Guestbook

Please leave a message in the Guestbook

Write a new entry for the Guestbook

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fields marked with * are required. Your E-mail address won't be published. It's possible that your entry will only be visible in the guestbook after we reviewed it. We reserve the right to edit, delete, or not publish entries.
Thomas 'Tommy' Turk Thomas 'Tommy' Turk from Phuket and Vienna wrote on 18th November 2020 at 4:57 am
A long ramble. As a kid growing up on a farm in the Kenya Highlands, I used to watch with awe as the EAA/BOAC Argonauts brrred and hummed overhead en-route to exotic destinations. After a messy education, (an impulsive dad whipping me out of school to travel for a few years), I dropped out of Princo. Head Master 'Flakey' Fletcher kindly got me into an apprenticeship at EAA in the DC3 prop. shop. After a year there I did 6 months National Service, after which EAA told me they didn't want me any more. Obviously I hadn't learnt the intricacies of balancing those DC3 props! Ambition burnt, having watched DC3 pilots in their khaki Safari outfits come down to the Wilson Airport hangers where I labored, to take DC3s up for test flights. Fast forward.. 5 Years later I was a DC3 F/O. after 9 years a Comet IVc Check Captain, and after 10 years a SVC10 Senior Captain. In 1973 I had Bruce Mackenzie on a flight He was then an EAA Board Member. I knew him from my charter pilot days with Campling Bros, where i often flew him and Tom Mboya. I asked whether rumors of calamity were true. He said.. this country won't pay for this, that one won't pay for that.. and we owe Shell millions of Shillingi. That triggered my move to Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong. After a year there I got into the Fitness Industry.. which i had been doing a sideline all along in Kenya. (Bruce Mackenzie died in an air crash. He had visited Idi Amin at Entebbe, and been given a lion's head as a gift. For reasons unknown, the gift had an altitude-triggered time bomb inside). I'm now Rtd in Thailand and Vienna. I wonder.. if in the far distant future, our great, great grand kids will find this site, and ask for stories about these 'pioneering' guys and gals.
Please wait...