558 Winter Servicing

[Mackrick]

Spent the day helping out at RAF Lyneham.

All photos from today are available here http://picasaweb.google.com/macs4me/558Lyneham09Mar10?feat=directlink

A few photos from today....

















Yes I was there....

[Jigsaw]

Absolutely bloody BRILLIANT. Thanks for that mate, made my day

[Nickolas]

Hope I can get some good one's like that......

[RLN]

Thanks MR. Great pics.

[Mayfly]

seats

[Mackrick]

seats

Got a few shots of them once on the ground for you MF...

[Mayfly]

Oooo you sweetie!!

[Jigsaw]

\:D/

Oooo you sweetie!!

The lady loves a bang seat

[Mackrick]

MF..they are in the link in my first post...

[Sooty655]

Great pics, Mackrick.

[Dan4th]

I guess we'll all know it's Summertime
when the Flipflops show up......



Of course, MR's gonna need a pedicure
or something......

D.

[Mackrick]

Me thinks that elf n safety might have something to say if I did Mr D....

[Dan4th]

[Mags]

Excellent pics - nice to see the work started

[Dee]

Fantastic pics thanks

[Spitfire]

Nice pics - love the 'office' close ups - very good

The whole office looks a bit care worn and very much 'used'

Question - in an 'EJECT-EJECT-EJECT' scenario does the whole of that grey tear drop thing some off - or do they go through it??
And - would the rocket blast from the bang seats do any harm to the poor sods stuck downstairs watching the 2 other fellas leaving home I mean... being left alone by the drivers in an unserviceable aircraft is one thing - but being sun burned as well is a bit off

[Stigish]

Nice pics Mackrick. Keep em' coming .

[Checkflaps]

As far as I was aware, the gist of the rocket seats was so that the crew could wait until it really was the VERY last second, allowing the rear crew the best opportunity to get the rock out of there. I think the lid goes first then the front crew go. There is a pic somewhere of the Vulc that landed on 2 legs after the crew nicely smacked one on the undershoot in NZ. They blew the top to enable all the crew to get out that way in case the 'normal' door was unable to open after the emergency landing.

Hope that helps.

G

[Spitfire]

Thanks for that ... a bit more research digs thisd up

The diagram below shows the layout of the crew area on the Vulcan. The two pilots at the front with ejector seats, the three rear crew behind them, facing backwards (this was the same in all three V bombers). The three rear crew are on a level a little lower than the pilots. There is a small ladder up to the pilot seats from the rear crew area. The canopy over the pilot area is ejected before the pilots can eject, when the canopy goes the front window sections in front of the pilots remain in place. In modern jets the pilot can eject ‘through’ the canopy, giving a faster exit, but on the Vulcan the canopy is made of metal. You can also see that the crew dinghy, big enough for all five members, is in the back of the canopy. This is additional to the individual dinghy that each crew member has in his crew seat. This is strapped to his ‘bum’ and goes with him when he ‘escapes’ from the aircraft.

The aircraft was originally conceived as being piloted by one man, not two, and this is one reason for the 'cosiness' of the pilots area. It is also why the aircraft is flown by a control column a little like a fighter stick rather than the 'handlebar' of most large aircraft. The 'captain' of a Vulcan crew was always the main pilot while the copilot was often, but not always, a relatively new pilot. I believe that in the early days of the 'V' force the copilot may also have been a pilot with considerable experience, but during my time they were usually a relatively new pilot, and this was often their first squadron 'tour' after leaving their flying training. Again while I was on Vulcans the copilot would normally hope that following his 'apprenticeship' as a copilot, he would go on to do his next tour as a Captain, which is what often happened. The two full tours I did, the first at Scampton on 27 Squadron and the second on 101 Squadron at Waddington were both with Captains for whom this was their first Captain tour following their tour as a Copilot. Our 27 Sqn. crew was captained by 'Ernie' Bishop who was only 23 when he got his Captaincy, very young. On 101 it was different, Tony Burton was an ex AEO on Vulcans who had done a copilot tour and was a 'little' older.

