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He still has a handwritten letter from Squadron Leader V Vesely, DFC, AFC, dated 24 March 1965, who was in the operations room during the incident which reads: “If I may take this opportunity, I would like to say how much we all admired your calm efficiency and your most excellent R/T. In spite of your great difficulties, you behaved like a very experienced captain. I often quote your emergency as one of the best conducted maydays we have ever had.”
Losing height rapidly, he could see the green edged fields of North Wales coming starkly into view and he considered his options. The ground team were directing him towards RAF Hawarden, a large airfield some distance from his position, but he was losing distance fast and knew he couldn’t make it that far. Instead, he saw a smaller airfield below which seemed to be empty.
Using a copy book pattern for a forced landing, he manually lowered the undercarriage and then manoeuvred the plane into a tight arc, losing height all the time so that he was 5,000ft into the turn and 3,000ft as he straightened out. At just 800ft, his heart dropped because he saw power cables stretched across the unused runway.
At this point, many pilots would have opted to use the ejector seat and take their chances outside the cockpit, but Christie-Miller still thought he could land the aircraft.
“I took a deep breath and just dropped enough height to fly under the wires. The next moment, at a speed of around 180 knots, his wheels touched the runway only 100 yards from the threshold and he released the drag-chute, a kind of braking parachute. It was a textbook landing but bad luck intervened again. “I was braking as hard as I could, but the crosswind caused the aircraft to veer across the runway.
“The right wing ploughed into some telegraph poles along the side of the runway and the plane hit an unused static water tank before ploughing nose down into the turf. I don’t remember much after that,” he recalls.
In fact, the impact had almost severed his left leg and badly injured his right, which were both jammed into the ground along with the thin metal fuselage.
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