AUSTER AND MEDUSA

My office door in Benghazi was propped open by a good-sized piece of petrified wood. It got there because of a strange event concerning an aircraft which was stranded on the ground a good way south of Benghazi. I can’t recall why it had been there in the first place.  Another aircraft had gone to collect the pilot and had also got stuck in the rough terrain when attempting to take-off. Both aircraft were abandoned and subject to an insurance claim.

An Englishman who ran an engineering company in Benghazi wanted to salvage the aircraft and sell off the parts. He needed to see if it was possible to do so profitably. He owned and flew an Auster, a type of light aircraft previously used by the British Army as a spotter or reconnaissance plane. It was designed with excellent short take-off and landing characteristics. He decided to fly over the abandoned aircraft and scout a route which his trucks might take to reach them. He took me with him as I had played a small part in his negotiations with the insurance companies. They would be relieved of some of the costs if he purchased the aircraft for scrap.

We had been flying around for a while when he experienced an embarrassing bladder problem, so he landed the aircraft and got out to urinate. He did not stop the Auster’s engine and thus risk restarting it – a task which would have required me to turn the propeller by hand whilst he sat inside pressing switches and shouting orders in the hope that the engine fired. The propeller would then have spun very quickly, and I might well have lost a hand. I was not in favour of that option. He left the propeller turning whilst I too got out and held on to a wing strut to stop the Auster from joining the other two aircraft.

Some weeks later a member of his staff brought the piece of petrified wood which he dumped on my office floor and left without a word. It made a good door stop. There are petrified forests in the Libyan Desert. Perhaps that was why it was known in antiquity as the homeland of the Greek goddess Medusa whose very glance turned people to stone.