Plane Tales

My logbook tales continue and after 5 months without an income the bucket of shekels I had to keep us afloat was starting to run dry… I could see glimpses of the bottom. Luckily the mortgage on our modest 2 up, 2 down, 250 year old, Scottish stone, terraced cottage at Leuchars wasn’t excessive and we had pared our living expenses down to the bone.  The sniff of some flying work for British Aerospace down at their factory at Warton, however, was very, very welcome.

RAF Warton during construction in 1938

The TSR2 and Panavia Tornado, both built at Warton

The Eurofighter Typhoon, soon to begin construction at Warton

The F3 Tornado in weather

The BAe Hawk

The Joint Tactical Information Display System

An F3 Tornado with a towed decoy

A Monarch Airways Airbus A300

Images shown under a Creative Commons licence with thanks to the RAF, the MOD, British Aerospace, British Aircraft Corporation, the USAF, the USN,  DoD and Monarch Airways.

Stories from my logbook continue with the last few weeks of my service career, which were a blur of form signing, return of equipment, formal dinners, informal parties, speeches and gifts, all accompanied by feelings of regret and excitement at to what my future held. I flew my last flight in an F3 leading a 3 ship out over the Scottish highlands and then, after everyone had landed, I beat up the squadron low and fast. I then planned to do a low, slow pass with a full burner pull-up into the vertical…

My full burner climb ended ignominiously when one reheat failed to light!

The mecca of all things truckie! Brize Norton.

The horrors of learning Morse Code!

The Campaign Against Aviation

The PA34 of British Aerospace which I flew at Prestwick

Finally, the proud holder of an ATPL

At last, the sniff of a job!

Images shown under creative commons licence with thanks to the MOD, the RAF, the CAA, Chris Lofting and BAe Systems.

Log book stories still abound but I’m now on the last volume of my small collection of RAF Form 414s.  Unbeknown to me back then, my time in the Air Force was fast coming to a close. When I was offered the job on the Tornado it was on the understanding that I would serve an additional year to amortise the cost of training and I was now in coming up to the completion of my term of service, 19 years or aged 38 which ever was longer.  If I signed on again it would be to age 55.  What’s more, I needed to make up my mind as the RAF wanted 18 months of notice of my decision… would I stay or leave.

The F3 Tornado

He used a mixture of chicken entrails, throwing bones and gazing into his crystal balls to tell me my fortune

With their glory days behind them the young guns often treated Specialist Aircrew with scant respect and as their skills grew tired and their experience became tarnished with age they sometimes had little to offer but old war stories

The KC135 equipped for probe and drogue refuelling

RAF weather colour codes

My ATPL study books

An F3 equipped for QRA

The result of a midair collision

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Ronnie Macdonald, Mike Freer, Trougnouf, US DOD, Mike McBey, Defence Imagery, the RAF, the MOD, the RAF Air Historic branch, the IWM, J Thomas, Midjourney and Adrian Pingstone.

In the words of it’s benefactor, “It has been described as the most exclusive Club in the world, but the entrance fee is something most men would not care to pay and the conditions of membership are arduous in the extreme.” Other clubs that sprang up during the World Wars are more a measure of the bravado, luck or good fortune of its members to make use of an aircraft’s emergency survival equipment but the club I will tell you about today is one that honoured the grim stubbornness of its members to overcome the pain and disfigurement of their injuries with stoical good (if rather dark) humour.  The Guinea Pig Club.

The badge of the Guinea Pig Club

McIndoe

McIndoe and his patients

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the RAF, East Grinstead museum, the Library of Congress, the RCAF, the IWM, the RAF Benevolent fund and the Queen Victoria hospital.

My logbook tales continue with my tour on Tremblers flying the F3 Tornado which had got off to a difficult start when our compliment of brand new aircraft were shipped off to other squadrons and, in return, we received the dregs of the RAF’s Tornado ADVs.  They certainly weren’t in the best of condition and I began to think I was fated when I was forced to divert following a generator failure and X-drive clutch failure on an air test but then I was looking forward to leading a detachment down to Coningsby to fight F-16s over the North Sea in the Air Combat Manoeuvring range for a week.

The British Aerospace North Sea ACMI served UK and European Air Forces

Tremblers formate on the RAF’s new E3D Airborne Early Warning aircraft.

