Yours truly
at Peter Vallance's
Gatwick Air Museum which has quite a variety of aircraft. The Shack engines
are run occasionally. Juliet is fully equipped inside as shown below.The Shackleton Mk 3 Phase 3 Viper fitted
Yours truly
at Peter Vallance's
Gatwick Air Museum which has quite a variety of aircraft. The Shack engines
are run occasionally. Juliet is fully equipped inside as shown below.
An ex apprentice
friend of mine in the tac nav's seat, with the 1C sonics systems and Orange Harvest ESM equipment in the foreground.
Just visible behind the nav seats is their best friend- the Mark 1 drift sight - never been known to fail. The
main spars seem a bit more difficult to get over these days.
Yours truly at the tacnav position which even has the lighthouses underneath
the attack table. Oh how I remember the winter flights when the heaters nearly cooked the flying boots under the
table while it felt that icicles were forming on the end of the nose.
Another ex apprentice matey in the tac nav position. He was a RNZAF navigator on Canberras. The routine nav's seat looks a bit care worn but the rest of the kit was in very good nick. Navs will remember the McMicheal TPI system with its weird cartesion wind indicators which often ran away to full scale deflection when you weren't looking, with drastic affect on the aircraft's position shown on the GPI 4 to the left.
Ah, the Mk3 Gee above smiler's left elbow; my favourite nav aid for fixing and making an approach onto 31/13. Above
it is the somewhat less loved APN9 Loran A kit.
The Routine
navigator's GPI 1C which projected the aircraft's position onto the topo or chart on the table. Has anyone got
any spare sonobuoy tape? Sticking charts and tracing paper down was the bane of our lives.
The ADF indicator is to left of the GPI with the Doppler Surface Motion Corrector (SMC) to its left. I forgot to check whether the aircraft had a Wind Finding Attachment (WFA) - another good way to waste 10 minutes whilst finding out the wind velocity. I think that most of us doing a DR navex preferred the multi drift wind finding method as it only put the ETA back by 1 or 2 minutes.
Below the GPI between the Master Indicators is the Blue Silk Doppler. A wonderful bit of kit if the sea state was only 3 or 4, any calmer or rougher and it tended to give up, and all the neons (the strip of white looking bits at the top of the indicator) flashed, instead of the centre couple for normal operation.
Will we ever forget the attack litany:
4 miles - blue silk to memory
3 miles bomb doors open
1½ miles - flares, flares
Attacking, bombs gone, mark - followed by a loud bang from the back as the photoflash went off
then hopefully from the tail lookout: 50-50, zero line, nav
The Tac Nav's GPI 1C which if I remember
correctly had a 2 mil scale setting for transit flying in addition to the 1/2 mil and 1 inch to the
mile scale for the submarine attack chart.
Also shown at the bottom are the sonobuoy release switches - dropping a pattern bravo demanded some nifty manipulation (easier for us left handers though) to select switches up for short cable and down for long cable during the 2 mile pattern spacing across a datum. Above is the torpedo depth and mode presetter and various other weapon panels which don't ring any bells (except the red flap). Remember the Connell box back in the galley. My apprentice training as an armourer came in very useful when it came to working out dropping patterns.