by John Freeman / Australia
flyingjohnfreeman@yahoo.com.au

Over forty-seven years ago, I made an interesting flight in a Tiger Moth from England to the Sudan. At the time, I had been engaged in ag-operations for two years and had recently traveled to England where I joined Crop Culture (Aerial) Ltd., a branch of Britten Norman Ltd., the designer of the B/N Islander aircraft. After a summer season of spraying potatoes in England using Tiger Moth aircraft, Jim McMahon, the manager for Crop Culture, asked me if I would like a season spraying cotton in the Sudan. All I knew about the Sudan was that it was somewhere south of Egypt and the prospect did not really seem attractive to me. However, when Jim mentioned the money I should make – tax-free in the Sudan - I changed my mind.

On the September 27, 1957 we were ready to leave the base at Bembridge Airport on the Isle of Wight in England. The fleet was two Tiger Moths with the normal 19-gallon fuel system. Additionally, each aircraft was outfitted with a 60-gallon rubber bag installed in the spray hopper. From here, fuel could be pumped into the aircraft’s fuel tank every hour, adding about ten flight hours. A third aircraft in the fleet was a Auster high-wing with the same Gypsy Major 130 horsepower engine as the Tiger Moth. The fuel system was a nose tank that held 12 gallons, a belly tank with 17 gallons and an extra tank behind the pilot’s seat that held 45 gallons. The 45-gallon tank was used to top off the belly tank hourly, by turning on a valve behind the pilot’s seat. The pilot knew the belly tank was full when he could feel the overflow. He felt for the overflow by putting his hand out of the pilot’s door and placing it by the belly tank cap. Once the belly tank was full, the valve was turned off.

I was given the Auster to fly. Flying alongside the Tiger Moths, the Auster only used 50% of the normal fuel consumption, which meant that I could have stayed airborne for almost 20 hours! Jim McMahon and Peter Charles flew the Tiger Moths.

We started to taxi at Bembridge early the morning of September 27, when we saw Desmond Norman’s wife running after us with three empty milk bottles, one per aircraft to be used for obvious reasons on six to eight-hour legs! We took off, flew to Customs’ aerodrome at Lympe, then left to cross the English Channel to Calais, mindful of all the lost aircraft and crews beneath the waves below us.

We flew past Abbeville Aerodrome in France where the Luftwaffe ME-109s called the “Abbeville Kids” used to leave to intercept B-17 Fortresses. We flew over Paris with its Eiffel Tower and on via Lyon to Marseille by the end of the first day. I was quite comfortable in the Auster, but I could only see straight-ahead and 90 degrees to my left, since the aircraft was packed with gear. The next day our flight took us to Rome and the following day to Palermo, Sicily - Mafia country.
It was beautiful flying along the French and Italian Riviera at four to five hundred feet. The weather was excellent. On the fourth day we crossed Sicily, leaving the south coast to cross 100 miles of the Mediterranean Sea - at 75 knots! I was told that pilots only worried whilst in sight of land and this was true. We saw not a single ship compared to earlier in 1956, the time of the Suez crisis, when pilots could have landed on an aircraft carrier most of the way across!

We were slightly off track on landfall, arriving at the Bay of Tunis, adding another 20 miles. After refueling at Tunis, we left in formation with a flight of rocket-carrying French Air Force B-25 Mitchells, who were off to hassle some Tunisian opposition soldiers.

Our small fleet continued to fly west to Bone, Algeria, where we carried out a spraying demonstration. Our spray gear was the early model Micronair A700 atomizer, with two per aircraft. When the demonstration was completed, we returned to Tunis.

Afterwards, flying along the North African coastline, I eased down to low level along the beach, until I saw Jim wagging his wings. I climbed up next to him to see him giving a cutthroat indication. Apparently, I was in hostile territory and could have received some lead in my pants!

From Tunis on October 1, we flew in daily single legs to Tripoli, Benghazi, El Adem (Tobruk) and Cairo. It was incredible to see piles of tins and other gear along the way, remaining from the War, 14 years beforehand. The tracks of army tanks over the stony ground were still showing like wide freeways.

At Cairo we went by taxi to our hotel and the driver, an Egyptian, told us the story that during the Suez crisis, the BBC advised which area was to be bombed that night, allowing civilians to evacuate. On one particular night, the target was the Egyptian Air Force Base at Cairo. The driver said all the occupants left quickly, but the RAF did not arrive. Realizing this, the local citizens went to the aerodrome and stripped it of all the furniture, carpets, food, etc. He said, then to add insult to injury, the RAF came the next night and bombed the aerodrome. He laughed more than we did in telling the story.

The next day, we departed from Cairo, passing the Pyramids, following the Nile, past the Aswan Dam, then being constructed, and finally arrived at Wadi Halfa. That flight was nearly eight hours. The following day, we flew across the Nubian Desert with its black rocks and sand, following the railway line built by the British years before in +50° C temperatures, to Khartoum in the Sudan. The total flight time from England was 61.5 tach hours.

The spraying season in the Sudan was quite an experience, working at 1000 MSL and +35° C temperatures each day. We logged 105 hours spraying, with me flying one of the Tiger Moths. That period itself is another story.

By December 10, we were finished with the Sudan contract. We replaced the ferry flight rubber bag tanks in the Tiger Moth hoppers, after much cleaning. We were off to Crop Culture’s base at Tiko in the British Cameroons, West Africa. I again flew the Auster. Departing on December 13, we flew to El Obied, El Fasher and El Geniener in the Western Sudan, where so much horror has been happening in recent years. The next day took us to Fort Lamy in French Equatorial Africa via Abeche, where we stopped for fuel and found the Auster’s tailwheel was flat. I taxied off the runway, followed by the Tiger Moths, shutting down the engines. While checking the tailwheel, an Air France DC-4 landed and rolled past us with its crew waving.

Once the DC-4 unloaded, the crew came over to see what two Tiger Moths and an Auster were doing in the middle of Africa. After a nice chat, they returned to their aircraft started up and took off past us. We returned to changing the tailwheel, only to hear a change in engine note from the DC-4. We looked up to see it at 200 feet carrying out a procedure turn followed by a fly-by past us at 20 feet with passengers looking terrified out of the windows. The crew gave us the “thumbs up” prior to climbing steeply away, wagging the wings. We called it “the fly-by of the century”. With the tailwheel repaired, we continued to Fort Lamy for an overnight where we enjoyed oysters flown in from Paris earlier that day.

Finally, we were onto Tiko on December 16 after a total of 25.5 tach hours of ferry flying. The aircraft were left at Tiko. We flew the airline as passengers to Lagos, Nigeria and from there via a BOAC Argonaut (The Argonaut was a DC-4 with Rolls Royce Merlin engines.) to London just in time for Christmas.

Finally, my adventure in the Sudan was over. I am so glad that I went there to spray cotton. It was one of my great lifetime aviation experiences. Next month in AAU, I’ll relate some of my flying escapades while in the Sudan.