Mk V Auster, April 1955


Gerald Steel who has appeared earlier in these pages, had insisted that I must fly the Auster myself, in my spare time.


‘Look, Kilpatrick,’ he had said, ‘This company doesn’t mind taking a bit of plant on to its books and writing it off six months later if it is a failure. But we don’t do that with people, so we won’t even consider employing a professional pilot until we are sure he will be staying with us. You fly this thing yourself, and prove you’ll never get to a meeting or that if you do you’ll be late for it!’ What with the rail strike and the marvellous weather, I was the only manager in United Steels who could go anywhere at any time, and I subsequently dined on a few occasions on the story of one of those flights. On the 9th of July 1956 I piloted the company’s little Auster from Workington


to Newcastle Airport with Jack Laird, our Commercial Director, as passenger. I had taken a couple of hours away from my desk to get him speedily over there for some jabs prior to a business trip abroad. We were nicely on our way over the northern Pennines when I detected a change in the sound of the Lycoming engine. It was an irregular, wailing note I had not heard before, and I intensified my search below and around us for a suitable space in which I could land if the engine failed. Not wishing to arouse any worries in my passenger’s mind I kept my gaze averted from Jack as I picked out a field and then quickly checked the engine instruments. All was well as far as they could indicate. The wailing stopped and I was reassured, but a minute later it started up again and, still with my concentration on the ground 2,000 feet below us, I decided I must alert Jack about what I was doing. I turned to him. The wailing was explained. He was singing ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’ at the top of his voice. The company


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