Tonks, Thank you.
Derek, You were a regular? I seem to remember that Catterick had a fearsome reputation. Was it justified?
Ralph
Very new old boy
Moderators: Guru's, The Ministry
Ralph
Many thanks for your continued memoires, find them so very interesting and the way you have depicted them I can almost visualise all that has been written.
Enjoyed the events you described regarding your call up for National Service, when I entered the RAF in '69' it was still very much a 'body shock' when dis-embarking from the bus at RAF Swinderby which was then the 'Recruit School of Training' everything accelerated to 'double-quick time'.
I can still remember my Sergeant 'Sgt Halliday' who used to wear his peaked cap practically over his nose which gave an intimidating appearance to us rookies as you looked into his eyes!!
As for the training and disipline, no more than what I had been expecting, no swear words as such but certainly the shouts of "You 'orrible little man" could be heard many times but not just by our Sgt or Corporal, it was the most favoured catch-phrase of all training instructors!!
As we neared the end of our basic training it all became quite relaxed in comparison to our arrival.
As you had previously pointed out, when it came to selecting a trade you were only given the options that they thought you would be suited to and ignored your hints well, the RAF after my Trade Training gave me the opportunity to put down three RAF Stations I would like to be posted to.........then they told me which one I was going to.........Bl**dy miles away from my requests!! :sad:
Had once spent some time with the army on exercise as RAF support, although this was only for two weeks and whilst there with three other RAF bods we were made to feel like the odd-man out. As for the food, well, the less said about that the better!! Think we were just unlucky on that exercise.
Keep the stories coming in Auster, now awaiting you next chapter.
Regards Nigel.
Many thanks for your continued memoires, find them so very interesting and the way you have depicted them I can almost visualise all that has been written.
Enjoyed the events you described regarding your call up for National Service, when I entered the RAF in '69' it was still very much a 'body shock' when dis-embarking from the bus at RAF Swinderby which was then the 'Recruit School of Training' everything accelerated to 'double-quick time'.
I can still remember my Sergeant 'Sgt Halliday' who used to wear his peaked cap practically over his nose which gave an intimidating appearance to us rookies as you looked into his eyes!!
As for the training and disipline, no more than what I had been expecting, no swear words as such but certainly the shouts of "You 'orrible little man" could be heard many times but not just by our Sgt or Corporal, it was the most favoured catch-phrase of all training instructors!!
As we neared the end of our basic training it all became quite relaxed in comparison to our arrival.
As you had previously pointed out, when it came to selecting a trade you were only given the options that they thought you would be suited to and ignored your hints well, the RAF after my Trade Training gave me the opportunity to put down three RAF Stations I would like to be posted to.........then they told me which one I was going to.........Bl**dy miles away from my requests!! :sad:
Had once spent some time with the army on exercise as RAF support, although this was only for two weeks and whilst there with three other RAF bods we were made to feel like the odd-man out. As for the food, well, the less said about that the better!! Think we were just unlucky on that exercise.
Keep the stories coming in Auster, now awaiting you next chapter.
Regards Nigel.
I used to be an optimist but with age I am now a grumpy old pessimist.
Nigel,
Many thanks for your encouragement. Clearly we are both ‘fellow sufferers’ at the hands of square bashing NCOs. Regarding headgear, I was in at the time of berets and those worn by the NCOs were small, well trained, pulled down tightly over the right ear and they ‘looked the business’. We recruits had all sorts of uncontrollably shaped berets with minds of their own and to be frank most of us looked just a bit ridiculous. Box pleats in the back of the blouses were not supposed to be allowed. Didn’t stop our NCOs having them, thereby increasing their ‘smartness’.
As for your brief army experience I wouldn’t think that you were unlucky, not from my experience of them. However, with my limited knowledge, there was one significant difference between the two services and it was this. The Army treated you as a responsible adult, whereas the RAF treated you as someone who needed to be guided and ‘looked after’. Difficult to explain the difference but it was noticeable.
Next instalment coming up.
Ralph
Many thanks for your encouragement. Clearly we are both ‘fellow sufferers’ at the hands of square bashing NCOs. Regarding headgear, I was in at the time of berets and those worn by the NCOs were small, well trained, pulled down tightly over the right ear and they ‘looked the business’. We recruits had all sorts of uncontrollably shaped berets with minds of their own and to be frank most of us looked just a bit ridiculous. Box pleats in the back of the blouses were not supposed to be allowed. Didn’t stop our NCOs having them, thereby increasing their ‘smartness’.
As for your brief army experience I wouldn’t think that you were unlucky, not from my experience of them. However, with my limited knowledge, there was one significant difference between the two services and it was this. The Army treated you as a responsible adult, whereas the RAF treated you as someone who needed to be guided and ‘looked after’. Difficult to explain the difference but it was noticeable.
Next instalment coming up.
Ralph
RAF – The Russians Are Coming
Before we left Wythall, we again broached the subject of promotion. ‘Ahem. Slight snag there. Afraid you were misled. But we can now give you all two stripes, one for each arm. You must sew them on upside down!’ So we all went off to Germany with the lowest rank, Junior Technician, proudly displayed. In fact, we were so close to demob that we didn’t really care. Actually, that’s all they could have done. There would be no point in creating a bunch of Senior Technicians for 5 months service only.
After transit by troopship, we were posted to Uetersen, an ex-Luftwaffe night fighter grass airfield near Hamburg. It had been established pre-war and we were accommodated in its barrack block. We were amazed to a man by the sheer luxury of the place. Solidly built in brick, centrally heated, double-glazing, parquet floor, stone stairs and two to a room with washbasin. There was even a blanco room in the basement complete with water trough and drying boards (not that we used them!). Absolutely incredible! Temperatures were well below zero outside but we just didn’t notice the cold because most of our movements were short trips between buildings. These were not quarters for officers’ but for ORs. And the food! Five course meals cooked and served by German civilians working on camp. I have, since then, stayed in much worse hotels than those quarters. Ah! Memories of Bodmin. For the rest of our time in Germany, we had no complaints whatsoever about our living conditions. It might just have been something to do with the exchange rate: 8-9 Deutschmarks to the £1 !!
We were held at Uetersen until early February 1953 and until our final ‘home’ at Hambuhren had been fitted out. Hambuhren is a village, about 4 miles from Celle and near to Hanover, the capital of Lower Saxony. Celle is one of those small classic German towns that have a lot of history associated with them. It has a schloss which is more like a stately home than a castle, with its own small theatre, beautifully laid out in white, red and gold. The first time I went into the small museum in Celle, I was astounded to see a large British Royal Standard displayed in pride of place. It turns out that Celle was the residence of the Duke of Hanover who was invited by the British to be their king, George I in 1714.
Hambuhren had been laid out specifically for air traffic interception and we were now within the Signals Intelligence (Sigint) organisation, which was part of GCHQ. The Operations Block was a long room with a line of HF receivers complete with translators on one side matched by another line of receivers on the other side and W/T operators manned these. The room permanently reeked of cigarette smoke and we all huddled over our note pads scribbling Russian as fast as we could, noting down the air traffic - ground-to-air and ground-to-ground transmissions. There was a control unit at the end where the watch officer could monitor your frequency, just in case you were listening to the American Forces Network big bands. As if we would? The majority of the traffic, as you might expect was routine and boring and that was my place of work for the next five months.
