Today Plane Speaking is in conversation with Neville Mack, the new Head of Training at Euro Flight, Lee on Solent. Neville has been instructing and examining for many years, but his history is more interesting, and we left it to Neville to describe exactly how his career developed.
I can remember, aged about 5, reading a ‘Janet and John’ book at school which had pictures of biplanes and light twins and finding it fascinating, even at that age, but as the second son of a Norfolk farmer, I never thought I would get involved in aviation. Dad had been a boy growing up during the Second World War, when it was a common sight to see hundreds of American bombers, B17s and B24s, information over Norfolk prior to daylight bombing raids over Germany. Decades later Dad’s office was full of debris ejected over the farm as these bombers came back, some badly damaged needing to jettison anything not fixed to the aircraft. He had picked up scores of live half inch machine gun rounds - tracer (red tip) and armour piercing (black tip) - as well as other items stored outside - parts of gun turrets, life jackets, cockpit hatches, you name it.
His real interest was not so much the flying side, but more the engineering and structure of aircraft. He knew the full specification, for example, of all the engines fitted to most wartime aircraft; British, American and German. When in 1968 the film ‘Battle of Britain’ was being made, I, as a 13 year old schoolboy, went with Dad to Duxford, Debden and North Weald to see the Spitfires, Hurricanes, Heinkels and Messerschmitts in action as they came and went with their B25 Mitchell camera aircraft to film the action sequences.
Thus my interest in aviation was born.
Being a farmer’s son however, I was encouraged by the family to work towards an agricultural based career. I had an elder brother, Desmond, who was (and still is) a keen farmer, so as the second son there would be no room for me in the family business.
I was reasonably academic, a pupil at the local grammar school. I left there with 10 ‘O’ levels and 3 ‘A’ levels at 18, and was given a place at Reading University to study for a B.Sc. in Agricultural Economics, a three year course.
I enjoyed my time at Reading, a mixture of research and study and some great social life, and I also met the woman who was to become my first wife. Jan was a third year Psychology student living in the same hall of residence. she was a pretty brunette, just my type, and had a cat called Boo, which was totally against the rules, and all the housemates worked together to keep it from being seen by the staff. We became an item after the first couple of months but she graduated two years before me and got a job locally as a retail manageress for my last two years.
Jan moved into a large rented house in Henley-on- Thames, a lovely town, where she shared with no less than three Heathrow based BA stewardesses, who, of course, were all romantically attached to BA pilots, all B707 and VC 10 first officers. One or other of these guys would be regularly around the house and in the local pub, we would talk aircraft and flying for hours, which really was instrumental in my decision to become a pilot, helped by the fact that Reading university was underneath the Heathrow flight line and there was often a constant stream of jets coming or going overhead.
Those pilots explained their route into flying - most were sponsored through Hamble but one had come up through the self-improver route and gave me some useful and practical advice on what to do. My last exam, in the hot dry summer of 1976, was an oral on a June morning, and the same afternoon I was at Wycombe Air Park at Booker, looking forward to my very first trial lesson.
My instructor, one Archie Macdonald - well into his seventies and an ex Fleet Air Arm carrier pilot, and I had an enjoyable hour in Cessna 150 G-BAXW, and I was hooked. However, like most new graduates I also needed a job, not least to pay for my flying. I was taken on by RHM Agriculture as a sales rep based in the Peterborough area, which I absolutely hated, but it did enable me to spend weekends in Henley with Jan and do some flying, both of which I loved.
I passed my PPL in March of 1977, by which time I had resigned from my god-awful job and was surviving by taking a few part time jobs in Oxfordshire - farm worker, barman, ( I had run the student bar at Uni so knew a bit about it), and so on - anything to get the funds to fly.
I was looking for a job that would combine my agricultural training with anything to do with aviation, and after weeks of applications I got a positive reply from a company at Gatwick which was affiliated to a cargo airline (IAS -A DC8 operator) and specialised in carrying animals by air. I got the job and spent the next year working part time in the office organising flights, and part time as an airborne animal handler accompanying shipments of livestock all over the world on freighter aircraft. My very first flight was with a load of 339 breeding pigs sent by British Livestock Company to New Delhi, which went well until arrival when I had the job of sorting out the pigs to the various consignees; These pigs were all colour coded with marker pen stripes on their backs - Mr. Patel had three, another Mr. Patel was expecting two, Mr. Singh was waiting for four - it took all night…..all of a sudden it was time for the return flight with 38 tonnes of textiles back to Gatwick - my first real experience of jet lag. Suffice to say I slept for 16 hours straight when I got home two days later.
