I knew that the forecast wind
for that day, the eighth of January
1971, was a little bit strong.
So instead of flying at 500 feet,
it was decided to go up to 1000 feet to save fatigue on the aircraft.
And after about four mile Bob said, there's a bit of some cloud ahead.
I'm going to have to power on and climb above the cloud.
And as you put power on, there was the most incredible explosion
and I thought we'd hit the ground.
The next thing I heard was "Fire and no one engine!" from Bob
and he started pulling the aircraft.
Away from the ground.
So anyway, we climbed out, they applied the fire to pilots, you know,
got the fire extinguishers going,
and it looked as though the fire had gone out on number one engine.
Great.
So there we are, climbing away
thinking, what are we going to do next?
You know, clearly a diversion was in order with one engine out.
And then the AEO
Said to the crew, the fire's not out, the fire's not out,
and then immediately another fire warning light came on the number two engine.
So then the emergency procedures for
engine for two engines out, you know, was gone into
and all the non-essential stuff that wasn't required to keep the aircraft
flying was switched off automatically by the pulling of the RAT and a mayday
was put out mayday, call fire
on board, you know, and the usual sort of thing.
And we climbed up to 9000 feet.
And it was obvious that the fire
was not going out and then the whole thing was catching fire, so at that stage,
Bob decided that we were going to bail out.
We're going to have to bail out the rear crew
Certainly going to have to bail out the aircraft.
So he then gave the order.
To bail out abandoned aircraft,
abandoned aircraft, and Roger went out of the aircraft.
Jim swiveled his seat and he went out,
so at that stage with both seats swivelled
I went down,
stood at the top of the
the door, and then I then jumped out myself,
and as I jumped out, I heard this most amazing roar of engines above me.
It was massive noise.
The parachute opened.
I tried to look around to see the aircraft behind me.
My great regret that
I never saw the aircraft.
You know, could I just could not see it any way.
Never thought of it, but I could hear it receding in the background.
So there we were at
9000 feet and coming down, and I looked down and I could see
a nice green valley below me and I thought, Oh, nice, be nice.
Easy landing.
But then I remember, of course,
then it was made quite clear to me that.
Quite a windy day.
So I started to drift, and before I knew it, I looked down.
I could see that I was being drifted on up
over the Cheviot hills.
And as I looked down, I could see there's an awful lot of rocks around like,
Oh Jesus, this is going to hurt.
And I was all sort of
resigned to hitting
one of these rocks and breaking a leg or something like that.
And I just kept on coming down and I was going backwards.
I was going backwards to the wind, and I was very lucky
in that I went over the brow of the hill and then my
feet.
My boots touched soft.
Heather and I rode over a couple of times on soft heather,
and it was like dropping onto a nice soft mattress.
And I got up.
I felt myself and I felt great, you know, bailed out of an aircraft.