The Steeple Times

Tag: disappear

  • A Gipsy flies

    A Gipsy flies

    The story of a 1929 bi-plane with a truly fascinating pedigree

     

    Britain’s best-known wartime Prime Minister piloted a Gipsy Moth aeroplane that will be sold by auctioneers Bonhams in February 2013 at a guide of £120,000. The same craft was also featured in an iconic 1980s film and was also supposedly flown by a member of the Fiennes family who mysteriously disappeared in 1998.

     

    The 1929 De Havilland DH 60 GMW Gipsy Moth bi-plane G-AAMY that will be sold by Bonhams at the Grand Palais in Paris in February 2013
    Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965)

    Piloted several times by Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) and used in the Oscar award winning Out of Africa, this 1929 De Havilland Gipsy Moth bi-plane is 24-foot long and has a 30-foot wingspan. It is capable of a maximum speed of 105mph and “wears” a yellow and black livery. It’s registration is G-AAMY in homage to the pioneering English aviatrix Amy Johnson (1903 – 1941).

     

    In the film, the plane was flown by Robert Redford but though the life of the big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton he played is intriguing; the exploits of Redford’s aviator double are just as fascinating a story.

     

    Sydney Pollack’s “Out of Africa” (1985) starred Robert Redford and Meryl Streep
    Tom Danaher pictured whilst filming with Mel Gibson

    Few outside of the aviation world will have heard of Tom Danaher (1929 – ) but aside from Out of Africa, he’s pretty much done it all. After graduating from a high school in Dallas in 1941, he became a Marine Corps fighter pilot. Stationed on Okiwana in August 1945, he shot down the last Japanese bomber on the final night of the Second World War and also made history, aged 21, for downing three other Japanese “Betty” bombers in the eight nights before the ceasefire.

     

    Recalled to active service in 1951, Danaher flew one of the earliest jets, the F3D Skynight, with the Marines in Korea on night combat patrols and then was part of the last combat mission on a high altitude bombing strike over Pyongyang, North Korea in July 1953.

     

    Danaher’s passion for flying continued after the war and in 1954 he flew his own plane, a 1948 Bonanza, to England to visit friends he’d made from the RAF whilst in Korea. To make the journey, he built a 109-gallon auxiliary fuel tank so that he could fly straight across the Atlantic. On the way home he called in for an audience with Pope Pius XII in Rome.

     

    The surplus Second World War minesweeper from which Wonderful Radio London operated in the 1960s

    Danaher’s visits to England led to him becoming involved in a pirate radio station in from 1944 to 1967 named Wonderful Radio London. Like many others, Danaher was not impressed by the BBC’s monopolistic attitude to radio programming and so helped build a 17,000-watt station on a surplus Second World War minesweeper. It was anchored three and a half miles off the English coast and outside of Britain’s territorial limit. Of the experience, Danaher told Airport Journals:

     

    “We had someone in Dallas who would record KLIF, a top 40 station, and we put it right on the air… The Englishmen over there just ate it up… The station programmed news and top 40 music and was very successful. It had the largest listening audience of any of any commercial broadcast station at the time.”

     

    Back in America, Danaher owned three car dealerships in Wichita Falls, Texas but sold them in 1972 to open his own airport, the Tom Danaher Airport. Lake Wichita Airport (7TXO), as it was also known, kept the aviator busy but he has also piloted in films numbering Empire of the Sun, Sky Bandits, Air America, Bad Medicine, The Pleasure of Love, White Hunter Black Heart, Cliffhanger and Goldeneye.

     

    In 1985, Danaher was recruited to fly Gipsy Moth G-AAMY by Sydney Pollack (1934 – 2008), the American director of Out of Africa. He recounted his six week experience on set in Masai Mara, Kenya in an interview for his local Texan newspaper, the TimesRecordNews, in 2008. Here, he highlighted the problems of trying to film with a vintage plane that “has no brakes and is difficult to steer”:

     

    “Robert Redford couldn’t make the thing turn. It took considerable finesse to turn it on the ground… The third time, he gave it full throttle… The left wing contacted a thick thorn bush and it tore some of the fabric off the lower left wing of the plane. We couldn’t fly it the rest of the day.”

     

    Other dramas arose with G-AAMY in terms of Meryl Streep’s body double refusing to fly in it and the craft struggling to reach the high altitudes necessary to film a sweeping shot of the plane flying past a waterfall. Danaher took charge stating: “If I can get a piece of string and a ruler, I can fix this.” He found just such, cleverly installed them and Pollack: “got every single shot he wanted.”

     

    Pilot Roger Fiennes (1944 – 1998) pictured with Alexy Zaitov during the 1989 Glasmoth project expedition to Moscow and back

    Another person to have piloted the Gipsy Moth G-AAMY, according to a comment left in the PPRuNe Professional Pilots Rumour Network forum, was a man named Roger Fiennes. Whether this “rumour” is true or not, the cousin of the actor Ralph Fiennes and the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, is another character with a flying history as fascinating as his true family name – which turns out to be “Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes” when presented in full. Of why he did not use this lengthy and historic surname, Fiennes is said to have once commented:

     

    “You try writing that signature on a 6 foot long cheque book.”

