history, trying to do so as a lively, living subject rather than a recitation of battles, wars and dates. My book on O’Connell, for example, looks more at his love affair with his lovely wife Mary, for it was a most successful marriage and he never really recovered from her death; and at the part he played in the British Great Reform Bill of 1832, which more than anyone he, an Irish icon, Out of Ireland, my book on Zimbabwe starts with a 13th century Chief fighting slavers and follows a 15th century Portuguese scribe from Lisbon to Harare, going on to travel with the Pioneer Column to Fort Salisbury, and to dine with me and Mugabe and Muzenda. And nearer our own day my Flying book tells of lesser known aspects of World War 2 in which my father was Senior Controller at RAF Biggin Hill, like the story of the break out of the Scharnhorst and Gneisau, or capturing three Focke Wulfs with a searchlight. And now for my latest effort I have gone back to my education (historical and legal, with a major Roman element) and that has involved going back in more ways than one, for the research included a great deal of reading, from Caesar to Plutarch and from Adrian Goldsworthy to Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni.

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      Book preview

      To Fly! - Brian Igoe

      To Fly!

      Brian Igoe

      Copyright © 2016 Brian Igoe

      All rights reserved.

      ISBN:

      ISBN-13:

      DEDICATION

      This one is for my father, Squadron Leader 'Bill' Igoe

      Without whom, of course, I would not be here.   Moreover, half this little book, the better half,   wouldn't be either.

      CONTENTS

      BILL’S STORIES

      1.THE MUSTARD FIELD

      2. FISHING IN A (FLYING) BOAT

      3 NEVER VOLUNTEER FOR ANYTHING....

      4 WORLD WAR TWO.

      5 THE SCHARNHORST AND GNEISENAU.

      7 BEHIND ENEMY LINES ‒ AND DOODLE BUGS

      BRIAN’S STORIES

      8 MY FIRST SOLO.

      9 SPINNING!

      10. A FORCED LANDING.

      11.  SAMS AND A WINGCO...

      12. SUGAR IN THE FUEL .....

      13. HAZYVIEW. WE LAND ON A GOLF COURSE...

      14. FLOATING IN RICHARDS BAY.

      15. TRANSKEI HEADWINDS, AND THE COB INN

      16. Out of fuel at Plettenburg Bay.

      17. HEAD ON TO A BOEING...

      18. TIME WARP IN MATJIESFONTEIN...

      19. DIAMONDS IN KIMBERLEY, AND HOME

      20. GROUNDED

      BILL’S STORIES

      1.THE MUSTARD FIELD

      Bill was born in 1911. In Nenagh in County Tipperary in Ireland. He was educated mainly on the rugby pitch, but he underwent primary, secondary and tertiary education and achieved excellent results. These experiences finally turned him into a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society with Aeronautical Engineering licences – five of them, A, B, C, D, and X licences. And these qualified him as a fully-fledged engineer for everything to do with the aeroplanes of the day, including the rigging. Rigging was very important on aeroplanes whose wings were made of wood and fabric held together with wires, and whose performance depended in large measure on the tautness of wires and fabric. Just like the sailing ships from which the skill of rigging developed.

      It also qualified him for a job as Assistant Manager at Croydon Airport, which he refused, and for a Commission in the Royal Air Force in England, which he accepted. And promptly transferred from Engineering to General Duties, so that he could fly the aeroplanes about which he knew so much. The step must have been a momentous one for the young man, involving as it would have a drop in earnings and a postponement of at least a year in attaining full commissioned rank.

      So, after a two weeks’ short discipline course, he was duly appointed an Acting Pilot Officer (on probation), with a Short Service Commission for 6 years, on October 3rd., 1933. He was then sent to No 3 Flying Training School at Grantham in Lincolnshire to learn to fly. He was twenty two and a half years old.

      Learning to fly in the RAF even then was not an overnight business. It took almost a year, but at the end you emerged with the coveted wings on your uniform. To start with, aeroplanes, or rather aeroplane engines, were still far from reliable, and forced landings were a common occurrence.

      A few weeks after first going solo Bill had been forced to land his Avro Tutor in a flowering mustard field.  The landing was successful, even though it was quite a short mustard field, but Bill’s uniform had gone yellow – bright yellow. He tried to brush himself down which only made it worse – he was much more concerned about the probable reaction of his instructor to the state of his uniform than the state of his aeroplane. However in due course he found a telephone and rang the Flying School at Grantham and explained what had happened and where he was.

      Stay there, Igoe, I’ll come over and fix it and we can both fly home.

      Er, I don’t think you’ll be able to get in, Sir said Bill. He had none of the inhibitions about addressing his seniors which were ingrained into the public school boys who made up most of the student pilots. And he was really worried about his yellow uniform.

      You got in, didn’t you? Didn’t damage your aircraft?

      Er yes Sir. I mean no Sir. I got in, just, and I didn’t damage the aircraft. But I didn’t have an option.

      Stay there by the aircraft. I’ll be with you in half an hour. And show you how to fix a carburettor. Insolent twerp, this last soto voce, not intended to be heard.

      Bill decided that it might be wiser, and more fun, not to mention that he was a licensed aeronautical engineer and that the carburettor float was u/s and would need spares and a mechanic. So he went back and stood by the aircraft and waited. And in due course was rewarded by the sight of another Tutor coming into view. The Senior Instructor, for that was who had been on the phone, first did a circuit of the field. And then another, and then made an approach to land – and overshot. After another circuit he waggled his wings as he flew off back towards Grantham. Bill caught a bus and the aircraft was collected by lorry. And nobody noticed his canary yellow uniform. But what he later remembered best about the incident was that it cost him a month’s pay to replace it!

      2. FISHING IN A (FLYING) BOAT

      A year later Bill was awarded his coveted wings and  at long last confirmed in rank and graded as P/O. The following week Pilot Officer Igoe found himself posted to RAF Calshot to extend his skills from fighters to Flying Boats. Here they were flying the by now venerable old Southampton Flying Boats, although it has to be said that Bill spent at least as much time playing rugby as he did flying. It was rugby, not flying boats, which landed him in hospital with broken bones three times during the next year. By now he had already played for Dolphin in Ireland, London Irish and the RAF, and also had caps for Hampshire and (unusually) Munster AND Leinster. A couple of generations later he would probably have been a professional! But Rugby (Union) in the 1930’s was a proudly amateur game.

      The other addiction which he had acquired at Grantham was squash.  Although this game had been discovered at Harrow School a hundred years previously by boys who discovered that a punctured Rackets ball, which squashed on impact with the wall, produced a better game,  it had only really caught on around the same time as flying when a court was built at the Bath Club in Brooke Street, London. The young Royal Air Force adopted this new game with enthusiasm. It kept you fit, did not require much space, and was great fun. Squash courts mushroomed in all sorts of unlikely places where British forces were based – Pakistan, Egypt, India, South Africa, New Zealand ...  it also worked up a huge

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