We were providing small snippets of information and were one source in a network of sources that was used to build up a picture of Soviet organisations and their order of battle. Typically, call signs would be changed on a monthly basis and we were building up a copy of their codebooks, sometimes anticipating a few of the changes. You were helped by sloppy Russian operators who did not stick to the rules in the same way that similar poor German procedures had helped Bletchley Park break the Enigma codes in WW2.
Example:
In normal tuning the caller gives his call sign and a count 1 to 10 then 10 to 1. Bad procedure by Wolf 7, ‘I give a tuning call. Wolf 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 9, 8, . . .etc’. Next month he is Journalist 5 and says, ‘I give a tuning call. Journalist 5, 6, 7, . . .etc.’. That fixed the codebook change. The transmissions were D/F’d and you could see if his unit had moved. Occasionally you were helped by a transmission like this at the change of call signs, ‘Bicycle 3 this is Dog 7 – no f**k it – Gooseberry 8’.
Despite the general boredom of the work, those last few months of my service were quite eventful. You must understand that it was a very tense time. More than once I have rolled out of the Block, bleary eyed, at 8 am after an 8 hour shift, mouth like the bottom of a birdcage after so many fags, having listened to some anonymous Russian say ‘Take off’ to about 20 aircraft, giving their call sign number only, without response, and looked up to see these Migs high above. They were actually swallows, but that’s how it got to you.
Stalin’s death was announced on 5 March and we had a virtual holiday because everything stopped and all the Soviet stations were relaying the funeral march. I think this went on for a couple of days. Nobody knew what was going to happen next.
The so-called ‘secrecy’ of what we were doing didn’t last 5 minutes. Some of Bodmin‘s students had a theatrical interest and they put on some Russian performances in the local parish church. There was a similar school at Coulsdon in Surrey and the conductors on the buses used to shout out ‘Moscow Corner. All Change!’ at the gates of the camp. It was positioned next to the Brigade of Guards depot and it didn’t take long for the Guards Sergeants to start yelling at their victims that they looked like a bunch of effing Russian linguists.
Hambuhren was ‘guarded’ by German civilians, the ‘Wache’. They were not allowed into the Ops. Block. That didn’t stop one of them one day, bursting into the room on my watch, eyeballs rolling, shouting that he had just seen an open-back car drive past the Block with some Russian officers in the back inspecting our aerials with binoculars. It transpired that the military attaches were allowed to move about within the opposing zones but were not supposed to take photographs. The British did the same but were even worse. They had a base in Potsdam, East Berlin, and they used to give their followers the slip and roam about in the woods near Russian airfields, taking notes and photos, until they were found and chased back to their base.
So much for it being hush-hush. In fact the training had been infiltrated and we were told that the names of every Russian linguist was on file somewhere in Moscow. That this was true was confirmed years later when one of the translators had reason to go to a trade exhibition at the British Embassy in Moscow. He was approached by an NKVD officer who said, ‘I have a photo of you’ and produced this picture of him crossing the road at Hambuhren. He was staggered. They not only knew his name but also what he looked like! Apparently we were regarded as useful commodities and the unit at Gatow, Berlin, should the balloon go up had second priority for evacuation after the diplomatic staff,. Academic really.
The secrecy farce was maintained to the end. My discharge papers say that I can ‘translate the language that I had been taught’!
I had married in the spring, 1952, and was able to live off camp at each of my stations. In Germany, we lived in a hotel in Celle for a short time. In the middle of June we woke up to see a number of German flags flying at half-mast. It was the time of the Berlin Uprising and the tension became worse. However, demob was only a couple of weeks away and we hoped that a greater distance from the Soviets would ease the stress somewhat and it did.
I have jumped forward a bit and I am now going back to some events that occurred in March, events that few people of my age remember. On March 12 I went on watch and there was a fuss going on. It was the day that an unarmed Avro Lincoln had been shot down by a Russian fighter, with the loss of 7 lives. It had happened during the previous watch and the transmissions of the event had been intercepted. The shooting down led to a lot of diplomatic activity, questions in the House, Churchill making a speech about it and a serious upping of the general nervousness. I may be wrong but I do not believe that a full account of this and other events have been published and there was speculation that this was a one-off accident or the actions of a trigger-happy pilot.
We discussed this with a couple of officers and it seem that the most likely explanation is this. The British had, for some time, been sending out Mosquitoes over East Germany on high-level reconnaissance sorties. They had been able to nip in and out before the Migs could get up to them. Further south, the Americans had been sending out F-84 Thunderjets on low level sorties for the same purpose, flying under the Soviet radar. We think that the Soviets were thoroughly fed up with this situation and decided to do something about it. They started off by buzzing one or two of the civilian aircraft that were flying in the Berlin air corridors. The most well known one was a Viking that was subjected to mock beam attacks. We recorded the R/T traffic. Others buzzings occurred which were not publicised at the time. In retrospect we thought that the Russians were trying to warn us. Presumably when the reconnaissance flights continued they decided to take drastic action and they set up standing patrols opposite the American zone. When the next F-84 crossed the border, which was around March 5, they jumped it and shot it down, the pilot ejecting safely. Again we had recorded the R/T traffic. This did not stop the reconnaissance flights because on March 12, two Lincolns had been detailed to fly to Berlin and back. They were flying along the very edge of the corridor, possibly with surveillance equipment on board. The first one was seriously buzzed but left the corridor OK. The second Lincoln was chosen as the victim.
To suggest that these events were not fully planned by the Soviets doesn’t hold water. I was on watch once when a Russian fighter intercepted an aircraft in the corridor. Immediately the ground operator was replaced by someone who obviously had much more authority and he asked the pilot a series of questions – did he recognise the type, how many engines, prop or jet, what was it doing, etc.? Finally he told the pilot to take no action but stay in visual contact.
Allied military aircraft were then routinely armed with instructions to shoot back. Gradually, the tension eased off a bit, presumably because the surveillance flights were curtailed. And anyway, the U-2s would be available in a couple of years.
One last comment on these matters. On watch with us would be a monitor who, whenever something out of the ordinary happened, would double up and listen in with the translator. On the day of the Lincoln incident, the monitor was a sergeant who spoke fluent Russian and also had a knowledge of Czech. The pilot of the intercepting fighter spoke Czech. The pilot of the fighter that downed the F-84 spoke Czech and they both had the same call sign. It could have been the same man. That had to be political.
Back to civvies and aeroplanes next.
Ralph
Before we left Wythall, we again broached the subject of promotion. ‘Ahem. Slight snag there. Afraid you were misled. But we can now give you all two stripes, one for each arm. You must sew them on upside down!’ So we all went off to Germany with the lowest rank, Junior Technician, proudly displayed. In fact, we were so close to demob that we didn’t really care. Actually, that’s all they could have done. There would be no point in creating a bunch of Senior Technicians for 5 months service only.
After transit by troopship, we were posted to Uetersen, an ex-Luftwaffe night fighter grass airfield near Hamburg. It had been established pre-war and we were accommodated in its barrack block. We were amazed to a man by the sheer luxury of the place. Solidly built in brick, centrally heated, double-glazing, parquet floor, stone stairs and two to a room with washbasin. There was even a blanco room in the basement complete with water trough and drying boards (not that we used them!). Absolutely incredible! Temperatures were well below zero outside but we just didn’t notice the cold because most of our movements were short trips between buildings. These were not quarters for officers’ but for ORs. And the food! Five course meals cooked and served by German civilians working on camp. I have, since then, stayed in much worse hotels than those quarters. Ah! Memories of Bodmin. For the rest of our time in Germany, we had no complaints whatsoever about our living conditions. It might just have been something to do with the exchange rate: 8-9 Deutschmarks to the £1 !!