     

    Fiennes flew many hours in a variety of planes and one of the best documented was an expedition supported by the Daily Mail from White Waltham Airfield in Berkshire to Sheremetyevo Airport in the Soviet Union in April 1989 and back. He flew one of three Tiger Moth bi-planes with a Russian navigator named Alexy Zaitov. The journey took three weeks to complete, involved 33 perilous stops and covered 5,000 miles.

     

    On 19th April 1998, Fiennes was piloting a 1941 DH82A Tiger Moth, G-BALX, from Dieppe to Headcorn Aerodrome in Kent but he failed to reach his destination. The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) report into the disappearance concluded:

     

    “Although the pilot contacted Paris Information by radio, in the absence of a specific request, the flight plan was not activated. Lashenden was therefore unaware of the flight’s departure and ETA. When the aircraft was reported missing overdue action, and the subsequent Search and Rescue operation, which was activated on the morning of 21 April 1998. Since then there has been no sign of the aircraft or pilot.”

     

    Articles at the time and forums since are sparse in detail but several forum posters and articles suggest that Mr Fiennes had “mounting debts and a string of business collapses.” Whilst some go as far as to suggest a “Lord Lucan” style disappearance and make references to “paddling canoes” and “check[ing] the Panamanian register,” others remember a “nice guy, sadly missed.” Whatever really happened that fateful day, though, will probably never be solved.

     

    Another image of Gipsy Moth G-AAMY

    G-AAMY, which was marked G-AAMT for the filming of Out of Africa, is a plane with a remarkable past. We suspect there’ll be a few more dramas for this craft yet.

    The 1929 De Havilland DH 60 GMW Gipsy Moth bi-plane G-AAMY will be sold by Bonhams at the Grand Palais in Paris, France sale during Rétromobile week (6th to 7th February 2013). For more information telephone +33 1 42 61 10 11 or go to: http://www.bonhams.com

     

    To learn more about Tom Danaher’s experience flying G-AAMY in Out of Africa, read the full TimesRecordNews report by Lara K. Richards at: http://www.timesrecordnews.com/news/2008/jun/08/fly/?print=1

     

    To read the AAIB account of the disappearance of Roger Fiennes and DH82A Tiger Moth, G-BALX, go to: http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/dft_avsafety_pdf_502449.pdf

     

  • Nad's not that Mad

    Matthew Steeples suggests that Nadine Dorries is perhaps right to head for the jungle

     

    Don’t get me wrong: I think Nadine Dorries is an utter loon. For those who haven’t heard of her, she’s the MP for Mid-Bedfordshire and a bit of a mouthpiece. Her entry on our roll call attracted over 8,000 hits yesterday and that alone is clear indication that she, unlike the majority of dimwits that occupy the Houses of Parliament, is an MP who gets noticed.

     

    Nadine Dorries heads for the jungle

    “Gets noticed,” I hear you splutter. Yes, she’s someone who loves the limelight and doesn’t care whom she offends. She’s best known for having described David Cameron and George Osborne as a pair of “arrogant posh boys” who “don’t know the price of milk” and is regularly derided for her “maverick” ways. Here is a woman who gets compared to Ann Widdecombe and Edwina Currie and one that hasn’t let her party tell her what to do.

     

    In the House of Commons she’s achieved little apart from becoming a figure of fun. She’s commonly known as “Mad Nad” and the media reel her out whenever they fancy a bit of sport. Dorries can be relied upon to produce lines such as: “[I’m] not an MP for any other reason other than because God wants me to be” and these indeed are classic examples of her idiocy.

     

    On Tuesday, it was announced that Ms. Dorries, on full parliamentary pay, has headed off to Australia to participate in the ITV1 television series I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! For this, she’s pocketing a fee of circa £40,000 and will, without doubt, rake in a lot more in appearance fees and for interviews on her return. MPs and the media derided this move but I congratulate her.

     

    Martha Payne

    I cannot disagree with those who state that she’d be fired if she were in a normal job and just disappeared for a month, but “Mad Nad” has realised that the Conservative Party is not the place for her. She has plainly come to the conclusion that the House of Commons is nothing other than a chamber full of hot air and that to get things changed, you follow the example of the schoolgirl Martha Payne and use technology and the media to the max. With NeverSeconds, this fearless 9-year old took on the might of a council and improved school dinners. In the meantime, MPs haven’t even been able to come up with an appropriate solution to restore the Houses of Parliament, let alone solve a nation in the midst of economic meltdown.

     

    Frankly, we have too many MPs in this country and they don’t work hard enough. In total, there are 650 and this corresponds to one for every 68,000 parliamentary electors. It would be better to halve this number and double the pay of the remainder. We’d get better quality people applying to be our representatives and people like “Mad Nad” would be a thing of the past. Nadine Dorries isn’t an A-list “celebrity” but she should most certainly stick to the jungle.

     

    Follow Nadine Dorries on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/nadinedorriesmp

  • Charlie Richardson (1934 – 2012)

    Charlie Richardson (1934 – 2012)

    This father of six and his gang were amongst the most notorious and sadistic criminals in South London in the 1960s. Using scrap metal and slot machine businesses as fronts, they ran fraud, protection rackets and received stolen goods. They were best known for nailing those who displeased them to floor and then made them mop up their own blood. This process was known as “taking a shirt from Charlie,” since afterwards a clean shirt was provided for the victim to return home in. Richardson, however, maintained the torture stories were a myth. In his twilight years, Beckenham based Richardson mellowed and spent his time campaigning on behalf of young offenders.