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Tony and Mike

That was one of my boys from 173 General Support Squadron, Laurie Serecini A really nice bloke and cool pilot, haven't seen him for 20 years, probably flying a 747 somewhere - or maybe owns a cake shop in Melbourne?

I seem to recall the first film "The Green Machine" annoyed a lot of the army because Aviation Corps got so much of the time but the producer thought the flying went good with the 1812 Overture.

As a result of public feedback from "The Green Machine" which was also shown before a major feature at the movies, the flying received so many comments they decided to bombard them with a full Porter low flying clip. Also shot at Oakey.

That flying was absolutely standard stuff, not for show. In the days when fixed wing were still doing close battlefield observation and artillery Air OP the only way to survive shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles was to scurry around in the shrubbery and do a 5 second pop-up - in a different place each time.

Pop-up and get a fix on a target, work out the grid reference (from a map on your knee without a copilot while missing trees at 20 feet). Give the fire mission to the artillery, get yourself back in the area of the target, call "fire" and get the "shot" and time of flight from the guns. 5 seconds before impact the guns would call "splash" and you would pull up into a big wing over, reaching the top just as the shell hit, see the picture and work out a correction as you were back into the trees and wander around repeating the procedure until the job was done.

Hell, I just loved it!

These days it is all helicopters who can hover below the trees, pop up just high enough (in a different spot each time) to get their eyes on the target and pop back down with half the time exposed with one of the two pilots doing nothing but concentrating on flying and the other on directing the guns.

Damn wooses! I think that was what an American Army Pilot called me when he was telling me about directing guns in Italy in a 50mph and 65 horsepower Piper Cub in WW2.

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