We were held at Uetersen until early February 1953 and until our final ‘home’ at Hambuhren had been fitted out. Hambuhren is a village, about 4 miles from Celle and near to Hanover, the capital of Lower Saxony. Celle is one of those small classic German towns that have a lot of history associated with them. It has a schloss which is more like a stately home than a castle, with its own small theatre, beautifully laid out in white, red and gold. The first time I went into the small museum in Celle, I was astounded to see a large British Royal Standard displayed in pride of place. It turns out that Celle was the residence of the Duke of Hanover who was invited by the British to be their king, George I in 1714.
Hambuhren had been laid out specifically for air traffic interception and we were now within the Signals Intelligence (Sigint) organisation, which was part of GCHQ. The Operations Block was a long room with a line of HF receivers complete with translators on one side matched by another line of receivers on the other side and W/T operators manned these. The room permanently reeked of cigarette smoke and we all huddled over our note pads scribbling Russian as fast as we could, noting down the air traffic - ground-to-air and ground-to-ground transmissions. There was a control unit at the end where the watch officer could monitor your frequency, just in case you were listening to the American Forces Network big bands. As if we would? The majority of the traffic, as you might expect was routine and boring and that was my place of work for the next five months.
We were providing small snippets of information and were one source in a network of sources that was used to build up a picture of Soviet organisations and their order of battle. Typically, call signs would be changed on a monthly basis and we were building up a copy of their codebooks, sometimes anticipating a few of the changes. You were helped by sloppy Russian operators who did not stick to the rules in the same way that similar poor German procedures had helped Bletchley Park break the Enigma codes in WW2.
Example:
In normal tuning the caller gives his call sign and a count 1 to 10 then 10 to 1. Bad procedure by Wolf 7, ‘I give a tuning call. Wolf 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 9, 8, . . .etc’. Next month he is Journalist 5 and says, ‘I give a tuning call. Journalist 5, 6, 7, . . .etc.’. That fixed the codebook change. The transmissions were D/F’d and you could see if his unit had moved. Occasionally you were helped by a transmission like this at the change of call signs, ‘Bicycle 3 this is Dog 7 – no f**k it – Gooseberry 8’.
Despite the general boredom of the work, those last few months of my service were quite eventful. You must understand that it was a very tense time. More than once I have rolled out of the Block, bleary eyed, at 8 am after an 8 hour shift, mouth like the bottom of a birdcage after so many fags, having listened to some anonymous Russian say ‘Take off’ to about 20 aircraft, giving their call sign number only, without response, and looked up to see these Migs high above. They were actually swallows, but that’s how it got to you.
Stalin’s death was announced on 5 March and we had a virtual holiday because everything stopped and all the Soviet stations were relaying the funeral march. I think this went on for a couple of days. Nobody knew what was going to happen next.
The so-called ‘secrecy’ of what we were doing didn’t last 5 minutes. Some of Bodmin‘s students had a theatrical interest and they put on some Russian performances in the local parish church. There was a similar school at Coulsdon in Surrey and the conductors on the buses used to shout out ‘Moscow Corner. All Change!’ at the gates of the camp. It was positioned next to the Brigade of Guards depot and it didn’t take long for the Guards Sergeants to start yelling at their victims that they looked like a bunch of effing Russian linguists.
Hambuhren was ‘guarded’ by German civilians, the ‘Wache’. They were not allowed into the Ops. Block. That didn’t stop one of them one day, bursting into the room on my watch, eyeballs rolling, shouting that he had just seen an open-back car drive past the Block with some Russian officers in the back inspecting our aerials with binoculars. It transpired that the military attaches were allowed to move about within the opposing zones but were not supposed to take photographs. The British did the same but were even worse. They had a base in Potsdam, East Berlin, and they used to give their followers the slip and roam about in the woods near Russian airfields, taking notes and photos, until they were found and chased back to their base.
So much for it being hush-hush. In fact the training had been infiltrated and we were told that the names of every Russian linguist was on file somewhere in Moscow. That this was true was confirmed years later when one of the translators had reason to go to a trade exhibition at the British Embassy in Moscow. He was approached by an NKVD officer who said, ‘I have a photo of you’ and produced this picture of him crossing the road at Hambuhren. He was staggered. They not only knew his name but also what he looked like! Apparently we were regarded as useful commodities and the unit at Gatow, Berlin, should the balloon go up had second priority for evacuation after the diplomatic staff,. Academic really.
The secrecy farce was maintained to the end. My discharge papers say that I can ‘translate the language that I had been taught’!
I had married in the spring, 1952, and was able to live off camp at each of my stations. In Germany, we lived in a hotel in Celle for a short time. In the middle of June we woke up to see a number of German flags flying at half-mast. It was the time of the Berlin Uprising and the tension became worse. However, demob was only a couple of weeks away and we hoped that a greater distance from the Soviets would ease the stress somewhat and it did.
I have jumped forward a bit and I am now going back to some events that occurred in March, events that few people of my age remember. On March 12 I went on watch and there was a fuss going on. It was the day that an unarmed Avro Lincoln had been shot down by a Russian fighter, with the loss of 7 lives. It had happened during the previous watch and the transmissions of the event had been intercepted. The shooting down led to a lot of diplomatic activity, questions in the House, Churchill making a speech about it and a serious upping of the general nervousness. I may be wrong but I do not believe that a full account of this and other events have been published and there was speculation that this was a one-off accident or the actions of a trigger-happy pilot.
We discussed this with a couple of officers and it seem that the most likely explanation is this. The British had, for some time, been sending out Mosquitoes over East Germany on high-level reconnaissance sorties. They had been able to nip in and out before the Migs could get up to them. Further south, the Americans had been sending out F-84 Thunderjets on low level sorties for the same purpose, flying under the Soviet radar. We think that the Soviets were thoroughly fed up with this situation and decided to do something about it. They started off by buzzing one or two of the civilian aircraft that were flying in the Berlin air corridors. The most well known one was a Viking that was subjected to mock beam attacks. We recorded the R/T traffic. Others buzzings occurred which were not publicised at the time. In retrospect we thought that the Russians were trying to warn us. Presumably when the reconnaissance flights continued they decided to take drastic action and they set up standing patrols opposite the American zone. When the next F-84 crossed the border, which was around March 5, they jumped it and shot it down, the pilot ejecting safely. Again we had recorded the R/T traffic. This did not stop the reconnaissance flights because on March 12, two Lincolns had been detailed to fly to Berlin and back. They were flying along the very edge of the corridor, possibly with surveillance equipment on board. The first one was seriously buzzed but left the corridor OK. The second Lincoln was chosen as the victim.
To suggest that these events were not fully planned by the Soviets doesn’t hold water. I was on watch once when a Russian fighter intercepted an aircraft in the corridor. Immediately the ground operator was replaced by someone who obviously had much more authority and he asked the pilot a series of questions – did he recognise the type, how many engines, prop or jet, what was it doing, etc.? Finally he told the pilot to take no action but stay in visual contact.
