Tuesday 5 November 2013

Gibraltar - a short stop for Arapaho.

One little piece in the new book 'Arapaho' refers to the cemetery in Gibraltar where some of the survivors of the battle of Trafalgar are buried.  When I was last there it was a little overgrown and neglected.  Not so now.   During my many trips there, I always stopped to look.  It might have been something to do with the fact that it's on the road up to the casino but it always brought a little lump to my throat.



One of the gravestones at the Trafalgar cemetery.

Staying on the theme of Gibraltar, in the 80s when I was test flying, I had to go out to Gib once a year to test fly the Lynx helicopter that was based there.  The first few times the border was closed, as it had been for many years but on  the last trip, the border had been opened.  What a revelation that was.  I flew out on the military trooping flight on a Thursday, did the test flight on Friday and couldn't get home until the next Tuesday.  The weekend is classified.


The airfield at Gibraltar.  Just to the north is the Spanish border and when the Spanish were being anal (most of the time) you had to be extremely careful not to fly into their airspace.  It meant a curved approach to the runway which even in a helicopter could be interesting as it brought you into the lee of the rock and the turbulence could be fierce.

1 comment:

  1. That is a wonderful photo of the rock. I think it looked a little different when I was last there in, er, 1968. I am sorry that I didn't discover the graveyard, although, in those days, my interest would not have been very high.

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