While there was a lot of leg-pulling between crew functions, the rear crew expected the Captain to be safe, to be competent and to lead and make decisions. At the end of the day the safety of the aircraft and the crew were the responsibility of the Captain. This would come into play particularly when the crew was abroad on a 'Ranger' operating as an independent unit. The Captain would also have a mentoring role over the copilot, he would be expected to do all he could to educate and grow the copilot into a future crew captain, this would be done by gradually increasing the co-pilots flying and crew-leading functions through the tour so that at the end of 2 1/2 years the copilot was doing most of the day-to-day running of the crew. Not all co-pilots managed this, either because of their flying ability, or (related to this) a lack of confidence in him from the rear crew, or even if he could operate the aircraft, no credibility as a leader.

Didn't know that it was originally designed as a one man cockpit

A blow up of a shot of our aircraft at Goose Bay, showing the proximity of the nose-wheel to the access door, and the problem you would have to exit the aircraft in an emergency with the wheels down.

[Sooty655]

Also worth noting that there are five indicator lights in front of P1 (left hand seat) which are operated by switches in the static line anchors of the rear crew parachutes, so the guys in front know when all the rear crew are clear of the aircraft.

[MadNaddy]

Thanks for the pics MR = brilliant as always.

Interesting info - Thanks for that. It's something I've wondered but always forgotten to ask

[Mayfly]

Ejection Seats are my baby

An absolute fascinating bit of kit, with the totally opposite function of what most explosives are all about.

There are so many things that happen at once & seats of the era of 558 [MK 3-4s] would see the pilot descending [safely] in his parachute in approx 1.25 secs after pulling the handle.

558 doesn't have rocket seats SF, so I assume you mean the blast from the cartridges when the seat fires?

Very little would escape as it's all used to propel the seat upwards, saying that I wouldn't wish to be standing too close either....

[Checkflaps]

I still have it on vid at home - and it is rather tatty. A Martin Baker corporate vid called 'All for 2 seconds'. In fact I have quite a few after I did my work experience there. I particularly like the very British vid about the first seat and the trial rig and live firing tests. Hosted by Mr Chumleigh-Warner. Rather....

Garry

[Mayfly]

Would love to see that again Garry if there's an opportunity sometime. DT blames his back problems on the test rig.... they all had to try it once upon a time.

[Landyman]

The aircraft was originally conceived as being piloted by one man, not two, and this is one reason for the 'cosiness' of the pilots area. It is also why the aircraft is flown by a control column a little like a fighter stick rather than the 'handlebar' of most large aircraft.

Interesting how there are different versions of this. I am just reading Avro Vulcan, written by ex Vulcan pilot Andrew Brookes.
To quote his chapter on the development and design:-

"Roly Falk, for all his flamboyance, was a very cautious character who was not going to fly in a cockpit designed by a committee, so he proposed that he design the Vulcan cockpit personally. Davies (Stuart ‘Cock’ Davies, Avro Chief Designer) thought it a good idea to give cockpit design responsibility to one man who knew what he was talking about, and Falk’s only eccentricity in Davies’ eyes was to insist that The Vulcan should not have a conventional spectacle control column. It was so light and easy to fly said Falk that it was going to have a fighter-type stick to get away from the heavy bomber complex, and this enabled him to close in the whole cockpit. ‘At the end of the day’, said Davies, ‘the cockpit looked as though it had been designed by one individual because it all fitted, so when the mock-up conference sat it was a brave man who would have stood up and said he didn’t like the result.’
Because Falk sat in splendid isolation at Farnborough, and because the flight deck of the production Vulcan with its twin ejection seats close together resembled a sardine can, the myth has grown up that the Vulcan cockpit was originally designed for one pilot and that the second seat was only crushed in as an afterthought by the RAF. This is untrue because two pilot operation had been written in from the start. Falk argued that one man could fly the Vulcan and he couldn’t understand what the other man was there for, but the RAF retorted that the old days of letting a brand new pilot loose on an expensive bomber had died with the Lancaster and they needed the co-pilots seat to train captains of the future and to cope if the first pilot was disabled".

Which account is correct I wonder?

Landyman.