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Contents Chapter 1 Danger Money .......................... 9 Chapter 2 War Clouds ............................ 15 Chapter 3 In the Navy ............................ 25 Chapter 4 Home and Dry .......................... 42 Chapter 5 Urge to Fly ............................. 49 Chapter 6 Taking to the Air ........................ 59 Chapter 7 Introduction to Helicopters ................ 66 Chapter 8 Becoming a Civilian ...................... 77 Chapter 9 Test Pilot .............................. 84 Chapter 10 French Adventures ....................... 104 Chapter 11 With Onassis to Antarctica ................. 121 Chapter 12 My First Million ......................... 135 Chapter 13 Breaking into Oil ........................ 154 Chapter 14 Life in the Jungle ........................ 173 Chapter 15 Selling Out ............................. 194 Chapter 16 World Expansion ........................ 215 Chapter 17 Airline Ego Trip ......................... 233 Chapter 18 Shooting for Business ..................... 258 Chapter 19 Chinooks and Tigers ..................... 282 Chapter 20 Aberdeen Strike ......................... 301

Alan Bristow: Helicopter Pioneer

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Page 1: Alan Bristow: Helicopter Pioneer

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Contents

Chapter 1 Danger Money . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Chapter 2 War Clouds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Chapter 3 In the Navy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Chapter 4 Home and Dry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Chapter 5 Urge to Fly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Chapter 6 Taking to the Air . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Chapter 7 Introduction to Helicopters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Chapter 8 Becoming a Civilian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

Chapter 9 Test Pilot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

Chapter 10 French Adventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

Chapter 11 With Onassis to Antarctica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Chapter 12 My First Million . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Chapter 13 Breaking into Oil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

Chapter 14 Life in the Jungle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

Chapter 15 Selling Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

Chapter 16 World Expansion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Chapter 17 Airline Ego Trip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

Chapter 18 Shooting for Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

Chapter 19 Chinooks and Tigers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282

Chapter 20 Aberdeen Strike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301

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Chapter 21 Operation Sandstorm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

Chapter 22 Resignation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

Chapter 23 The Westland Affair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336

Chapter 24 Briway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359

Chapter 25 Coda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

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C h a p t e r 1

Danger Money

Rarely does a single catastrophic blow kill you; it’s the cumulativeeffect of small difficulties, individually benign, that build andbuild into a deadly threat while the realisation grows that

you’re in over your head and the cold sweat rises on your spine.Sensible people said it was too risky to fly a primitive Hiller helicopter,with balsa wood rotor blades and vintage piston engine, out over theAntarctic Ocean from a small, difficult-to-find ship in weather thatcould not be accurately forecast; whenever the notion crossed mymindI would think of the extraordinary sums of money Aristotle Onassiswas paying into my Swiss bank account. When your safety margins arecut down further by a fog that materialises all about, you just have toget down low over the grey waves and slow down to forty, maybe eventhirty knots, whatever the visibility allows, and set course for whereveryou think the ship is. But when those balsa wood blades start to takeon ice and the helicopter begins to shake and rattle, you lose powerand lift and you find yourself descending inexorably towards the coldocean depths, it’s difficult to find much comfort in the thought ofOnassis’s money.

Helicopters fly only if the shape of the rotor blades remains as thedesigner intended; an accumulation of ice from freezing fog or sleetdestroys that shape, kills lift and forces the aircraft out of the air. Iwas wearing my patented Frankenstein Rubber Co. survival suit butI knew my lifespan would be measured in minutes when I went in;the chances of the ship finding me were virtually non-existent, even ifexpedition commander Fanden Andersen – known to his crews as the‘Devil’ – could be bothered to look for me.