Allied military aircraft were then routinely armed with instructions to shoot back. Gradually, the tension eased off a bit, presumably because the surveillance flights were curtailed. And anyway, the U-2s would be available in a couple of years.
One last comment on these matters. On watch with us would be a monitor who, whenever something out of the ordinary happened, would double up and listen in with the translator. On the day of the Lincoln incident, the monitor was a sergeant who spoke fluent Russian and also had a knowledge of Czech. The pilot of the intercepting fighter spoke Czech. The pilot of the fighter that downed the F-84 spoke Czech and they both had the same call sign. It could have been the same man. That had to be political.
Back to civvies and aeroplanes next.
Ralph
I love this Ralph,
In a strange way it reminds me of when I were a lad... I really wished we would move to England, they wanted Dad to take a job at Aldermaston, but everything that was going on in NI at the time was so removed from the cold war and fast jets, it seemed like another world and I was facinated by it... I still am! Please keep them coming.
In a strange way it reminds me of when I were a lad... I really wished we would move to England, they wanted Dad to take a job at Aldermaston, but everything that was going on in NI at the time was so removed from the cold war and fast jets, it seemed like another world and I was facinated by it... I still am! Please keep them coming.
Ben.
Back to Hawkers
I returned to Hawker Aircraft in July 1953 and decided that I would prefer to go into to the Stress Office rather than the Design Office. There was no vacancy in the Projects Office, which created new designs and centred mainly on aerodynamics, though I continued to study aerodynamic theory along with aero-structure theory.
The Farnborough Airshow was held every year in those days. We were allowed the day off and provided with free tickets for Technician’s Day, which was on Monday of the display week. Occasionally, the number of tickets ran out and so some of us had to get into the boots of cars to pass through the gates. It was a time when numerous new and interesting shapes of aircraft were appearing and when we could get close to competitors’ aircraft. Great excitement.
But I must go back to Farnborough 1952. No one needs reminding that that was the year of the John Derry crash. I had been on leave from Bodmin at that time and was able to go there with my wife and a friend. There are number of film clips that show the sequence of events and we were facing the DH 110 as it flew towards us. The nose section landed about 30 yards to our left against the fence. The two engines, slowly rotating with cables hanging off them, arced over the crowd behind us. There was a delay and then the display started again with Neville Duke producing a supersonic bang in the Hunter. It then carried on to the end.
After the show, the crowd started to disperse and we decided to walk up the hill behind us to see if there were any signs of the engines. All we could see were some deep gouges in the grass and nothing else. We then made our way to the exit and as we got near the gate we saw a newspaper seller holding up The Evening News with the headline ‘6 Killed at Airshow’. Initially we thought that this must somewhere else in the country. We were shocked when we read that in fact the Airshow was Farnborough. When we got to the railway station, the toll had risen higher and by the time we got home, it had reached the mid-twenties. We had no idea that there had been such a tragedy. Ambulances did not have sirens in those days. We had assumed that the engines had landed behind the crowd because there had been no indication otherwise and the show had carried on as though all was normal apart from the crash. Of course, these days, the show would have been immediately cancelled.
It is those Farnboroughs in the Fifties that I remember so vividly with all the wonderful new types emerging. And of course it was organised by the Society of British Aircraft Constructors and so there were none of those foreign Johnnies around. There was one Farnborough, can’t remember the year, when I think that I heard the loudest sustained noise ever. It was a year when they decided to ginger the show up a bit. So they simulated an attack on the airfield using flights of Hunters and Scimitars making mock strikes whilst setting off numerous thunderflashes in the wood. To cap it all they put 4 Harriers in hover just a short distance from the crowd line. Kids and young people were crying in fear and it made your eardrums vibrate. I don’t think they repeated that exercise. Does anyone else remember it?
Early September 1953. Attempt on the World’s Speed Record. I was just settling back into Hawkers in the Stress Office as a junior stressman. They thought that they would have a crack at the record because the Hunter had been attaining speeds in level flight faster than the then current record, set by an F86D in the US. Neville Duke was using the prototype WB 188 and discovering that he had fuel flow problems leading to engine surge. This was sorted and on or about 1 September whilst he was making his first attempt, he switched in the reheat and there was a loud bang and he nearly ended up in the Channel. After recovery he saw part of the port undercarriage leg sticking up through the wing. The aerodynamic loads had sucked out the leg and smashed it back through the wing. Could have been a faulty up-lock. He landed on one main and the nose wheel back at Dunsfold and managed to limit further serious airframe damage except a bit to the port wing tip. Hawkers decided that they would still attempt to regain the speed record, so they set about repairing the aircraft as quickly as possible.
The main spar of the Hunter was damaged and an insert, made from high tensile steel in the form of an angle, was bolted to the spar. I was given the job of doing a ‘check stress’ of that area, that is check over the figures of the stress analysis previously done by a senior stressman. Everyone worked very hard and one week later, WB188 was ready to fly. It took the record on 7 September with a speed of 727.6 miles per hour and it was nice to be associated with this success. Mind you, it only lasted 3 weeks because the Swift then broke the record for Supermarine. There was rivalry between Hawkers and Supermarine and there was a lot of satisfaction when the Hunter was selected for service at the expense of the Swift.
The Hunter had its own share of troubles. Although not directly involved, I remember there was a lot going on in the office to do with its short range necessitating additional external fuel tanks. Another problem was the air brake and I seem to remember this being a protracted affair. After split flaps and brakes on the sides of the rear fuselage, both of which gave pitch problems, they finally settled on the ‘barn door’ under the fuselage. Further trouble was the damage being sustained by the underside of the rear fuselage caused by the spent 30mm Aden cannon shells. After lots of ‘try-outs’ to eliminate the problem, they finally gave up and decided to collect them in those blisters.
These modifications were taking place whilst the production was underway. When you build aeroplanes, you have to carry on production with the designs that were first issued and treat the mods as a separate process, otherwise you would never get anything out of the door. These changes could be caused by alterations to the specification, minor design changes, access requirements, electrical changes, etc. Generally speaking, only when the aircraft is ‘finished’ is it then subject to the mod list. When the Hunter first went into service, I seem to remember that there were over 1,000 mods, large and small, to be done on the early aircraft.
Sydney Camm, with no disrespect to him whatsoever was aka Kidney Sam and was still the Chief Designer whilst I was in the Stress Office although I saw him on very few occasions. His main interests lay in the Experimental Design and the Projects Offices and the golf course.
I know this has been said many times before but it does no harm to repeat it, for it is men like Camm to whom this country should be eternally grateful. Not only for the superb design of the Hurricane but also for its timing. It was in March 1936 that he and his fellow board members decided to put down the tooling for producing 1000 Hurricanes (an enormous figure at that time) at the Company’s expense and three and a half years before the start of WW2. Although there was talk of a contract, there was no guarantee that this would result in a firm order. Eventually this came through three months later and it is those three months that enabled the RAF to put up an extra 400 Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain. But for that forethought, we would probably now be conducting this site in German. Having run a small private company and being familiar with unauthorised and broken promises of orders I am astonished.
