One for Peter.....

[jonesey2k]

They have WAAS GNS530's instead

[RAF_Quantum]

Peter,

When I worked for Air Anglia, one rainy day whilst on duty at Aberdeen I looked out of our ops office window and saw a BEA Trident touch down long and my colleagues and I all thought 'WTF that looks hairy'. We craned our necks to see it dissappearing into the distance and then lost sight as the terminal building obscured our view. Somewhere I have a photo of this Trident completely off the end of the runway with its undercarriage having ploughes some nice furrows. Fortunately no-one injured and no apparent long term damage to the Trident. It did cock-up all our flights in/out of ABZ for some time though.

Regards

John

[petermcleland]

Hi John...That must have been when I was on Tridents but I hasten to add that it was nothing to do with me I'm surpised that I never heard about it. I bet it was difficult to drag it out of there too.

The only "off end of runway ploughing" that I did was in the RAF when our esteemed boss and aerobatic team leader decided to lead a box formation landing at Fassberg DOWNWIND by mistake. The three of us formating did not realise what was up until we were having to apply a lot of braking to remain in position. I was braking as hard as I possibly could and was still closing on the boss's tailplane in front of my nose...I started to feed in a little right rudder and managed to squeeze my nose past his starboard boom...I glanced right and caught the eye of Tom Gribble (number two) and he saw what I was doing and kindly did the same...meanwhile I continued to move right as I slowly started to overtake the boss and I watched, mesmorised as the nose of my port wingtip tank obligingly lifted gently over the tail point of the boss's starboard tip tank...Tom Gribble unseen by me had moved his aircraft off the edge of the runway a bit to let me through...Whoosh, I was through the gap and I eased the brakes to charge ahead into the lead...At about this point Bert Cann (number three) burst two tyres.

Now we charged together off the end of the runway into the mud...We were still in box formation, BUT I was leading and the boss was now in the number four position behind me. Our wheels all ploughed deeply into the mud and we quickly came to a stop.

The slight problem remaining was that this was all a grand practice for an air display for a coming major inspection and that meant that the rest of the Wing (three squadrons of Venoms) were all airborne having been practicing their flypasts...Now they could not land as there were four Venoms, that had foolishly landed downwind, parked in what would be their undershoot area prior to the threshold of their correct into wind runway.

The tugs all came out to move our Venoms out of the way but sadly the towing arm "weak links" kept breaking because the wheels were so deep in the mud. In the end they got them all out but not before the rest of the Wing had to be diverted to nearby Celle for fuel