I recently had the pleasure of talking to Ron, a passenger on a community bus, who informed me we had previously met 68 years ago.

Then, we were both members of 622 Squadron, flying Lancasters, in Mildenhall, Suffolk. He was a wireless operator and I was a flight engineer, on two different planes.

It was late 1944 when 622, together with other squadrons, carried out a daylight attack on an industrial complex in the Ruhr valley, in Germany.

Having turned for home, our aircraft took some flak from a battery, which fractured the oil pipeline associated with part of one engine.

The engine went into overspeed and caught fire. Unable to feather the propeller, we resorted to operating the fire extinguisher, having already shut off the fuel to the engine, and hoped this might have the desired effect of putting out the flames.

It did, to a limited degree, but we were left with a considerable volume of dense smoke to contend with.

The next move was to reduce speed on the three operating engines down to stall point.

Now, the overspeeding of the dud engine was exacerbated and with shuddering which affected the whole air frame and caused the skipper to seriously consider ditching.

At this point, the flight engineer (me) took a dim view of the rising swell of the sea below as being suitable for the exercise.

Then, our wireless operator suddenly got lucky and Little Snoring in Norfolk agreed to our request for an emergency landing, which our skipper was pleased to accept.

But it was close. The small area of Tarmac available was hardly adequate for our Lancaster and we rushed towards the perimeter track at incredible speed.

Almost immediately, a figure emerged from the airfield office, wanting to know why the skipper had landed the aircraft with coarse pitch, courting an almost certainly fatal collision beyond the airfield.

Our skipper rode the storm, however, insisting that landing on terra firma had superior benefits: the aircraft was saved, without doubt, from a watery grave and the crew was evacuated.

However, no thanks were forthcoming from any quarter, to my knowledge.

So with a new engine from Mildenhall, we were glad to return there.

But not for long. We were given a transfer to 7 (PFF) Squadron at Oakington in Cambridgeshire.

KC Chittock, Fairlands Avenue, Buckhurst Hill.