An F3 Tornado fires an AIM 9 Sidewinder missile

A piper plays at sunset

A 100 Squadron Hawk trainer

An F3 on approach

The K2 Victor Air to Air Refuelling tanker trailing all 3 hoses

Italian firemen hose down a Tornado canopy as it was too hot to close properly

The F3’s single Mauser 27mm cannon

The golfer Tom Kite playing for the USA in the Dunhill Cup at St Andrews

The Royal and Ancient golf club at St Andrews beside the 1st tee and the 18th green. In front is the historic bridge built for herders over the Swilken Burn

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the RAF, the R&A golf club, BAe, Mike Freer and Optograph.

It’s the summer of 1971 and Helen Reddy is singing about hiking down to the canyon store to buy a bottle wine and having such a good time.  I have no doubt that the nine prominent Salt Lake members of the Fishy Trout and Drinking Society returning from their deep sea fishing trip were feeling equally relaxed as they boarded their flight back home from Los Angeles. They were getting onto a Hughes Airwest DC-9, Flight 706, the forerunner of Capt Jeff’s beloved Mad Dog and Angry Puppy, belonging to a new regional airline purchased and renamed by Howard Hughes.  A little before them, a U.S. Marine Corps F-4B Phantom II, Bureau Number 151 458, departed Mountain Home Air Force Base in southwest Idaho, bound for Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada…. and so the story starts!

A Hughes Airwest DC-9

A U.S. Marine Corps F-4J Phantom II,

An ANA B-727

A JAF Japanese built F-86F Sabre

The B-727 and F86 tracks

The flight paths of the DC-9 and the Marine F-4

The F4’s position as would be seen from the DC-9 cockpit

The DC-9’s position from the F4 front cockpit

The eye’s Fovea Centralis, the small area of the eye’s retina that can detect fine detail

Various TCAS displays

Images under a Creative Commons licence with thanks to Richard Silagi, the U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation, Michael Bernhard, Hunini, the NTSB, the USN and U.S. Defense Imagery.

The numeric version of three previous Tales covering the A to Z of Aviation.  Now we look at what numbers might mean to pilots?

Babylonian numeric text

The Japanese Zero fighter

A ‘tongue in cheek’ three engined Airbus

The twin hulled S55 flying boat

The North American F-82

Flying in Vic

The Piaggio Avanti EVO

The Old Course with RAF Leuchars in the background

The 10 ton Grand Slam bomb

The Seven Seas appeal of the DC-7C

The NASA B-52 “Balls 8”

Red 10

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, Kogo, Arpingstone, images from the Public Domain, the USAF, the RAF, Scott Cormie, Swissair and Delta, NASA,

As you may recall I was undergoing the training course for the Tornado F3 Air Defence Variant having completed four previous flying tours.  Now being a senior officer it made the job of working as a student again a little more bearable.

The Old Pilot’s logbook tales continue:

An RAF Tornado Air Defence Variant

67° wing sweep

Ait to Air refuelling from the wing stations of an RAF VC10

We watched in horror as a motley collection of hanger queens and scruffy excuses for aeroplanes were delivered, bent and leaking, onto our aprons

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the Royal Air Force, the MOD, Adrian Pingstone, Chris Lofting, J Thomas and Pràban na Linne Ltd.

Form 414, my RAF Logbook continues with me leaving Australia and the Hornet unhappily in my rear vision mirror as I was heading back to Blighty and a cold winter in Lincolnshire.  No 229 Operational Conversion Unit was the training unit that would give me my first taste of the Mighty Fin, the Swing Wing Super Jet, Mother Riley’s Cardboard Aeroplane otherwise known as the Air Defence Variant of the Tornado.

Not just a British aircraft, the Tornado was a project involving Germany and Italy as well.

A cutaway of the ADV Tornado

Just some of the multitude of limitations that Tornado pilots were required to memorise

The Tornado cockpit showing the wing sweep lever

The Mighty Fins of 43 and 111 Squadrons

The RB199 lacked sufficient thrust to allow the F3 to perform adequately at medium and high level but it did have a way of going backwards!

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Surruno, Panavia, BAe, the RAF Museum, Mike Freer, Kevan Dickin, Chris Lofting and the RAF.

After I landed my aircraft I clambered out of the Hornet with the cold realisation that I might have flown my last sortie.  The spinning sensation had ceased and the sortie had gone beautifully, it was almost as if it had been a bad dream. A continuation of tales from the Old Pilot’s logbook, RAF Form 414.

Was the sun about to set on my career?

The surgery span round and round

Promotion

Exercise K89

One of our opponents, the F16

Firing off live missiles like the AIM 7M Sparrow

Landing in a thunderstorm

A week on Song Song island acting as the Range Safety Officer

The RSO and his crew of Malay troops

My final flight and the boys renamed my aircraft Nick The Pom!