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The Hiller rattled out its dying protest as I wound on throttle to stayabove the waves. In a few moments, I knew, I would run out of lift.My wife and daughter back in Somerset would receive a telegramsaying I’d been lost at sea, and nobody would know how it happened.Strangely, fear was not an issue; I was wholly focussed on the problemof how to extend my life by another minute. Suddenly I became awareof a marked increase in the light level, a brighter glow ahead of me. Islowed the helicopter to a crawl, and out of the murk loomed the sideof an enormous iceberg. I came to a hover in front of this vast wall ofice, which disappeared into the fog left, right, and over my head. I satthere for a few moments with my heart beating fast. The vibrationsfrom the rotor head were getting critical. What to do? These tabularbergs could be more than a mile long, and my chances of gettingaround it were poor. The only way was up. I opened the throttle to takewhat little power there was left and raised the collective lever tomaximum pitch. Slowly, the Hiller rose up this ice cliff, the only visualclue I had to my horizontal situation. With the Franklin engine scream-ing, the machine began to shake like a wet dog and the rate of climbdropped almost to zero. Just as I thought it would not climb anotherinch, the light changed again and the ice wall disappeared. I saw whatseemed to be a snow ledge ahead of me, nudged the azimuth stickforward and settled on top of the iceberg in a blizzard of my ownmaking as those crippled blades whipped up the snow which nowreached up to the door sills. The berg was perhaps fifty feet high.Another ten feet and the Hiller would have run out of power andwould have had to descend, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop it.

I sat for a moment collecting my thoughts. The helicopter seemedquite stable, so I shut down the engine, then wondered if I’d done theright thing – would I ever be able to start it again? But if I didn’t getthe ice off the rotor blades, there would be no point in trying to startup. I waited for the blades to stop turning, then stepped carefully outinto the snow and climbed up to look at them. There was a layer ofrime ice about an inch thick on top of the blades, right across their spanand about three inches in from the leading edge. How had she everstayed airborne? As was my habit in difficult circumstances, I lit acheroot, took a deep drag and thought about things. I was alone witha crippled helicopter on an iceberg somewhere between South Georgiaand the Pole. Try as I might, I couldn’t make the vision of Mr Onassis’smoney compensate for this fact. Indeed, I would have given all of itto be back with the Foreign Legion in Indo-China, taking my chanceswith the Vietminh.

Fast forward a couple of years and I’m standing on the corner ofLeadenhall Street in the City of London trying very hard not to look

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like a man who is carrying the best part of a million pounds in cash.Pedestrians bustle by. They must know, I thought; it must be obvious toa blind man that the suitcases on which I had a death grip were stuffedto bursting with big white five pound notes. I turned up the collar ofmy sports jacket and tried to shrink into it. This was 1955 and streetmugging was less of an issue than it is today. But a million pounds wasa lot of money in 1955. This was the real birth of Bristow Helicopters; Ihad indeed survived the Antarctic, survived Indo-China, survivedwar-time sinkings and the early days of unreliable, pioneering helicopters,I had lived to bank Onassis’s money and more besides, and thingswere starting to get interesting.

In the absence of an armed escort, I hailed a taxi. ‘Yeovil, please.’‘Where?’ asked the startled driver.‘Yeovil,’ I repeated. ‘It’s in Somerset.’‘It’ll cost you,’ he said suspiciously.‘I’m aware of that,’ I said. ‘You’ll be well paid.’Near Blackfriars Bridge we passed a line of telephone boxes and I

asked the driver to pull over. He watched me suspiciously as I man-handled the cases to the phone box. I couldn’t get them in the door.I called my accountant, George Fry.

‘George? It’s Alan. I’m in a taxi.’‘Bit extravagant, isn’t it?’ said George.‘I’ve got about a million quid in two suitcases,’ I said.George was not easily perturbed. ‘Hmm,’ he said.‘It was the damnedest thing, George, I never saw a living soul. Some

disembodied voice told me to shove the suitcases through a hatch, theycame back full of money, and I walked out. I kept thinking they’d comeafter me saying there was a mistake. Or somebody would knock me onthe head.’

‘Strange business,’ said George. ‘Better get it to the bank.’‘My thoughts precisely.’The taxi puttered through the London suburbs and out into the

countryside, and I sat wondering why the Dutch had insisted onpaying so much in cash. But there were all sorts of restrictions on themovement of money in those days, and it didn’t pay to ask questions.They could pay me in cowrie shells for all I cared, as long as they werenegotiable at the bank.

