The first Twin Pioneer was handed over to Tengku Yaacob, Malayan High Commissioner in London, during a ceremony at Prestwick in the early spring of 1958 and was flown from Scotland to Malaya by a crew seconded from the Royal Air Force, Flight Lieutenant Charles being the Captain. With the Suez crisis uppermost in everyones' minds and much of the Middle East in a state of turmoil, British stock was at a low ebb in the area. So, not wanting to have our new aircraft impounded by some unfriendly state, the CAS Designate arranged for the national markings on the fuselage and wings to be covered over with canvas strips and the plane registered as a civil aircraft for the long flight to the Far East.
All went well until the crew ran into extremely bad weather over Turkey where they were forced to land at a remote military airfield tucked among the mountains. Unfortunately one of the canvas strips bearing the civil markings had become detached in the storm, leaving Flight Lieutenant Charles with the difficult task of trying to explain to a junior Turkish officer, who spoke no English, why a number of Royal Air Force officers were flying a hitherto unknown type of aircraft bearing a civil registration on one side and an equally unknown military marking on the other, from the United Kingdom, which he had had heard of, to Malaya, which he had not! Indeed the situation eventually became so farcial that the poor young Turk was only too pleased to have the aircraft refuelled and sent on its way, reckoning he would never be able to explain at all to his superiors.
