A Pontefract man is operating with his Air Force Unit from a lonely airstrip at Benta, in a remote province of Pahang, Malaya, which provides an example of co-operation between the armed forces in the war against terrorists.

He is Corporal Albert Gothard, the only son of Mrs. L.E. Gothard, of 13 Westbourne Crescent, Pontefract. An airframe fitter, he joined the R.A.F. in 1947, as a boy entrant, and in 1952 was posted to the Far East Air Force. He served for a time at the R.A.F. Maintenance Base, at Seletar, and then joined his present unit, No, 1914, [Air Observation Post] Flight, which is giving air support to the ground security forces in the Malayan jungles. Corporal Gothard has logged more than 70 hours flying in the Flight’s Austers, on reconnaissance and leaflet and supply-dropping sorties. He plays left half for the Flight’s football eleven.

The Austers of No 1914 Flight are flown by the Royal Artillery Officers or Glider Pilot Regiment Sergeants, while R.A.F. personnel service and maintain them. The airstrip is a narrow, grassy and often muddy runway set amid jungle strewn hills, and flanked by a main road and tall rubber trees, while at one end cluster the native-style ‘basha’ huts in which the soldiers and airmen live and work. The Austers may fly an officer to another remote outpost to search for terrorists and their camps or parachute to ground forces, rations, wireless sets, batteries, mail, and cigarettes. The Flight in the past year has showered some 2,000,000 leaflets over Northern Malaya terrorist areas, in some of the wildest mountain regions in the Peninsula.