Few of the local houses were flooded, but there was a near river running down Gretton Road outside my house covering the entire road up to the top of the kerb. They say there used to be a small stream there in the old days and it would seem that nature has a better memory than man!
My wife took three hours to drive back from her work in Gloucester (about 15 miles) and even then had to park at Cheltenham Racecourse and walk 4 miles, once wading up to her thighs to get home.
I was due to pick up my buddy from Canada on Saturday morning from Heathrow and was really worried I wouldn’t be able to make it. The alarm went off at 05:00 and it was still raining, but not as hard. So I set out hoping to get through. I expected empty roads at this time of the morning, but was greeted by traffic I would normally expect on a normal weekday!
I made it to Bishops Cleeve (1.5 miles!) and stopped dead in a traffic queue backing up from the flooded Smiths Industries roundabout. I did a u-turn and used my local knowledge to drive past the school to Southam and Prestbury. There were loads of abandoned cars at all angles along the main road. In Prestbury, the main road was closed, but I diverted around the back streets and made it through. Once on the A40, it went well. Around Oxford, it stopped raining and the clouds lifted a bit. By the M25, it was broken cloud and sun! Needless to say, Dan was early and made it through from the time the aircraft switched off engines to arrivals in 15 minutes – a new world record.
Sunday was a much better day locally. Although by midday it was threatening rain again, we decided to take a trip to the airfield for lunch and maybe a local to look at the extent of the flooding. We got there to be greeted by the site of two RAF rescue Sea King helicopters and their crew taking lunch in the Aviator. It took a while to get served, but all the while the weather improved and we even spotted a few blue bits, then the sun poked through! The weather was improving all the time.
Lunch cleared away, we went airside to take some photos of the Sea Kings. While doing so, a couple of the crew arrived and kindly offered to show us around. We had a good look around and I was astonished to learn that the pilots had to climb through the gap in the seats to sit up front, there were no doors – only one precarious spot to plant your foot on some blanking plates. Put a foot wrong and you would wipe out some expensive looking avionics – but the lady pilot merely shrugged and said ‘you get used to it’.
They really are big, solid beasts.
I went back to the terminal to book out and met the SATCO at the desk. Darren told me that Gloucester was the centre of the rescue effort on Friday and Saturday and that they had put people winched out of their home up in the terminal overnight and that it was just starting to wind-down now. The Sea Kings were due out later and were likely to impose restricted airspace around Tewkesbury and Upton to protect their flying operations.
Unfortunately, when I got to the aircraft, there was no key for the ignition on the coaming as I expected. Last week, the other owner of the plane had a problem with the ignition and mag’s barrel that the key goes into and couldn’t select both mags. With a local repair in France he made it back to the UK and immediately got Aeros (our maintenance organisation) to take a look. They confirmed it was shot (it is a 1959 aircraft after all) and replaced it, hence my need of a new key.
So unfortunately, no flying today. But we did get the unexpected bonus of having a look around some rescue Sea Kings and a chat to the crews.
I think Gloucester airfield did a lot of good for themselves the way the worked for the community in this recent crisis. It served as an ideal base for the rescue effort with all the facilities already on site that the Sea Kings would need. And let’s face it, Tewkesbury, Upton and most other places on the Severn often get a pasting from floods on a yearly basis – although there is no doubt that this is the worst that anyone can remember.
Perhaps the planners and NIMBY locals should remember this before they decide that the airport would be far better as a massive housing estate!