The money was in payment for the patents on a helicopter-borneharpoon I had invented, a fleet of helicopters I didn’t yet own, and acontract to operate them hunting for whales in the Antarctic. The factthat only a few months later the patents were utterly worthless didn’tseem to bother the Dutch. I thought at best they might want theirmoney back, at worst I might wake up dead with a harpoon between

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my shoulder blades, but they even settled a hefty bill I sent themafterwards for conversion work on their helicopters. I have sometimeswondered since what their game was, but it’s never cost me any sleep.

Hours later I was decanted in Yeovil, paid off the delighted driverand added a fat tip, and hauled the suitcases up the steps of theNational Provincial Bank. ‘I want to see the manager, please,’ I said.

The clerk smiled. ‘I’m afraid Mr Cudlipp is with a customer, sir.Would you like to make an appointment?’

‘Young lady, if you value your job, tell him now that Mr Bristow ishere and wishes to deposit one million pounds.’

A hush fell on the bank. Suddenly the manager’s door sprungopen and an aggrieved customer was pushed out, still grappling withloose papers. The manager beckoned me in, turning the key in the lockbehind us.

I placed a suitcase on his desk and clicked it open. The moneyglistened. New five pound notes, fat bundles of them, each one as bigas a pocket handkerchief and covered in swooping script, all togetherpromising to pay the bearer on demand a sum that the averagelabourer would earn in a thousand years. The manager, a friendly chapwith whom I was on good terms, was washing his hands with invisiblesoap.

‘Have a cigar, Mr Bristow,’ he said.He fired up my cigar and I sat watching while the staff was

dragooned into counting tall bundles of money. Even as the work wenton, the remainder of my money was being transferred to Switzerlandby more orthodox channels. It was a very satisfactory day, I thought.There were to be many more millions to come, but I remember thatone with particular fondness because it was my first, and becauseeverything really took off from there.

We – myself, a handful of my closest friends and an army ofgood men and women – built on that foundation the best helicopterservice company in the world. There is no corner of the globe overwhich Bristow Helicopters have not flown. We have opened up thejungles and great sand seas, the ice fields and mountain ranges, and wehave pioneered delivery services far, far offshore in places where peopleonce said helicopters could not fly. We have carried employment andprosperity to countries which, but for oil and mineral exploration,would still be languishing in poverty and despair. Our helicoptershave saved thousands of lives in rescues at sea and ashore, and perhapsmillions more indirectly through our assault on the mosquito and thetsetse fly. In doing all this we have helped to shape the modern world,and not incidentally, we have made a lot of people very rich. One yearsoon, the Bristow Group will turn over a billion pounds.

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I was by then an acting Fourth Officer and was in charge of thenumber one starboard lifeboat. I got up there, threw in my ditty bagand started getting the boat away. It had an old-fashioned releasesystem which meant two men had to hand-lower it in the davits. Justas she was swinging free, a second tin fish hit us on the starboard sideand the ship listed sharply. The lifeboat struck the side of the ship andtipped over, and my ditty bag went sailing into the sea. With desperatepeople rushing to stations all around me and the ship listing in itsdeath throes, I watched the little blue and white fender bob away atabout one knot. It was the most important thing in my life at the time,and I felt utterly bereft.

The boat had heeled over and remained listing, engines stopped.Only two lifeboats on the port side were useable, so I took charge of thelifeboat further down on the port side. Suddenly the Captain shoutedat me.

‘Go down and get the Chief Engineer, for god’s sake.’‘Where should I go, sir?’‘He’s in his bathroom. He’s just telephoned me, he can’t get out.’I staggered below to find the Chief Engineer’s bathroom door

jammed solid. Grabbing a fire axe, I hacked my way through. Inside,wild-eyed, the entombed chief engineer stood stark naked. With nothought to propriety we rushed back along tilting passages onto thedeck, and the Chief Engineer remained unclothed until somebody tookpity on him in the lifeboat and gave him a shirt.

