Memories of George H Messenger
One rather strange incident happened on 624 Sqdn. Whilst in North Africa. One night when going out to the plane (which was not our usual one) I had an uneasy feeling when I got near to it. I did my usual outside inspection and everything seemed all right. I then clambered into the fuselage and started doing inspections in there and found the flap pressure was low. I called the ground crew who said " It should be alright we topped it up this afternoon". I said " Top it up again and we will wait and see what happens". This was done but after a short while the pressure was falling indicating that somewhere in the flap system there was a leak. I then scrubbed the flight as the flaps were a vital part of our supply drop, full flap for going into a dropping zone (to put the brakes on) and partial flap to assist the climb out. On walking away from the aircraft the navigator said, "If we had gone on that flight we would never have come back". I said I felt the same as he did.
The next day the fault was found and rectified and someone else had that aircraft for the night operation. It was last seen crashed in flames down the foothills of the Pyrenee's.
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Another night we were flying fairly low over France when a black line of cloud or hills seemed to be in front of us. The navigator was told and he said, "There are no hills or mountains of any height on our route". As we got nearer we could see it was definitely a hill or mountain. The navigator then discovered that the chart he was using was marked in metres, all other charts were in feet, so we had to climb up rather rapidly over this obstacle.
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Another incident happened when we were flying along the foothills of Mont Blanc. The rear gunner called out that a big red-hot lump had gone by and was everything all right? Looking out of the window at one of the engines I noticed half the exhaust manifold had disappeared and flames were coming straight out from the cylinder.
If anybody who is in Mont Blanc area finds a lump of exhaust, that is its history..