Locked Up Abroad

Everyone, since the dawn of time, has complained about ‘shortage of manpower’. There are never enough people to do the work that is piling up in front of us.

Imagine, if you will, the early dwellers in caves. Man goes out, clubs woman over the head, drags her back to his well appointed cave with the southerly outlook and grunts at her in a way that will indicate a need for the cave to be kept clean and dinner to be on the table at eight o’clock sharp each evening.

It is a large cave. Very soon, with the arrival of small person(s), the woman will start to complain, as they do, that there is too much work in the house. She will tell him relentlessly and remorselessly that she had a career sewing skins together before he dragged her off and now that career has gone; her whole life is consumed by taking care of him and the small one(s).

She needs help. There is more work than there is day.

He nods and grunts in a manner that will indicate to her that he will see what he can do to resolve this problem.

That very evening he drags in another woman.

First woman will want to know where she came from, who she is and what is her background?

He will grunt that he met her down at the club.

So it goes on. In no time there will be more small ones and more work. Cooking, cleaning, repairing of skins, feeding minors, etc.

There is never enough manpower.

Never.

And so it was some years ago when I was in the military.

Beloved and I saw an advert for a television programme on television. Odd that. The television channels spend an awful lot of time telling us what they are going to show us in future. This happens so much that, by the time that programme is aired, I have no wish to see it since we have already seen all the best parts.

This particular advert was for a programme called ‘Locked Up Abroad’. I mentioned to her that I had been locked up abroad many years ago.

She was horrified.

“Oh, no,” I assured her, “It was fine. We enjoyed it, really.”

Explanations seemed to be in order.

 Due to a shortage of manpower I was dragged away from my other duties to go on a trip with our aeroplanes to Oman. That was fine. Nice people, generally, the Omanis.

A colleague and I were working on our aeroplane when a chap came over and asked us if we knew about this Rolls-Royce engine.

We assured him that we did so he asked us if we would look at his because his aeroplane was equipped with similar engines. He had, he told us, done the course but this was the first time he had actually seen a live engine of this type.

We assured him that there would be no problem. After a short time we finished up with our task and strolled over to his aeroplane. We asked him what the problem was. He told us that the pilots were concerned about a lack of thrust.

This seemed odd because the engines were new but we said we would assist him in checking it anyway.

The first thing to do was to take out the thermometer from the aeroplane and take a reading. We went into the shade under the wing and found the ambient temperature to be fifty two degrees celsius. In the shade!

Here’s an odd thing. We had been told that if the temperature hits fifty degrees all the ex-patriate labour should be sent home. For this reason all the official thermometers never go above forty-nine point nine degrees. So it was on the airport terminal building where it said forty-nine point nine and our thermometer read fifty-two.

Now we had to explain to him that when doing thrust checks the reference graph only goes up to forty-five degrees. This means that we should have to wait until the temperature dropped to below that before the engines could be ground run and checked.

He gave us the aeroplane keys and left. He had things to do.

We had things to do, too. As a result we forgot about this other aeroplane until midnight. The temperature was now low enough to do a ground run so we opened it up and did the run. Easy. No problems. Engines good. It was just ambient temperature that was dropping the thrust output on the engines.

Until.

A voice in my earphones said, “Shut down.”

“Just cooling the engines down for three minutes,” I replied.

“Shut down now, please. There is a small gentleman with a large gun pointed at me out here.”

“Right you are,” I said and shut down, locked up and came out.

Sure enough, there was a small fellow in a baggy uniform with a very big revolver pointed at my colleague.

He spoke no English but I guessed we were under arrest and preceded him to a van that took us into an office where we were fingerprinted, photographed and locked up.

In the morning we were given a superb breakfast and released. Apparently the aeroplane that we were running was the property of the Sultan of Oman who wanted no fuss made.

However (posh ‘but’).

We were politely informed that the ground running of engines was forbidden after evening prayers because people needed their sleep to get up early for morning prayers.

We were also informed that there was a detuner on the other side of the airport but we knew nothing of that.

Thus we were arrested and locked up for ‘disturbing the peace’.

We were also treated very politely and with great respect, fed very well and given a lift back to our hotel.

Don’t get events like that on ‘Locked Up Abroad’ or on ‘CNN News’!

All because we had a shortage of manpower and so, it seemed, did the Sultan of Oman.