Following a company reorganisation I was moved internally to a position of Route Sales Coordinator in IAS, which involved dealing with general cargo flights rather than those with animals. I was involved with this kind of operation, working for airlines in the commercial department between 1978 and 1986, moving from IAS to Tradewinds Airways shortly before IAS’s demise. During this time, I managed to keep my PPL current, adding IMC and twin ratings, but now with a wife, a mortgage and two young boys with a third on the way, money for flying was very limited. Lonrho, who owned Tradewinds, shut it down in early 1986. By this time, I was deputy commercial manager running their busy route to Khartoum, and I had lots of contacts in the industry by this time and took my knowledge to a couple of brokerage companies before setting up my own brokerage with a business partner in 1989.
We opened an office in West Sussex, not far from Shoreham where most of my flying took place and were operating two Boeing 707 freighters all over the world, finding the charters for them and obtaining all the clearances, buying the fuel, invoicing the customers and hiring the crews. We had a niche market which proved quite profitable, and while my business partner spent any extra income on joining fancy golf clubs, predictably, I spent mine on enhancing my flying qualifications, adding CPL, IR and restricted then full instructor ratings to my licence.
I was fortunate in that, after 1994, the only airport in Europe which allowed the ‘noisy’ Boeing 707 to continue to operate was Ostend in Belgium, and I amassed a few hundred hours flying crews, flight briefs, funds, etc. back and forth between Shoreham and Ostend using Piper Warriors, an old Aztec, and a very smart Cessna 303.
During one of these trips Captain Brian ‘Sport’ Martin, who was our chief pilot and training captain on the 707, casually remarked ‘you’ve got a licence, why don’t you come and fly the 707 with us’. Shortly after I found myself on the Lufthansa 707 simulator in Frankfurt learning how to fly a much larger aircraft.
We were too busy in the office for me to be able to do much 707 work, but over about 10 years I managed to accrue about 600 hours as co-pilot on the 707, before Ostend and the rest of Europe banned them for noise reasons at the end of 1999. My workload and frequent long trips abroad had put a terrible strain on our marriage by this time, and Jan and I were effectively living separate lives from the mid- nineties, with me providing the funds and she raising the family.
One of my first PPL students at Shoreham in 1998 was Louise, who was a Gatwick based stewardess for Monarch Airlines and who ultimately wanted to get a job sitting nearer the front of the aircraft. More on that later…
Our little company had to close, which we did in an orderly fashion at the beginning of the new century, and I had to decide what to do. I had instructor ratings and had done some teaching already at Shoreham, which I enjoyed, and I got a job quite quickly at OATS Oxford as a basic VFR instructor in early 2000.
I was there until the end of 2004, during which time I became a team leader, obtaining multi engine instructor privileges, and was in charge or running several courses for students sent by British Airways, Aer Lingus, British Midland, and the Algerian Air Force, training them up to CPL and IR level on Oxford’s Warriors and Seneca 2s and 3s, and the Zlín 242s which were used for spinning and aerobatics.
One day in November 2003 I got a phone call from the blue. It was ‘Sport’ Martin, my old 707 captain, who said ‘Hi mate, we’ve got a job if you want it’. This was just after the end of the second Gulf war, and the Iraqi currency was being replaced by new paper money. Until then, the money has been flown in by B747 freighters operated by MK Cargo, but then an A300 of DHL had suffered a missile attack when climbing out of Baghdad and had lost all hydraulics. The crew had done a magnificent job managing to land it back at Baghdad with nothing more than power and trim, but the result was that the insurance premiums for the 747 had jumped to ridiculous levels, and the coalition were looking for a cheaper, expendable aircraft, (and crew) to carry on the flights into Baghdad, which was where we came in. In a war zone, noise was not an issue, and there was a 707F in quite good condition on the Sierra Leone register which was undergoing a ‘C’ check in Southend ready to start work. The 747s would bring the money into Sharjah in 100 tonne loads, and we would deliver it to Baghdad in 40 tonne loads. Simples.
I had a few weeks leave saved up from Oxford, so I thought I’d give it a try. Neil McMillan, my CFI at Oxford, when I explained what my plan was, gave me some great advice. ‘Watch your 6!’ Those of you who know the clock code will understand.
