A Short History of a Nearly Nobody

Sunday 30 July was my fifth day at the Moonrakers Gliding club and I was looking forward to flying again. So far I had flown with four different instructors and they all seemed to have a magic touch. When I had to work hard all the time to keep the glider flying level or turning smoothly, they could take control and everything instantly become smooth and perfect. Today I was back in the T31 and flying from the front seat with Dennis instructing from the rear. One of the most exciting phases of flight when learning to fly a glider, is the take off. We were using a launching method whereby a cable is attached to the aircraft at a special hook point just under the front of the fuselage. Once this was attached and checked to ensure it would release correctly, a helper held one of the wings of the glider, and the cable (about 3 or 4 thousand feet of it) which was attached to a winch at the other end of the air field, was rapidly wound in, pulling the glider with it. This gave us the spe...

RAF Yatesbury was just down the road from Calne in Wiltshire. It has long since been returned to the farmers but I was there on an Air Radar Fitters course. The week ends were spent going back to Portland and getting into trouble for being late returning. So for a change I accepted an invitation to go to RAF Upavon to visit a Gliding Club. Moonrakers it was called, and the Chief Flying instructor was a certain John Willi (Williamson). We arrived at about 09:30 on a reasonably sunny Sunday morning, put our names on the flying list and were immediately asked to help wash and polish the wings of this rather nice fiber glass winged, single seater aircraft (Olympia 419 as it turned out). Always a willing helper, so no problem. Job done. Gliders were going up and down for rather short flights and everyone seemed to know what was goings on and were very chatty. Then a rather slim, not very tall man stood by a blackboard and had his photo taken. He then got into the machine we had been polishi...