When I first went into the Design Office, I was warned to keep well away from Camm. He was a hands-on designer and he used to tour the offices. If he was near he could pick on you and if he spotted something he did not like he could be very rude and offensive. He would shrivel you. There are numerous anecdotes about his sometimes irrational behaviour. This may be apocryphal but it was said that he was looking a draughtsman’s design, said it was rubbish, ripped the drawing from the poor man’s board, threw it in the bin and walked out of the office, giggling. He would reject a design out of hand without giving a reason and then walk off. He was an arrogant, self-opinionated, dogmatic hard driver and there was never any doubt about who was the Boss. But the man was a genius
He was largely self-taught in the disciplines of mathematics, elementary aerodynamics and aero structures. This knowledge was adequate when he was designing his beloved ‘art and ‘urricane and indeed the Typhoon, and just about adequate for the Tempest and Sea Fury, but it was about here that he began to fall behind technically. His genius lay in his ability to treat aircraft design as an art and in this he excelled as the beautiful lines of his aircraft demonstrate. He was able to look ahead but not take risks with untried manufacturing techniques, he had more than enough common sense, a brilliant eye for detail design and a fanatical attitude to weight saving. He had a large fund of aphorisms, my favourite being ‘simplicate and add more lightness’.
I became aware that around the offices, whilst he was still in charge, he was regarded as a ‘man of the 30s and 40s’. He was still able to sort out good design from bad but the new technologies were not for him. Someone from the Projects Office said that he didn’t appreciate that at high speeds air was compressible and he flatly refused to believe that kinetic heating existed.
At one time I had to do some work on the Sea Hawk and I needed to get some information about the P1081, the development of the P1040 (Sea Hawk prototype) with swept wings and tailplane. In the file was the accident report on the fatal crash of the P1081 with ‘Wimpy’ Wade, chief test pilot, at the controls. He was doing some testing and the aircraft became uncontrollable, at which point he decided to eject. The P1081 was fitted with the Malcolm ejector seat that was armed with two charges. Unfortunately, only one of them fired and the resulting low trajectory caused the pilot’s head to strike the tailplane and he was killed instantly. He remained in the seat until it struck the ground. I believe that the aircraft then recovered and entered a shallow descending turn and came down almost horizontally and not far from the pilot.
One day all in the Stress Office were asked to go over to the Test House where a Hunter wing was going to be tested to its ultimate design load. We all hoped that it would reach this load but we also wanted to see the wing busted. Various points along the wing were attached to harnesses which were loaded by hydraulic jacks and arranged to simulate the aerodynamic load distributions. It was covered in strain gauges with their wires all over the place. The loads were increased and it reached its proof load OK. We were then asked to keep a close eye on it because there was the odd creaking sound coming from it and then as it got near to the final load, there were some loud cracks as some rivets started to fail. It finally reached its goal with the wing being curved upward in a crazy way. To our great disappointment they stopped the test there so that they could analyse the data and to carry out a detailed survey of any small failures. We felt a bit cheated when a few days later we heard that they had gone to destruction. They didn’t need any observers for that as it was largely academic. It had failed at about 108% of the design load. That was not necessarily a good thing because it was carrying 8% extra weight at its weakest point. Bit for the wife and kids I suppose.
Then came the 1957 Defence White Paper and it seemed that fighters were finished. It had a dreadful effect on the military side of the British aircraft industry and many PV jobs were stopped in their tracks. I was working on the Air Superiority Strike Fighter P1121 and it was only a few months away from its first flight. The project was immediately dropped thereby leaving this market clear for the French and Americans. The TSR2 was not the only casualty. Why do our biggest imbeciles end up in government? His name was Duncan Sandys, newly appointed Minister of Defence who decided that fighters were no longer required for defence because missiles would now do the task.
This gave me cold feet and I decided to leave Hawkers as I could see no future there. I thought that jet engines would always be needed, if only for civilian use so went to the nearest turbo engine manufacturer, Napiers, in Acton, West London.
Ralph
I returned to Hawker Aircraft in July 1953 and decided that I would prefer to go into to the Stress Office rather than the Design Office. There was no vacancy in the Projects Office, which created new designs and centred mainly on aerodynamics, though I continued to study aerodynamic theory along with aero-structure theory.
The Farnborough Airshow was held every year in those days. We were allowed the day off and provided with free tickets for Technician’s Day, which was on Monday of the display week. Occasionally, the number of tickets ran out and so some of us had to get into the boots of cars to pass through the gates. It was a time when numerous new and interesting shapes of aircraft were appearing and when we could get close to competitors’ aircraft. Great excitement.
But I must go back to Farnborough 1952. No one needs reminding that that was the year of the John Derry crash. I had been on leave from Bodmin at that time and was able to go there with my wife and a friend. There are number of film clips that show the sequence of events and we were facing the DH 110 as it flew towards us. The nose section landed about 30 yards to our left against the fence. The two engines, slowly rotating with cables hanging off them, arced over the crowd behind us. There was a delay and then the display started again with Neville Duke producing a supersonic bang in the Hunter. It then carried on to the end.
After the show, the crowd started to disperse and we decided to walk up the hill behind us to see if there were any signs of the engines. All we could see were some deep gouges in the grass and nothing else. We then made our way to the exit and as we got near the gate we saw a newspaper seller holding up The Evening News with the headline ‘6 Killed at Airshow’. Initially we thought that this must somewhere else in the country. We were shocked when we read that in fact the Airshow was Farnborough. When we got to the railway station, the toll had risen higher and by the time we got home, it had reached the mid-twenties. We had no idea that there had been such a tragedy. Ambulances did not have sirens in those days. We had assumed that the engines had landed behind the crowd because there had been no indication otherwise and the show had carried on as though all was normal apart from the crash. Of course, these days, the show would have been immediately cancelled.
It is those Farnboroughs in the Fifties that I remember so vividly with all the wonderful new types emerging. And of course it was organised by the Society of British Aircraft Constructors and so there were none of those foreign Johnnies around. There was one Farnborough, can’t remember the year, when I think that I heard the loudest sustained noise ever. It was a year when they decided to ginger the show up a bit. So they simulated an attack on the airfield using flights of Hunters and Scimitars making mock strikes whilst setting off numerous thunderflashes in the wood. To cap it all they put 4 Harriers in hover just a short distance from the crowd line. Kids and young people were crying in fear and it made your eardrums vibrate. I don’t think they repeated that exercise. Does anyone else remember it?
Early September 1953. Attempt on the World’s Speed Record. I was just settling back into Hawkers in the Stress Office as a junior stressman. They thought that they would have a crack at the record because the Hunter had been attaining speeds in level flight faster than the then current record, set by an F86D in the US. Neville Duke was using the prototype WB 188 and discovering that he had fuel flow problems leading to engine surge. This was sorted and on or about 1 September whilst he was making his first attempt, he switched in the reheat and there was a loud bang and he nearly ended up in the Channel. After recovery he saw part of the port undercarriage leg sticking up through the wing. The aerodynamic loads had sucked out the leg and smashed it back through the wing. Could have been a faulty up-lock. He landed on one main and the nose wheel back at Dunsfold and managed to limit further serious airframe damage except a bit to the port wing tip. Hawkers decided that they would still attempt to regain the speed record, so they set about repairing the aircraft as quickly as possible.
