Bristow Bits by Tony Stafford.

My first posting in Bristows was in early 1969 to Trinidad. We had a small hangar at Mayaro on the east coast with an S55 and Bell 206A - Marcel Avon was Chief Pilot and we initially worked for Pan American Oil with the Bluewater 3 rig. In January 1970, we opened a new heliport at Sea Lots in Port of Spain, and operated from there with a second rig coming on site, together with a second Whirlwind. I remember one crew change day when the other two aircraft went U/S and I completed all the flights flying 10 hours without a break - a real bottom numbing experience !!

Talking of long flights, I did a ferry flight in a Wessex 60 (G-AWOX) from Redhill to Phuket in north Thailand. We started on 30/6/1971, routing through France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Burma - 26 sectors in all and a total of 81 hours flight time over 20 days. The other pilot was John Hobday, with engineer Nick Owen. We should have ended up in Singapore where the aircraft was being ferried onwards to Australia, but we found a cracked main rotor star at Phuket and so the odessey ended. It was great fun, except for getting lost near the Russian border (lousy maps and no aids) when we were flying the longest sector from El Azig to Tabriz in a time of 4hr25mins achieved with a cabin tank and single engine running (is this a record for a Wessex ?); refuelling by hand with 120 cans of fuel in the blazing sun at a God forsaken dump in the Pakistan desert (Char Behar); enduring a riot in Calcutta, and spending two hours flying IMC somewhere off the Burmese coast on our way from Aukab to Rangoon in the most horrible monsoon - oh, well I suppose it was probably a fairly normal Bristow flight.

I ended up being based in Singapore, and working in Djambi, Sumatra, where I also had a hairy moment when the tail rotor failed as I was depositing an underslung load of fuel at a rig site. The image below shows the remains being flown out; it was eventually shipped back to Farnborough for investigation, whilst I was shipped off to Bushire, Iran in purgatory. I was never officially told the results but apparently the intermediate gearbox had failed.

Regards,

Tony Stafford