We started work shortly afterwards and were doing a flight a day Sharjah- Baghdad- Sharjah with 40t of money into Baghdad and tankering fuel back to Sharjah. The plan was to arrive overhead the airport at Baghdad, which is vast in terms of area, at 17000’ which was outside the range of the insurgents’ surface to air missiles, and spiral down - to the left if Sport was flying and to the right if I was flying, so we could see anything coming up at us. There were two helicopter gunships, courtesy of the USAF, constantly patrolling the airfield ready to take out any portable missile sites once they detected the radars being turned on, which gave us a little comfort.
This continued, with a few days off here and there for 3 months. The handling people on the ground told us it was quite impressive watching this big aircraft spiralling up and down almost every day. We did pick up some small arms fire towards the end of our mission, which broke the outer pane if the DV window by my right ear but never were troubled by missiles. Our gratitude to the helicopter guys! A new window was put in and we carried on.
I was enjoying myself far too much to worry about my job at Oxford, but when the project finished in March it was no surprise to me that they didn’t want me back. However, my old club at SFC had done a deal with a company in the USA, finishing the Instrument Ratings for people who had done most of their training in Florida, and needed instructors, so that’s where I went next. We were using Beech Duchesses, preparing students for test at Bournemouth, the site of the test centre.
By this time Louise and I were in a relationship and were living together locally in Horsham. She was just completing her training, some at Shoreham to CPL level, and then the IR at Bristol, and was looking for her first job. She was offered a job flying the Jetstream 32 of Eastern Airways based at Durham Tees Valley, which, although geographically not ideal she accepted and was about to start training when she receives a call from a Company who had been sent her CV some months earlier. Club 328 were offering her a job as co-pilot on a Dornier 328 jet based in Southampton. This was a no-brainer - more money, nearer home, and a jet rather than a turboprop.
Club 328 however wanted her to pass a simulator assessment before confirming her appointment, which was to be conducted on a Boeing 727 simulator in the hangar at Bournemouth airport. She had never flown anything bigger than a Seneca, and I knew one of the sim instructors there, so I called him and arranged for her to have a practice on it before the Club 328 people arrived. It so happened on that day I needed to fly an Instrument Rating candidate to the test centre for his test, so all three of us loaded into a Duchess and flew to Bournemouth, where she went to the sim and he for his test.
I was on my fourth coffee in the cafe when Mike the sim instructor called me a couple of hours later and told me that she was up to speed with the 727 and would I like to come over the sim block and wait with her for the Club 328 people to arrive. He came and collected me and we waited - they eventually arrived - Alan was the deputy chief pilot who was to be conducting the assessment - and with him as his assistant was Will, an ex- Oxford student of mine who has been on one of the courses I ran. We got chatting, and Will was asking me what I had been doing since leaving Oxford, so I explained about the Baghdad episode etc. Alan, whom I had never met, said he couldn’t help overhearing that I had been flying in Baghdad, and what was I flying. I told him - and we swapped stories. Alan had at that time been flying a Dominie (military HS125) carrying senior officers back and forth to Baghdad during his last days in the RAF, and had regularly seen us coming and going in the 707 while on the ground there.
Louise did her assessment and got the job, but there was a hitch in that their aircraft was still on the Austrian register and she needed to get a validation from Austro-control in order to fly it. There was a lot of back and forth between Club 328, her and Vienna to arrange this. One morning the phone rang, and she was in the shower, so I answered it. It was Alan from Club 328. I said, ‘ Hi Alan, I’m afraid she’s in the shower- I’ll get her to call you back’. Much to my surprise, he said ‘ It’s not her I need to speak to, it’s you! You’ve got jet time, haven’t you - yes, I know you have, and you’ve got an instructor rating. Do you by any chance have a US visa? ‘ My initial thought was ‘ Where’s this going?’ I had a current US C1-D visa from the time we had been operating the 707 to New York as a subservice for Air France, which I explained. He told me that Club 328 had just arranged to purchase 2 ex-demo Premier 1 executive jets from the Beechcraft factory in Wichita, Kansas, and that they offered training for 4 pilots with each aircraft and that they so far had no-one to send on the first course in a month’s time and no-one to line train the pilots after they had completed the course.
Would I be interested? When I responded in the affirmative, he asked ‘How soon can you get out of your current commitments?’ to which my reply was ‘What’s the time now’.
Almost twenty years later I find myself still flying a Premier, holding a TRI/TRE and about 3500 hours on type.
More to follow later this year.
David Hoy