The main spar of the Hunter was damaged and an insert, made from high tensile steel in the form of an angle, was bolted to the spar. I was given the job of doing a ‘check stress’ of that area, that is check over the figures of the stress analysis previously done by a senior stressman. Everyone worked very hard and one week later, WB188 was ready to fly. It took the record on 7 September with a speed of 727.6 miles per hour and it was nice to be associated with this success. Mind you, it only lasted 3 weeks because the Swift then broke the record for Supermarine. There was rivalry between Hawkers and Supermarine and there was a lot of satisfaction when the Hunter was selected for service at the expense of the Swift.
The Hunter had its own share of troubles. Although not directly involved, I remember there was a lot going on in the office to do with its short range necessitating additional external fuel tanks. Another problem was the air brake and I seem to remember this being a protracted affair. After split flaps and brakes on the sides of the rear fuselage, both of which gave pitch problems, they finally settled on the ‘barn door’ under the fuselage. Further trouble was the damage being sustained by the underside of the rear fuselage caused by the spent 30mm Aden cannon shells. After lots of ‘try-outs’ to eliminate the problem, they finally gave up and decided to collect them in those blisters.
These modifications were taking place whilst the production was underway. When you build aeroplanes, you have to carry on production with the designs that were first issued and treat the mods as a separate process, otherwise you would never get anything out of the door. These changes could be caused by alterations to the specification, minor design changes, access requirements, electrical changes, etc. Generally speaking, only when the aircraft is ‘finished’ is it then subject to the mod list. When the Hunter first went into service, I seem to remember that there were over 1,000 mods, large and small, to be done on the early aircraft.
Sydney Camm, with no disrespect to him whatsoever was aka Kidney Sam and was still the Chief Designer whilst I was in the Stress Office although I saw him on very few occasions. His main interests lay in the Experimental Design and the Projects Offices and the golf course.
I know this has been said many times before but it does no harm to repeat it, for it is men like Camm to whom this country should be eternally grateful. Not only for the superb design of the Hurricane but also for its timing. It was in March 1936 that he and his fellow board members decided to put down the tooling for producing 1000 Hurricanes (an enormous figure at that time) at the Company’s expense and three and a half years before the start of WW2. Although there was talk of a contract, there was no guarantee that this would result in a firm order. Eventually this came through three months later and it is those three months that enabled the RAF to put up an extra 400 Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain. But for that forethought, we would probably now be conducting this site in German. Having run a small private company and being familiar with unauthorised and broken promises of orders I am astonished.
When I first went into the Design Office, I was warned to keep well away from Camm. He was a hands-on designer and he used to tour the offices. If he was near he could pick on you and if he spotted something he did not like he could be very rude and offensive. He would shrivel you. There are numerous anecdotes about his sometimes irrational behaviour. This may be apocryphal but it was said that he was looking a draughtsman’s design, said it was rubbish, ripped the drawing from the poor man’s board, threw it in the bin and walked out of the office, giggling. He would reject a design out of hand without giving a reason and then walk off. He was an arrogant, self-opinionated, dogmatic hard driver and there was never any doubt about who was the Boss. But the man was a genius
He was largely self-taught in the disciplines of mathematics, elementary aerodynamics and aero structures. This knowledge was adequate when he was designing his beloved ‘art and ‘urricane and indeed the Typhoon, and just about adequate for the Tempest and Sea Fury, but it was about here that he began to fall behind technically. His genius lay in his ability to treat aircraft design as an art and in this he excelled as the beautiful lines of his aircraft demonstrate. He was able to look ahead but not take risks with untried manufacturing techniques, he had more than enough common sense, a brilliant eye for detail design and a fanatical attitude to weight saving. He had a large fund of aphorisms, my favourite being ‘simplicate and add more lightness’.
I became aware that around the offices, whilst he was still in charge, he was regarded as a ‘man of the 30s and 40s’. He was still able to sort out good design from bad but the new technologies were not for him. Someone from the Projects Office said that he didn’t appreciate that at high speeds air was compressible and he flatly refused to believe that kinetic heating existed.
At one time I had to do some work on the Sea Hawk and I needed to get some information about the P1081, the development of the P1040 (Sea Hawk prototype) with swept wings and tailplane. In the file was the accident report on the fatal crash of the P1081 with ‘Wimpy’ Wade, chief test pilot, at the controls. He was doing some testing and the aircraft became uncontrollable, at which point he decided to eject. The P1081 was fitted with the Malcolm ejector seat that was armed with two charges. Unfortunately, only one of them fired and the resulting low trajectory caused the pilot’s head to strike the tailplane and he was killed instantly. He remained in the seat until it struck the ground. I believe that the aircraft then recovered and entered a shallow descending turn and came down almost horizontally and not far from the pilot.
One day all in the Stress Office were asked to go over to the Test House where a Hunter wing was going to be tested to its ultimate design load. We all hoped that it would reach this load but we also wanted to see the wing busted. Various points along the wing were attached to harnesses which were loaded by hydraulic jacks and arranged to simulate the aerodynamic load distributions. It was covered in strain gauges with their wires all over the place. The loads were increased and it reached its proof load OK. We were then asked to keep a close eye on it because there was the odd creaking sound coming from it and then as it got near to the final load, there were some loud cracks as some rivets started to fail. It finally reached its goal with the wing being curved upward in a crazy way. To our great disappointment they stopped the test there so that they could analyse the data and to carry out a detailed survey of any small failures. We felt a bit cheated when a few days later we heard that they had gone to destruction. They didn’t need any observers for that as it was largely academic. It had failed at about 108% of the design load. That was not necessarily a good thing because it was carrying 8% extra weight at its weakest point. Bit for the wife and kids I suppose.
Then came the 1957 Defence White Paper and it seemed that fighters were finished. It had a dreadful effect on the military side of the British aircraft industry and many PV jobs were stopped in their tracks. I was working on the Air Superiority Strike Fighter P1121 and it was only a few months away from its first flight. The project was immediately dropped thereby leaving this market clear for the French and Americans. The TSR2 was not the only casualty. Why do our biggest imbeciles end up in government? His name was Duncan Sandys, newly appointed Minister of Defence who decided that fighters were no longer required for defence because missiles would now do the task.
This gave me cold feet and I decided to leave Hawkers as I could see no future there. I thought that jet engines would always be needed, if only for civilian use so went to the nearest turbo engine manufacturer, Napiers, in Acton, West London.
Ralph
Continued Stress
Started at Napiers and someone was asked to show me round the works. His first words to me were they had not sold an aircraft engine in the last ten years and he didn’t think that they would sell one in the next ten and by Golly, he was nearly right. Their main income at that time came from the Deltic diesel engines that were being used in trains. I was there for only eight months and it was clear that they were losing it, despite the success of the Sabre engine in the past. They were then designing the Eland, the Rotodyne Eland and the Gazelle engines. The first two sold in minute numbers but the Gazelle was more successful in some Westland helicopters. I was in the so-called Calculations Office and the way it was being run was laughable. An artificial division had been created between graduates and non-graduates, the former frequently being called to what I suppose would be called brain-storming sessions today, whilst we lesser mortals just got on with the work. These sessions were supposed to deal with problems but just how having a degree is supposed to make you a troubleshooter is beyond me. The head of the office became a professor of something somewhere and the last time I saw him was on the box, judging who had made the best model egg racing car or something like that.
