| The intention
was to follow the route of the 1934 Australia race as far as Calcutta as
fuel had been provided by Shell.
By now, Lady Blanche had
taken delivery of a Miles M.2F Hawk Major as new, registration
number G-ACWY, on 4th September 1934 which she owned until 27th March 1942.
She kept the aeroplane at her home address - Manor Farm, Sherston, Wilts
although it was maintained at Whitchurch by the Club. Apparently she had
her own landing strip in one of her fields and did not use the larger grass
runway to the west of Badminton Hall on the Duke of Beaufort's land. This
latter landing strip now has a system of landing lights and can handle
fairly sophisticated twin engine aeroplanes, either belonging to local
landowners or used to fly members of the Royal Family on visits to the
Duke of Beaufort.
They set off with moderate
visibility from Bristol on November 20th at 8am and crossed
the Channel via Lympne. There they flew into mist and were forced to land
at St Englevert, north of Boulogne. After 2 hours, they carried on
to Abbeville where they were forced to stop as the route to Paris was fogbound.
Next day they carried on
to Paris where they nightstopped due to oil trouble. Next day they tried
to fly on to Lyon but halfway there were forced to land in a field near
what they later discovered to be Paray-Le-Monial. They were very
close to the airfield there and they then took off again at tree top height
and eventually found the airfield after the Guardian had lit a beacon on
the ground.
After waiting there for an
hour or two, they continued on to Lyon where the weather was better and
then on to Marseilles having flown over the clouds and the mountains. However
my father got a frost bitten face. They left Marseilles next morning, refuelled
at Nice and then crossed to Corsica and flew along the rocky coast
and then to Sardinia to Elmos, a distance of 147 miles, whilst bitterly
cold.
There they found it warm
and then crossed to Tunis, then onto Cairo, following the North African
coast. Here they spent a couple of days sightseeing and seeing the pyramids
at Giza.
Then on through Palestine,
and onto the Rutbah Wells following the Trans Arabian pipeline to Baghdad
and then to Basra and Bushire.
While climbing from Bushire
and about 60 miles south of Bushire, Lady Blanche reported via the voice
tube that oil was spurting into the front cockpit. Oil pressure was going
down and Micky advised that they climb higher to 8000 feet but eventually
Micky had to switch the engine off otherwise it would seize.
They had hoped to be able
to glide to the next place but that was not to be. Micky started looking
for a forced landing site and within a few minutes had found a perfect
landing site and did a perfect landing. Here they were somewhere between
Bushire and Bandar Abbas in what is now Iran marooned........
top
Michael is a Distributor
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