I got my lifeboat away, and the captain and senior officers allclimbed into the other boat. People started jumping overboard fromthe ship and we went around collecting them. The sea was calm andwarm; it was August off the Azores. We soon filled up both lifeboats.The maximum for my boat was twenty-eight; we certainly had morethan forty on board. Floating nearby was the old carpenter, a man inhis fifties, maybe even older, who had been with us on the Matiana andwho was obviously badly hurt. Bones were sticking out of the back ofhis hand, and he was going under. Some people in the lifeboat seemedshocked into immobility, or perhaps they were poor swimmers. I wasyoung and strong and could have swum the Channel; I dived over theside and pulled the old chippy to the boat. They lifted him in and gavehim morphine. It was his last voyage; he retired when we got home.

As darkness fell we drifted out of sight of the Hatarana, which turnedturtle but stubbornly refused to sink. I heard later she’d had to be sunkby gunfire from the Royal Navy corvette HMS Pentstemon. We were inthe lifeboat all night; she had a dipping lug sail and we set coursenorth-east, making for England. It was difficult to calculate the drift – Ithink the boat went one forward and two sideways. We couldn’t put

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side boards out because it would have meant taking out seats, and wewere desperate for somewhere to sit. I set ‘overboard watches’ wherecrew members would take one-hour turns in the water, holding ontothe sides, so that others could get some sleep. We used the oars tocounteract drift, but gauging drift was purely a matter of seamanship.We had no sextant but knew our latitude and longitude. I set aboutworking out a plot, drawing a Mercator grid on the back of sometelegram forms we found in the boat.

Next morning there was a cloud of black smoke on the horizon and adreadful old tub hove into view. She was clearly having trouble withher engines, and making about six knots. He name was Corabella. Shewas on her way from Takoradi to Liverpool, and any submarine withina hundred miles couldn’t fail to spot her. She came alongside andput down her scrambling nets. We helped up the injured and clearedout the lifeboat. I was just about to pull the plug to sink her when anAustralian voice boomed down from above.

‘You sure you wanna do that, mate?’I looked up quizzically. It was the Corabella’s Captain.‘This is an iron ore ship,’ the Captain said. ‘If we get the hammer,

we’re going down like a rock. You might be better off staying in thelifeboat.’

There was general laughter. I pulled out the plug – you didn’t wantto leave lifeboats around to tell the Germans what they’d sunk. Theoars floated away as I clambered up the scrambling nets.

‘You forgot to bring the oars,’ said the captain laconically.Rough though she was, the Corabella was a good enough ride home.

Vernon Hussey Cooper, like me an acting Fourth Officer, had beenin the other lifeboat. He looked subdued. ‘What-ho, old chum,’ he said.‘Glad you’re alive.’

‘Why so glum, Vernon?’‘Afraid I’ve lost my telescope, old chum. Mummy gave me that.’The Second Mate of the Corabella came up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said,

‘but we haven’t any cabins for you chaps. You’ll have to sleep in theofficers’ mess.’

It was tiny, with room for one on the settee and one on the table.Having been sunk twice, Hussey Cooper and I were pretty keyed up.We intended to sleep in our lifejackets.

‘Come on, Vernon,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and check out the lifeboats.’Just outside the mess was a big raft lashed to four forty-gallon oil

drums. It had provisions on board, and fresh water, and there was awell in the centre with places to sit. It was held in the shrouds by twobig wooden chocks, alongside which was tied a heavy hammer. Knockthe chocks out with the hammer, cut a lanyard and away she’d go.

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Vernon and I went back to the officers’ mess, had a bite to eat and wentto sleep.

At around two o’ clock in the morning there was the most almightyclap and we awoke with a start. ‘Torpedo!’ I said. ‘We’ve got one rightup for’ard.’

In pitch blackness we groped our way to the float. Vernon picked upthe hammer and was about to knock out the first chock when I stoppedhim. ‘Hang on . . . are we sinking?’

