The day was fine, the visibility superb. A flight was planned and two aeroplane loads of intrepidly, brave aviators decided to ‘Go Foreign’. The flight consisted of Ni Thomas in AA1 Yankee G-BFOJ and Paul Vickrage + Tim Comber in Grumman AA5B G-BIPV. We were off to Le Touquet for mussels, steak tartar and chips.

At the time (late 90’s) there was no dedicated radio channel for General Aviation in the UK. So we chose to use 123.450mH frequency for passing useful information, position, traffic, weather reports etc.

Imagine our surprise that having updated each other on our present positions, we received a rather disgruntled, abrupt call from someone who said they were Coastguard and we must not use THEIR frequency!! Hmmm??? We hadn’t had that before!! So we stayed silent until reaching Le Touquet. Needless to say the issue was discussed thoroughly over our French feastings. We were GRUMPY over the issue.

It was resolved that we didn’t believe the Coastguard bloke. In future whenever we were using OUR Channel, that we wouldn’t give our call signs, names or our whereabouts when next we used the radio. Thus the Grumpy’s were born.

Ni became Grumpy One, The G-BIPV crew became Grumpy Two, and its stuck ever since. The Grumpy titles very quickly became rather popular – Very soon Andre Everaert became Grumpy Three and Johan Winburg became Grumpy Four. This then started to cause problems? We couldn’t remember who was who with over 4 of us ‘members’, so started to name suitable candidates . Yogi Beck had a star painted on his wing so naturally he became Grumpy Star, then there was Danny DeBrandt Grumpy Red and so on and so on … See the full list.

Place name were likewise amended, but by now we were aware of failing memories and a decline in mental ability so place names became slightly off beat. Littlehampton became ‘Smallpigwieght’, Chilbolton – ‘Cold Nut’, Wing Airstrip –‘The Flappy Place’ etc etc.

In actual usage terms one has to remember that some of the commercial guys use 123.450mH for chatting and it’s the frequency used on the cross Atlantic route for passing position reports and suchlike, so its best not to use it for silly chat or to hog the channel.

By Nigel Thomas