A couple of interesting things that I remember. There was a purge on saving weight on the Eland so they decided to make the plenum chamber from magnesium alloy instead of aluminium alloy. After an engine test run, the casting had distorted by three eighths of an inch, so they dropped that idea.
The other one was a rotor of some sort from the Gazelle engine that had been statically and dynamically balanced and then tested in an engine. It was shaking all over the place so they balanced it again. Same thing happened. They did it once more and surprise, surprise, it was no better. So they decided to get to the bottom of it. Someone realised that an internal circlip in the assembly was rotating in its groove and since its CG was offset from the centreline of the assembly, this was causing the problem. It was, from memory, being tested at 40,000 rpm. I had the job of designing a new circlip with enlarged ears to put the CG on centre and the circlip manufacturers introduced this design as a new line.
I then decided to work for a contract design company because it offered a variety of manufacturers and designs. Most of the work came from Fairey Aviation and included an analysis of the rear door of the Rotodyne, and a detailed analysis of the aerodynamic loads on the radome under the Gannet 3. I also did an independent stress analysis on the fuselage of the Westland Westminster helicopter workhorse. It was fairly simple because it consisted mainly of a space frame and looked like a bit of a girder bridge. As Gary Russell and Ian Hind mentioned earlier, there were two prototypes built before the project was scrapped.
The things I remember about the stressing were the crash cases. These were to allow for 40g vertically and 20g fore and aft because the engines were mounted on top of the fuselage, over the cabin and passenger section. I even did a bit of stressing on the Olympia 418 high performance sailplane with a wooden structure.
Left employment to join an old acquaintance as a junior director in an engineering company. I was like blotting paper and soaked up all the essentials of how to run a small company. Had to leave. He was single; I had a wife and two kids and just couldn’t keep up on starvation pay.
I then helped to form a limited company offering engineering design with four colleagues. We had to change the name of the business on the back of which it was formed namely Technical Data Services because many people thought that we were Technical Potato Services. An interesting aspect of this business was that we decided to look for work by telephoning companies in the London and the Home Counties. We contacted 3,000 of them. Of those, about 1,000 said that might have a use for our services. From that 1,000 we actually received work from five. Of the five, one of them was the Radio Chemical Centre in Amersham, Bucks (now Amersham International) and for many years we received orders from them for lab equipment in excess of £100,000 per year, and that was in the 60s to 80s. Lucky?
The new company then started manufacturing its designs instead of contracting them out. We also received orders for work on the BAC 1-11 but gave that up because it was too competitive with a lot of aggravation. We did some work for Rediffusion in Woking and one day when delivering some parts I noticed a contraption which consisted of a roller carpet, operating vertically. On the canvas were attached numerous Monopoly type houses with areas painted to represent, fields and roads. I was told that this was part of the Concorde Simulator. Apparently there was a fine probe that passed over this moving map display and its information was sent back to the simulator screens. G-loads were simulated by jacks attached to the seat harnesses. This may be a spoof, but they told me that they invited the French Concorde test pilot, Andre Turcat, to try it out and he said it was very good except for one thing. He said that when taking off in Concorde from the Toulouse in the evening, he could see the low sun reflecting off the windows of the houses by the side of the runway. Rediffusion then decided to drill little holes in the ‘Monopoly’ houses and insert Perspex plugs.
How times have changed. Sometime in the early 80s and several years after I had started flying, including some at night, I sat in the jump seat of a BAC 1-11 (I think) full motion simulator at Rediffusion’s place in Crawley for a night circuit of Gatwick. It was so convincing that when it was over and I stepped out of the cockpit into a brightly lit factory workshop, my mind did a mental somersault in disbelief. It was quite weird.
It was at this point that my direct association with aviation lapsed for some time. Well not entirely. In 1956 we had moved into a house that was about three miles to the south east of Heathrow. Whenever we had easterly winds, some of the departures passed over our house. Those were the days of the Viscount, Vanguard, Britannia, Stratocruiser, Constellation, Dakota, DC 6, etc. The rates of climb of some of those prop liners, especially when fully loaded, had them sailing over at about 1500 ft, so I was never very far from aeroplanes.
Another source of aviation came when Peter joined us as a director and we began to build animation stands (rostrums) and optical printers to our own designs for the film industry. There were a few interesting things that occurred with those products but they are not aviation orientated. Let me know if you want to hear them.
Peter had been a flight engineer on Lancasters during the latter part of WW2, had completed a full tour of 30 ops and had started to get the ‘twitch’. He had been scheduled to go out to the Pacific but Hiroshima put a stop to all that, much to his relief. I will set out a couple of the yarns that he told me, like the night they were returning from a raid and the pilot wanted to go aft for a rest. Peter and the navigator sat up front flying the aircraft, with the intercom. on. After a little while Peter said, ‘Can you see that bridge down there? Do you think we could get this crate under it?’ ‘I’m sure we can!’, and they put the Lanc into a shallow dive. Within seconds, the pilot was up at the front with them. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ‘ Oh, just seeing if you were awake!’ He didn’t get his rest that night.
They were attacked by a nightfighter and they had no idea how badly they had been hit. The journey back was OK but when the had a look at the damage, there was a line of bullet holes, more or less the length of the fuselage, but where the mid-upper gunner sat, the line dipped down and then rose again to continue its previous line. And nobody had been hit.
One night they raided a target in Norway and the flak guns mounted on the tops of a fjord had been modified to allow them to be to depressed below the horizontal. They found themselves flying up the fjord, below the radar, with the flak guns firing onto the tops of the aircraft. Another time they flew over neutral Sweden. This must have been cleared diplomatically because at the border, the searchlights which had been waving about all over the sky, suddenly all pointed away from their route and left a sort of searchlight valley through which they flew.
Another night they had been badly shot up and had lost all hydraulic power. They decided to divert to Carnaby on the edge of the Yorkshire coast, which I have mentioned previously. Despite the very long length of the runway, the wheels up, flaps up landing run went right off the end of the runway. Fortunately no one was hurt.
He told me how one evening he became the most unpopular man on the squadron. Picture the scene, just as in the film The Dam Busters. It’s dusk and the crews are bunched together waiting for the call to get into the lorries that will take them to their aircraft. The atmosphere is quiet but tense with each crewman dealing with his thoughts in his own way. The worst part of the evening. Then along strolls Peter, whistling merrily and tosses a thunderflash to the side of them. Well, he was only 19.
Running a business in a competitive world is so demanding that it dictates your entire life and in 1975 I thought, for a bit of relief, that it was about time that I got back to my aeroplanes and so I decided to start flying.
Ralph
Started at Napiers and someone was asked to show me round the works. His first words to me were they had not sold an aircraft engine in the last ten years and he didn’t think that they would sell one in the next ten and by Golly, he was nearly right. Their main income at that time came from the Deltic diesel engines that were being used in trains. I was there for only eight months and it was clear that they were losing it, despite the success of the Sabre engine in the past. They were then designing the Eland, the Rotodyne Eland and the Gazelle engines. The first two sold in minute numbers but the Gazelle was more successful in some Westland helicopters. I was in the so-called Calculations Office and the way it was being run was laughable. An artificial division had been created between graduates and non-graduates, the former frequently being called to what I suppose would be called brain-storming sessions today, whilst we lesser mortals just got on with the work. These sessions were supposed to deal with problems but just how having a degree is supposed to make you a troubleshooter is beyond me. The head of the office became a professor of something somewhere and the last time I saw him was on the box, judging who had made the best model egg racing car or something like that.