The ship clattered on. Not a soul appeared. All seemed normal. Wefound our way to the bridge. The Second Mate was on watch. ‘Excuseme, sir,’ I said, ‘where did that torpedo hit us?’

‘What torpedo?’ he asked.‘Didn’t you hear that bloody great thump?’‘Oh, that? That happens every morning at two o’ clock. It’s the coal

trimmer down in the bunkers, dropping his barrow on the ’tweendecks.’

The sound had resonated up through the ship, and in our jittery statewe had presumed the worst. We were the butt of humour, but every-body understood.

As we steamed towards Liverpool at seven knots, making smokethat could be seen for two degrees of latitude, I witnessed an extra-ordinary piece of medical improvisation by the Second Mate. Theengineer on watch had been doing his ablutions at a washbasin next tothe metal shield around reciprocating shafts from the engine. Withsoap in his eyes he groped around for a towel, and somehow got hisarm behind the shield. The shaft came down and skinned him, rippinghis arm open to the bone.

He didn’t pass out, surprisingly. Somebody shot some morphineinto him and they carried him into the wardroom. The SecondMate gotout the Captain’s medical guide, organised water and chloroform andproceeded to operate on the engineer with the book open on the tablebeside him. They had a pretty good set of instruments for cutting,sewing and tying. As I watched, he’d pull a finger to tell him whichtendon was which, then refer to the book. Tying the tendons seemedvery much like tying a fishing line. After a couple of hours, he’d joinedup everything, sewn backwhat skin the engineer had left, and bandagedthe whole mess up. They filled the engineer up with sedatives so hedidn’t go raving mad with pain when he woke up, and he was taken tohis cabin and continued the voyage as a passenger.

Whenwe docked in Liverpool two doctors came on board to examinethe engineer. They spent some time with him in the wardroom, pokingthis and pulling that, and one of them, a surgeon, said he didn’t thinkhe’d have been able to do a better job himself.

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C h a p t e r 1 3

Breaking into Oil

My letter to Douglas Bader triggered the chain of eventsthat transformed Bristow Helicopters into a world force inaviation. In it, I introduced Air Whaling Ltd as a company

with long experience of helicopter operations in the Antarctic andsuggested that Shell would profit from using helicopters to supportexploration for oil and the transport of crews to drilling rigs thatShell was working all over the world. By a mystifying coincidence, theletter landed on Bader’s desk at Shell Mex House in the Strand just ashe was wondering where on earth he was going to find an operator fortwo Westland WS55 helicopters he’d just bought, on instructions fromhis superiors, to service exploration platforms in the Persian Gulf. I wassummoned that day by telephone, and drove up to London with mymind full of outlandish possibilities. At Shell Mex House the corporatepecking order determined which floor you were on, and Bader, asworldwide Aviation Superintendent, was two floors off the top. I wastaken up in the elevator by his secretary, Pam.

‘The Group Captain’s looking forward to meeting you,’ she said.Douglas Bader always preferred to be called ‘the Group Captain’, andPam never referred to him as anything else.

She led me into a bright, airy office with a window looking out onLondon’s smoky skyline, the diffused reflections of riverside buildingsplaying on the Thames far below. Bader got up and came around hisbig desk to shake hands, walking carefully on his tin legs. He had in hismouth the short-stemmed pipe that was rarely a stranger to his face.

‘Ah, Mr Bristow,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’‘And I you, of course,’ I ventured.

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He motioned me to take a seat and resumed his own. Bader spokein short, sharp sentences and was not disposed to idle chat, but he wasclearly enthusiastic. ‘I’ve heard about all your work in the Antarctic,’he said with boyish eagerness. ‘Remarkable. What’s it like flying downthere?’

‘Well, sometimes it’s very pleasant and sometimes it’s quitedangerous,’ I said.

‘I’m sure it is,’ he said. ‘It takes quite some nerve to do whatyou’ve done.’

