Khormaksar Air Day – 18 November 1960
I believe this was an annual event. I certainly remember going to something very similar about a year later. Ours ended tragically when one of the aerobatics team dived straight down into the runway and killed himself although fortunately I believe not causing very much other damage. [Stop Press : I was recently contacted by one of the airport firemen on duty that day who was able to give a few more details of the incident]
Pat has preserved her programme over the years. As well as being a programme for the actual day’s events, it also gives a wealth of detail about the history of the base & its individual squadrons together with snippets of life in the colony and a great number of advertisements for local businesses.
I’m afraid that 64 pages of the programme scanned at high resolution would produce a file that (a) wouldn’t fit easily on the site and (b) would cost you an arm and a leg to download. I have therefore produced two versions for general use :-
The two megabyte file should download on a standard 56k modem in less than five minutes (depending on your computer’s settings it might start displaying quicker than this). At this sort of compression you may have to guess a few of the words in closely typed articles and probably won’t be able to recognise any of the people pictured. However some of the advertisements with line drawings and large print text are quite well rendered.
The eight megabyte file will of course take four times as long to download but the better detail will make all the text legible (albeit not superbly clear !) and most of the photographs reasonably acceptable. We had a problem in accessing it recently but I think it's working properly again now.
If there is(are) any page(s) you would particularly like to see at a better resolution, please contact webmaster and we can either display them on the site (obviously not all of them at once !) email a page to you or even copy the whole lot to a CD and post it to you (perhaps a small fee to cover the cost would be appropriate). Pat will of course be cherishing the original copy for another forty years and will no doubt bring it to any reunion meeting(s).
I hope you all enjoy this whiff of nostalgia as much as I did.