A couple of interesting things that I remember. There was a purge on saving weight on the Eland so they decided to make the plenum chamber from magnesium alloy instead of aluminium alloy. After an engine test run, the casting had distorted by three eighths of an inch, so they dropped that idea.
The other one was a rotor of some sort from the Gazelle engine that had been statically and dynamically balanced and then tested in an engine. It was shaking all over the place so they balanced it again. Same thing happened. They did it once more and surprise, surprise, it was no better. So they decided to get to the bottom of it. Someone realised that an internal circlip in the assembly was rotating in its groove and since its CG was offset from the centreline of the assembly, this was causing the problem. It was, from memory, being tested at 40,000 rpm. I had the job of designing a new circlip with enlarged ears to put the CG on centre and the circlip manufacturers introduced this design as a new line.
I then decided to work for a contract design company because it offered a variety of manufacturers and designs. Most of the work came from Fairey Aviation and included an analysis of the rear door of the Rotodyne, and a detailed analysis of the aerodynamic loads on the radome under the Gannet 3. I also did an independent stress analysis on the fuselage of the Westland Westminster helicopter workhorse. It was fairly simple because it consisted mainly of a space frame and looked like a bit of a girder bridge. As Gary Russell and Ian Hind mentioned earlier, there were two prototypes built before the project was scrapped.
The things I remember about the stressing were the crash cases. These were to allow for 40g vertically and 20g fore and aft because the engines were mounted on top of the fuselage, over the cabin and passenger section. I even did a bit of stressing on the Olympia 418 high performance sailplane with a wooden structure.
Left employment to join an old acquaintance as a junior director in an engineering company. I was like blotting paper and soaked up all the essentials of how to run a small company. Had to leave. He was single; I had a wife and two kids and just couldn’t keep up on starvation pay.
I then helped to form a limited company offering engineering design with four colleagues. We had to change the name of the business on the back of which it was formed namely Technical Data Services because many people thought that we were Technical Potato Services. An interesting aspect of this business was that we decided to look for work by telephoning companies in the London and the Home Counties. We contacted 3,000 of them. Of those, about 1,000 said that might have a use for our services. From that 1,000 we actually received work from five. Of the five, one of them was the Radio Chemical Centre in Amersham, Bucks (now Amersham International) and for many years we received orders from them for lab equipment in excess of £100,000 per year, and that was in the 60s to 80s. Lucky?
The new company then started manufacturing its designs instead of contracting them out. We also received orders for work on the BAC 1-11 but gave that up because it was too competitive with a lot of aggravation. We did some work for Rediffusion in Woking and one day when delivering some parts I noticed a contraption which consisted of a roller carpet, operating vertically. On the canvas were attached numerous Monopoly type houses with areas painted to represent, fields and roads. I was told that this was part of the Concorde Simulator. Apparently there was a fine probe that passed over this moving map display and its information was sent back to the simulator screens. G-loads were simulated by jacks attached to the seat harnesses. This may be a spoof, but they told me that they invited the French Concorde test pilot, Andre Turcat, to try it out and he said it was very good except for one thing. He said that when taking off in Concorde from the Toulouse in the evening, he could see the low sun reflecting off the windows of the houses by the side of the runway. Rediffusion then decided to drill little holes in the ‘Monopoly’ houses and insert Perspex plugs.
How times have changed. Sometime in the early 80s and several years after I had started flying, including some at night, I sat in the jump seat of a BAC 1-11 (I think) full motion simulator at Rediffusion’s place in Crawley for a night circuit of Gatwick. It was so convincing that when it was over and I stepped out of the cockpit into a brightly lit factory workshop, my mind did a mental somersault in disbelief. It was quite weird.
It was at this point that my direct association with aviation lapsed for some time. Well not entirely. In 1956 we had moved into a house that was about three miles to the south east of Heathrow. Whenever we had easterly winds, some of the departures passed over our house. Those were the days of the Viscount, Vanguard, Britannia, Stratocruiser, Constellation, Dakota, DC 6, etc. The rates of climb of some of those prop liners, especially when fully loaded, had them sailing over at about 1500 ft, so I was never very far from aeroplanes.
Another source of aviation came when Peter joined us as a director and we began to build animation stands (rostrums) and optical printers to our own designs for the film industry. There were a few interesting things that occurred with those products but they are not aviation orientated. Let me know if you want to hear them.
Peter had been a flight engineer on Lancasters during the latter part of WW2, had completed a full tour of 30 ops and had started to get the ‘twitch’. He had been scheduled to go out to the Pacific but Hiroshima put a stop to all that, much to his relief. I will set out a couple of the yarns that he told me, like the night they were returning from a raid and the pilot wanted to go aft for a rest. Peter and the navigator sat up front flying the aircraft, with the intercom. on. After a little while Peter said, ‘Can you see that bridge down there? Do you think we could get this crate under it?’ ‘I’m sure we can!’, and they put the Lanc into a shallow dive. Within seconds, the pilot was up at the front with them. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ‘ Oh, just seeing if you were awake!’ He didn’t get his rest that night.
They were attacked by a nightfighter and they had no idea how badly they had been hit. The journey back was OK but when the had a look at the damage, there was a line of bullet holes, more or less the length of the fuselage, but where the mid-upper gunner sat, the line dipped down and then rose again to continue its previous line. And nobody had been hit.
One night they raided a target in Norway and the flak guns mounted on the tops of a fjord had been modified to allow them to be to depressed below the horizontal. They found themselves flying up the fjord, below the radar, with the flak guns firing onto the tops of the aircraft. Another time they flew over neutral Sweden. This must have been cleared diplomatically because at the border, the searchlights which had been waving about all over the sky, suddenly all pointed away from their route and left a sort of searchlight valley through which they flew.
Another night they had been badly shot up and had lost all hydraulic power. They decided to divert to Carnaby on the edge of the Yorkshire coast, which I have mentioned previously. Despite the very long length of the runway, the wheels up, flaps up landing run went right off the end of the runway. Fortunately no one was hurt.
He told me how one evening he became the most unpopular man on the squadron. Picture the scene, just as in the film The Dam Busters. It’s dusk and the crews are bunched together waiting for the call to get into the lorries that will take them to their aircraft. The atmosphere is quiet but tense with each crewman dealing with his thoughts in his own way. The worst part of the evening. Then along strolls Peter, whistling merrily and tosses a thunderflash to the side of them. Well, he was only 19.
Running a business in a competitive world is so demanding that it dictates your entire life and in 1975 I thought, for a bit of relief, that it was about time that I got back to my aeroplanes and so I decided to start flying.
Ralph
auster, I for one am most certainly reading and enjoying all of it, at 65 I can be reminded of how things were when UK produced aircraft and so many worlds firsts.
A boring old fart you are most certainly not, a long time back when we were hosted on the Shackleton Project forums there was another who wrote articles of his time in coastal command Sunderlands, Chrisopher Fry, his stories were equally interesting and welcome.
Please keep it comming.
Rich
A boring old fart you are most certainly not, a long time back when we were hosted on the Shackleton Project forums there was another who wrote articles of his time in coastal command Sunderlands, Chrisopher Fry, his stories were equally interesting and welcome.
Please keep it comming.
Rich