The Meteor
I joined 208 at Abu Sueir in the Suez Canal 
Zone in Apr 1954 and left it at Takali, Malta in Jan 1957. During this period the squadron was flying the Meteor FR9 (1). First, a few words about the Meteor, which has been maligned in a recent book. It did indeed gain a lurid reputation from the large number of fatal accidents it suffered in the early 1950s — mainly before ejection seats were introduced with the Mk8 and subsequent marks. When I first flew it as a student at Driffield in 51, my Kiwi instructor warned me “Bradley, any bloody fool can fly the Meteor and many of them do. If you don’t want to end up looking like a bunch of bloody pork chops scattered around a bloody great crater, just listen to what I am going to tell you”. He got my undivided attention. It was this kind of “gallows humour” that earned the Meteor her nickname “Meatbox”.
However, most of us felt at home in her as soon as we climbed in. If you respected her quirks and foibles by observing a few simple “Does” and “Don’ts”, you found her to be docile as well as exhilarating; the perfect “gentleman’s carriage”. She was not a “perfect ladies aeroplane”, as the Spitfire has been described. There was no power assistance for the controls and control forces were brutal at what we called high speeds-above 450 knots or about Mach 0.7. When I was a “creamie” at Middleton St George in 52/53 we found that a few blokes could not hold the
rudder loads needed to counter full thrust on a single-engine overshoot from Decision Height. They were sent off to Valley to fly the “screaming kiddy-cars” as we called the Vampires. In the Middle East the Meatbox had the advantages of being strong and simple, easily maintained, and it had two virtually indestructible Rolls Royce Derwent engines (2).
Its disadvantages were its poor range, typical of British fighters, and its lack of any navigation aid, such as a radio compass. I say this with feeling, because the two incidents of my tour in which I came nearest to “buying it” were
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