Читать книгу Round the Bend онлайн

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From that time onward my own work began to change. I had to spend more time on the ground, because I was the only ground engineer in the show who was licensed for aircraft overhauls; I couldn't be away all day piloting while a machine was in for its annual overhaul, and with three machines coming up for annual overhaul in turn it was clear that I should have to spend a lot more time in the hangar. Having to do that, I was able to attend more to the book-keeping and costs, and it was about that time I set to work to get the prices down. It had been all very well to charge a high figure for my transport in the early days, but I knew that if I went on doing that the oil companies would start to kick, and either get their own aircraft or else, much worse, encourage someone else to start up at Bahrein in competition with me. Within a month of my return with the second Airtruck I cut my own prices by twenty-five per cent, and let them all know what I'd done, and why I'd done it.

I still did all of what one might describe as the pioneering flying. Whenever we had to make a landing at a place we hadn't used before, I used to take the machine myself if possible, sometimes with Gujar or Arjan with me in the machine so that they could see it and get the gen. That was the position some months after I got back to Bahrein, at the end of November, when Evans of the Arabia-Sumatran rang me up and asked if I could quote for taking a load of fifteen hundred pounds of scientific instruments and one passenger from Bahrein to Diento, in Sumatra, where they had another refinery.