Lieutenant Commander Mike Hadcock
Naval pilot who survived two emergency ejections and was later made a tribal chief in Nigeria
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER MIKE HADCOCK, who has died aged 87, was a naval pilot who survived a “cold launch” and two emergency ejections from naval jets.
At night on October 31 1957, while ready for launch from the catapult of the carrier Eagle, Hadcock’s Sea Venom jet suffered an electrical failure, and his observer, Lt Stacey Swift, signalled to the flight deck officer that the aircraft was unserviceable, while Hadcock closed the throttle and undid his safety harness.
A series of errors ensued and the aircraft was catapulted off in what was known as a “cold launch”, with no power and no instrument lights, and with Hadcock detached from his only means of escape, the ejection seat.
While the aircraft accelerated along the carrier’s deck, Hadcock slammed open the throttle, but the jet dipped over the carrier’s bows, dropping so low that Hadcock could see his reflection in the water before the engine powered the aircraft to safety. After a flight of 20 minutes, Hadcock and Swift returned safely to the deck.
After leaving Eagle in 1958, Hadcock qualified as a maintenance test pilot and spent the remainder of his flying years as a “flying plumber”, the naval term for an engineer-pilot.
Crawford survived two ejections, the first from a Sea Hawk off the coast of Scotland in February 1956 and the second from a low-altitude ejection from a Hunter shortly after take-off from Yeovilton in March 1965. In the latter he suffered a compression fracture of the spine, following which his fixed-wing flying career was curtailed and he was banned from flying in aircraft with ejection seats.
He requalified as a helicopter pilot and in the 1960s oversaw the introduction into naval service of the Sikorsky SH-3 helicopter which, built under licence by Westland, became the dependable and long-serving naval workhorse, the Sea King.
When he retired from the Navy after 20 years’ service, he had flown 15 different types of aircraft and logged more than 1,900 hours’ flying time. In one commission in Eagle in 894 Naval Air Squadron in 1957-68, and mostly with Stacey Swift as his observer, Hadcock completed 49 night deck landings and 132 day deck landings. He rued the fact that of the nine pilots who graduated with him from flying training school at RAF Syerston in 1954, seven died in flying accidents.
Michael Wilfrid Hadcock, the son of medieval historian Neville Hadcock and his wife Jeanne Le Pajolec, was born on October 7 1930 at Hexham in Northumberland. He was educated at Wellbury Park, where his uncle, Bernard Kenworthy Browne, was headmaster, and at Ampleforth, where he discovered and adopted a pet owl; he also boxed and shot for the school.
In the spirit of his grandfather, Sir George Hadcock, he and his brothers were all gifted engineers. His elder brother, Richard, was a leading authority on structural analysis and on the use of composite materials in aircraft design and manufacture, while his twin brother, George, after working on the Handley Page Dart Herald turboprop passenger aircraft, designed – and for more than 30 years made by hand – the unipivot arm, regarded by vinyl aficionados as the best of turntable arms.
In 1969 Hadcock joined Unilever, transferring his flying and engineering skills to palm oil production. After working in Cameroon and Nigeria, he was appointed as Unilever’s chief engineer in charge of industrial mills on two large experimental plantations in Malaysia, where he put his inventive mind to developing more efficient means of production.
Later he returned to Africa, first to Ghana and then back to Nigeria, where, in recognition of his work for the community, he was appointed a chief, the Oyewole of Igbodigo.
His interests included photography (his work featured in the Royal Photographic Exhibition in 1958); he was also a local historian, painter, classicist and fisherman, and played polo for the Navy and later in Nigeria.
He was also a lepidopterist and would often disappear for whole days in pursuit of specimens, his collection containing butterflies from Brazil, Malaysia and West Africa; even in old age he had instant recall of the genus and Latin name of each one. Realising that their nomenclature was inspired by classical mythology, he committed to memory the whole pantheon of Greek and Roman gods and how they interacted with each other.
Hadcock, whose deep Catholic faith sustained him all his life, devoted much time to good causes, including the campaign to have cluster bombs banned.
During training at RAF Valley he met his wife Rosemary Radcliffe, and they married in 1958. She survives him with their two sons and two daughters.
Michael Hadcock, born October 7, 1930, died June 7 2018