I was flattered to be spoken to in such terms by a man of hismettle. Bader was world-famous as an indefatigable fighter pilot, aman who’d talked his way back into the wartime RAF after losing bothlegs in a flying accident before the war, who’d shot down twenty-twoGerman aircraft and whose spare legs had been parachuted to himin a unique sortie, by special permission of the Luftwaffe, after he’dbeen captured in 1943. He had escaped on them that very night, only tobe recaptured gamely hobbling towards England, and had ended upincarcerated in Colditz Castle, where only the most incorrigible officerswere imprisoned. He was an indomitable sprit, a legend, and a greataviator. And here he was praising me!

‘How far did you fly from the factory ship?’ he asked eagerly.‘The furthest we got was 180 miles.’‘That’s a long way. Had any engine failures?’‘Not in the Antarctic, fortunately.’‘Where do you get your pilots from?’‘I train most of them. We’ve picked up good engineers from various

companies.’‘How many chaps have you got?’‘Six pilots with a few more coming on, and five engineers at the

moment.’‘Do they have S55 time?’‘Yes, all of them.’‘Which mark?’‘The Westland version with the Alvis Leonides 550 hp engine, not

the American S55 with the Pratt & Whitney R1340.’‘Good, good. Now I’ve been told by my superiors that we’re going to

have a serious exploration in the Gulf based out of Doha.’‘Where’s Doha?’ I asked.‘It’s in Gutter!’‘Never heard of it. Where’s Gutter?‘It’s pronounced Gutter, it’s spelled Qatar. It’s in the Persian Gulf.’‘What sort of operation do you want?’

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‘You’ve got to carry men and materials from Doha forty miles out toShell’s first drilling rigs in the Gulf. Seven days a week, and at night.’

‘We can do that. It’s just a question, sir, of having the manpoweravailable for night operations. You can’t expect people to fly aroundthe clock.’

‘Fine. Just make sure everyone is trained and licensed for nightflying.’ He rattled on with barely a pause for breath. ‘I tell you whatwe’ll do. We’ll give you the helicopters, you give us the manpowerand the maintenance, we’ll do it like that. We’ll provide the hangar.Can you go tomorrow?’

‘Yes, I can go tomorrow.’Bader pressed a button on his desk. ‘Snoddy? Pop in please.’In came Roy Snodgrass, all of five eight, slightly built, tidy and very

well spoken. Snodgrass and an engineering man called Bill Williamswere Bader’s right and left hands.

‘Snoddy, this fellow’s going to run our helicopters for us. Take himto Doha and make sure he gets what he needs. He can go tomorrow.’

He smiled a close-of-business smile, but we hadn’t done the importantjob.

‘How are we going to get paid for this, sir?’ I asked.‘Oh. Oh yes. You’ll be paid so much a month in arrears for the

wages, and you can mark up your expenses by ten per cent.’‘We’ll have to get a stock of spares, sir, and I’ll have to charge you

more than ten per cent on the replacement parts.’If Bader didn’t realise it then, it would have dawned on him soon

afterwards – once we had control of the spares it was very difficult tofire us. It seemed unusual that a great oil company would buy thehelicopters and then give the operator the right to provide spare parts.Shell had no idea about the WS55’s spares consumption, but I hada firm handle on it from our Antarctic experiences. It was a reliablehelicopter, although pumps, solenoids, fuel and air filters and a hand-ful of small items often had to be replaced before they’d completedtheir scheduled maintenance flying hours. The Alvis Leonides engineworked very well and rarely failed. But the fact that our relationshipwith Shell remained unbroken for decades was nothing to do with ourmonopoly on the supply of replacement parts. We did a fantastic jobfor them, and the Group Captain knew it.

I phoned Jean and told her I was off to somewhere nobody hadever heard of and didn’t know when I’d be back. She was used to thatsort of thing. The Group Captain’s comment to Snodgrass about ‘ourhelicopters’ was the first I’d heard of the fact that Shell had alreadybought the helicopters we would be flying. On the plane to BahrainSnoddy explained that they were due for delivery later that month.

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