FLYING-BOAT CREW’S EXPERIENCE

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23742, 14 September 1942, Page 4

FLYING-BOAT CREW’S EXPERIENCE

♦ VIOLENT AIR CURRENTS \IN CLOUD (8.0. W.) RUGBY, Sept. 12. One of the strangest stories of the war in the air has just been told by the crew of an Australian Sunderland flying-boat of the Coastal Command after an operational flight over the Bay of Biscay. During an early morning patrol the Sunderland flew into a funnel of cumulo-nimbus cloud at 4500 feet. Many aircraft have flown into cumulonimbus cloud, but few have emerged as they went in. Veteran pilots describe the violent air currents in this type of cloud as fantastic. Sometimes they break an aircraft into pieces. When the Sunderland flew into the cloud it began to plunge round alarmingly. The pilots fought with the dual controls, but the aeroplane performed like a demented Spitfire. The captain took over and pushed the control column forward to increase the speed. Then even stranger things began to happen. The cook, who was preparing breakfast on his oil stove was deposited on the roof in a perfectly natural sitting position. The navigator and his instruments left the navigation table at precisely the same moment. The navigator came to rest in the glass astrodome in the roof, just in time to receive his maps and rulers on his lap. On the bridge one of the co-pilots who had been standing behind the captain’s seat rose vertically until his head bumped against the roof, “I then found,” he said later, still puzzled, ‘‘that I was suspended there, yet I could raise one foot to the throttles, which were just in front of my toe and push them wide open.” At the same time the captain found that his head too was pressed against the roof, and although he still held the controls and was in a sitting position he was no longer in his seat. What exactly happened, no one seemed to know. The Sunderland may have dropped hundreds of feet like a stone in a terrific stall. At length it righted itself and the crew collapsed on the deck. When they took stock of what had happened, they found that parachutes had-been forced from their bags, and lockers in the wardroom burst open and their contents scattered. A small wireless receiver had been lifted from the deck and jammed in a bomb-rack on the roof. Nearly all the food in the galley had disappeared, but a cup half full of tea was found on the deck where it had been placed, still half full of tea. The engines fortunately continued to function, and the Sunderland got safely home. ■