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Description
Mr. Duffley tells about trying to take off with water in the fuel tanks.
Louis Duffley
Louis Duffley est né à Quispamsis, Nouveau-Brunswick, le 14 février 1920. Ses amis et lui se sont joints à la Force aérienne et, en 1941, se sont rendus à Toronto pour recevoir leur équipement et être initié à la discipline élémentaire. De là, il s'est rendu à l'école technique de Belleville. Il y a terminé sa formation en 1942 et a été affecté à Moncton, Nouveau-Brunswick. Il y a passé un an et demi avant d'être envoyé à Dorval, Québec, pour suivre un autre cours. Deux mois plus tard, M. Duffley s'est joint au 165e Escadron, sur la côte Ouest. Finalement, il a été envoyé outre-mer en 1944, avec deux de ses copains de la Force aérienne.
Transcription
I'll come, I'll go to one incident that sticks out in my mind, because I, if it had been a few seconds longer then I wouldn't be here talking with you. We were moving from, by the way when we first went to Burma, we were on the India-Burma border in Assam in the Imphal Valley, Kangla, to be right specific, like Quispamsis. But anyhow we were there for up until March and in March we went down the coast to Akyab and then further down south to Ramri.
As it turned out it was on May 7th of 1945, we were supposed to have got off early in the morning, and we didn't for whatever reason and anyhow we, it was around noon hour when we were ready to take off about twenty of us on board as passengers, charging off down the runway at 90 knots tail up and all that and the port motor died. We wound up in some brush growth at the end of the runway, 180 degree turn. We were a little bit concerned but we didn't know what was going on really, so we all got out of course and standing around wondering what happened and what to do and I remember the pilot got out, and he was so nervous that he couldn't light a cigarette. Anyhow it turned out to be that the, that we, the motor transport section had been directed to take fuel from a storage tank without checking it for water. So we had a 120 gallons of water in the fuel tank. They won't fly on water. So that was a close call, a few more seconds we would've been airborne, and I wouldn't be here to tell it.