A i r    a l a r m

It was a summery afternoon sometime in the early/mid-'60s and I was gazing out of the upstairs front bedroom window at nothing in particular. From that high viewpoint, particularly on just such a clear sunny day without a cloud in the sky, you can see right along the coast to the mouth of the Tees or straight out across the sparkling blue sea to the horizon.
      A brief spark of light way out to sea caught my eye. As an avid Biggles-reader, I was in no doubt that it was the sun catching the wings of a banking aeroplane and looking hard I could now see a white dot low down at sea-level. It didn't move, but after a short while it was definitely bigger, so it was coming directly towards me.
      This whole episode took about a minute to play out. As the dot got bigger and stayed whitish, I decided that it was a Costal Command aircraft, and as it rapidly neared the shoreline at a very low altitude
it was clear that it was a biggy. It could only be an Avro Shackleton, a direct descendant of the wartime Avro Lancaster heavy bomber. For the aerophile, the Avro family lineage is very obvious, except the Shackleton is a lot bigger... and with four Rolls Royce Griffon piston engines, it is much, much noisier too.
      This giant aircraft skimmed the cliffs just over a mile away with hardly anything to spare and it was at this point I became alarmed
- for now it was racing across the tree tops the other side of the railway, its shadow dancing up and down just beneath it, and I was looking exactly head-on at the damned thing... if not slightly down on it!
      It started to pull upwards as it neared the railway. Rooted to the spot by the sight of 30 tons of duraluminium, aviation fuel and electronic equipment coming up The Parkway directly towards me, I could hear our window glass start to buzz in the metal frames and then, with a titanic roar, the thing flung itself over our rooftop, momentarily blotting out the sky. Despite its speed, it seemed to be in slow-motion, slow enough for me to take in the details: the oil streaks from the engines, the angular cockpit window frames, the weathered grey and white paint, the huge contra-rotating propellers that seemed to be turning so slowly.
      It was probably 100ft up and the noise was thunderous enough to rock the house. Immediately following it came the wosh-wosh-wosh of the air turbulence, then there were dogs barking and babies yowling and my mother downstairs was shrieking "WHAT in God's name was THAT!" It was a rhetorical question of course, but I couldn't have croaked an answer anyway, being clenched from head-to-foot awaiting the huge explosion from even higher Hob Hill behind us that would surely kill us all. But the seconds passed and nothing happened and the racket of the Shackleton gradually faded into the distance.
      Of course this was no struggling aircraft barely under control. Although greatly reduced in size after the war, the RAF was still much bigger than it is now and there was plenty of air activity up and down the country due to the Cold War. The Shackleton was making its approach at very low level to test Britain's radar defences*.

* Though not the now-gone giant 'golf balls' at RAF Fylingdales, since they were part of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System network.

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