and now they could do little but wait. Catherine climbed off the cliff with the survivor, while other others went to examine the site of the accident.

Powell had fallen from a kind of pinnacle. On top was his hat and a new nylon rope, uncoiled. Sixty feet below was a large imprint in turf where he had landed, then he had pitched forward another twenty feet on to broken rocks. Splashes of blood showed where he had dragged himself up the gully for about sixty feet.

Of the subsequent carry which impressed him greatly, Hinde had this to say:

“We did not move him until Bill [Brankin] and the rest of the boys arrived with the stretcher, then we strapped him on and, with great effort, we carried and hauled him up to the crest and then down very steep hillside below a vertical wall which was first ascended only a few weeks ago. The complete carry lasted about 3_ to 4 hours. Hamish directed operations and it was remarkable how few belays were employed and yet I felt remarkably safe except at the steepest part of the descent (near the top). Belays were used only for first part of lift out of gully when I was guide man at back of stretcher. For steep hillside descents if one man slipped he hung on to the stretcher and the others held him.“

The patient reached the ambulance at 3.45 pm., the fall having occurred at 4.0pm the previous day. The better part of twenty-four hours had been devoted to searching. Powell was found at 9.0 am on the second day.

In ten years RAF mountain rescue changed out of all recognition. In 1951 the officer in charge of the Kinloss team had been forced to go to the president of the Moray Mountaineering Club for advice when the Lancaster crashed on Beinn Eighe. By 1961 officers and NCOs were giving lectures one mountain rescue to civilian clubs and other organisations including the Outward Bound Sea School at Moray, coastguards, police and civilian mountain rescue teams. In 1961 and 1961 Scottish police were being sent out on exercise with the teams to be trained in mountain rescue.

When the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme was implemented, the teams became official examiners in the mountaineering class. All teams, not only in Scotland, but in Wales, England and Cyprus, provided material for television documentaries, for radio and the press. They were called upon to rescue crag-bound dogs and other animals, and to search for lost children and escaped criminals. On one occasion Leuchars was asked to go to the assistance of a snow-bound train outside Aberdeen.

It is easy to forget, in the face of such varied activities, the raison d'etre of RAF mountain rescue; to search for and rescue the occupants of crashed aircraft. For one thing there were few aircraft crashing now, and unless a multiple disaster or a difficult rescue was involved, such accidents attracted little attention in the press.

In August 1959 the two Welsh teams, St Athan and Valley, searched for coastline of South and West Wales for weeks, looking for parts of a Victor bomber which had come down in Cardigan Bay. A similar search had been carried out by Kinloss in 1953 when a Shackleton crashed in the Sound of Mull. The team spent many dark December days combing the shores of the mainland and of Mull for the bodies, while others searched the hills of the island to try to find out whether the aircraft had glanced off them before going into the sea. Continue to Page 10