In November 1995 an announcement was made that Prince Charles had, after twenty five years, given up flying. It had been his habit to take over the controls of the jets in the Royal Flight when travelling on official business. Un-named sources from within the Royal Flight spoke of scary moments when coming into land, exacerbated by the natural reluctance of whichever regular Royal Air Force pilot was unlucky enough to be in the other seat to tell his Royal Highness to take his hands off the controls. Someone, somewhere came to the conclusion that the Prince was living on borrowed time and must have had a quiet word with his mother, the Queen.
The 1995 announcement took me back on a journey through time to a bright sunny day in July 1970. His Royal Highness, then as now, was heir to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I was a director of a family company quoted on the London Stock Exchange and in the midst of what, in retrospect, turned out to be my palmy days. I had a fair selection of the trappings that money could buy including a stud farm close to the centre of Newmarket and racehorses. I was a keen private pilot with my own hangar at Elstree aerodrome and flying just about everything that could be flown on a private pilot’s licence including the Spitfires and Hurricane that I have talked about in a previous posting (here). I also had a one third share in a Tiger Moth and a Bell 47 G4A Helicopter. In 1970 this model represented the state of the art in supercharged piston-engine helicopters and was widely used by oil companies and the armed services throughout the world. It was the one with a cockpit shaped like a goldfish bowl that everyone remembers from the M.A.S.H. films and long running TV series.
I had a horse called Sovereign Spitfire entered to run at Goodwood racecourse. It was possible, with advanced permission, to land a private aircraft at the nearby Goodwood racing circuit that served as an airfield albeit one without flight control or ground-to-air radio. On a fine day with hardly a cloud on the horizon, navigating from Elstree to Goodwood would be as much as doddle as it ever could be in helicopter. Which is not to say that it would be entirely without difficulty for a lone pilot. Helicopters in that time required the pilot to have one hand permanently on the controls leaving one hand free for anything else that needed doing including such actions as gaining or losing height, turning the dials of the radio, holding the map and leafing through the pages of Pooley’s Flight Guide. Autopilots for helicopters had not yet been developed and satellite navigation aids had not yet been invented.
Pooley’s Flight Guide is a small volume that private pilots and many commercial pilots rely upon to identify and land at unfamiliar airfields. For every civilian airfield recognised as such there is a plan showing the length and direction of the runways. Information is provided as to whether the runways are tarmac or grass, the location of the control tower and the windsock, the height above sea level and the radio frequencies if any. There was an entry for the Goodwood motor racing circuit.
I steered on a heading calculated to take me through a gap in the South Downs just to the north of Goodwood racecourse. Goodwood House, seat of the Duke of Richmond, lies roughly a further one and a half miles to the South and the racing circuit the same distance again South South West from the house . On arriving on the South side of the Downs overhead the place where these features should have been there seemed to be nothing below that looked remotely like a race course with a grandstand, or an imposing country mansion or a motor racing circuit. After meandering around the sky for a minute or two an airfield with hard runways came into view. This seemed not to be the Goodwood racing circuit, where the aircraft landing area was all grass according to Pooley’s Flight Guide but did not correspond to anything else that should have been in the vicinity either. It crossed my mind that some gypsies might have come by since the Guide went to press and told his Grace that they had a load of tarmac left over from a job and did he want them to make up his grass runways?
With one hand on the controls I steered the helicopter in a tight pattern above the centre of the airfield maintaining an altitude of 3000 feet. With my free hand I studied my map and leafed through Pooley’s Flight Guideto see what airfield I might be above. 3000 feet, it should be understood, is the height at which arriving aircraft fly above airfields - this being at least 1500 feet above aircraft on the circuit and taking off and landing and, accordingly, a safe height. While thus engaged (and finding nothing) I was suddenly startled out of my skin by a Chipmunk fixed-wing aircraft. I had done my early flying training on Chipmunks but this one was different because it was plastered with RAF roundels. Without warning the RAF Chipmunk came up from behind the helicopter and flashed across my view as it passed directly below and at a distance of about twenty feet. It was about as close a near miss as could be. “If that frightened them as much as it frightened me,” I thought to myself, “they must be almost wetting their pants.”
Obviously it was not a good place to be hanging about. Could this be, I asked myself, an RAF airfield that I am flying above? If it was it would not have been in Pooley’s Flight Guide. I scrutinised my air flight map. Like RAF Tangmere, for instance? More scrutinising. “Could be,” I said to myself, “that I came through the wrong gap in the South Downs - in which case Goodwood racing circuit must be a mile or two West of here. I think I’ll go look-see.”
Goodwood Racing Circuit turned out to be a bit under two miles to the West, confirming that the airfield underneath me was indeed RAF Tangmere and confirming also that one gap in the South Downs looks very much like another. I landed at the racing circuit without further incident.
This news item appeared in the national papers the following morning:
The Prince of Wales, who is hoping to learn to fly, had his first air experience flight yesterday at Tangmere, Sussex.
The half-hour flight, the first of a number, was the first step towards deciding whether the Prince has the aptitude for flying.
