Times of Moths and Cherokees

Jim Davis has a passion for instructing. He has been training civil and military pilots, in the air and on the ground for 50 years. His other passion is writing, which he studied at Curtin University in Perth. You can see, and buy, his two pilot text books PPL and Flight Tests at www.jimdavis.com.au

I see an entry that says that on 7 August 1964, I flew a “local survey” for four hours. It’s a flight I overlooked in my last story – so I will slot it in here. It was very interesting for a couple of reasons.

Anglo American, or de Beers (I never know which is which), chartered us to look for diamonds from the air. They needed the get-up-and-go of the Cherokee 235 as their own Bonanza simply couldn’t carry the load.

They had invented a fancy new PFM (Pure Effing Magic) box which could, they said, spot a diamond from 1000 feet. No, it wasn’t a magnetometer – that thing that looks like a torpedo hanging underneath an aeroplane – this was something very different and hush-hush. In fact, it took up a big chunk of the cabin, and it needed two people to drive it.

I should explain that this was more than ten years before the first candle-powered PCs were invented. I suspect Anglo’s big, black, steam-driven box with pressure gauges, dials and meters could all fit into today’s Apple Watch, and still leave room for fly-to-Mars calculations.

Anyhow, we set off, heading for our first diamond-seeking site, while we all waited for the biggest dial