Avpin

Avpin ! I remember it well. Got soaked in the stuff once when I clipped the locking wire off the drain valve cap ready to empty the tank on the Hunter – except I clipped the wrong bit of wire so when I undid the cap the whole drain valve came out covering me in the delightful stuff from head to foot…

When you think of all the other horrible stuff we used to breathe all the time, Bostik’s, PRC, Methyl Ethel Ketone (MEK); oh the list goes on. Day after day in Lightning fuel tanks and engine bays.

Errr I still use all of them day in day out, and the Trich mentioned earlier

Lightnings all marks IIRC used avpin. Wonderful smell! Once inhaled, never forgotten. Asbestos glove, gee you were lucky. Chiefies beret did just as well. Common denominator appears to be Avon engines.

When you think of all the other horrible stuff we used to breathe all the time, Bostik’s, PRC, Methyl Ethel Ketone (MEK); oh the list goes on. Day after day in Lightning fuel tanks and engine bays.

Now it’s your standard Devon farmyard perfume we inhale!!:-)

.Fumes were nasty as well!

Crusty asbestos ridden gloves, Hydrogen Cyanide fumes, volatile mono fuels burning uncontrollably, Trichloroethylene solvents…It’s a wonder we’re still alive! 😀

Oh and good to hear you Hunter boys found the glove extinguishing method as useful as we did..

What made me laugh was despite all of the scaremongering around the stuff, replenishing the tanks was still just like trying to fill you car with petrol from a 5 litre bottle without the handy nozzle – on a windy pan sat on a Canberra wing the stuff went bloody everywhere yet dissapointingly not once did I spontaneously combust (at least without the aid of Marham airmans mess chicken curry the night before)

Avpin is Isopropyl Nitrate ( 3 Oxygen atoms ) and not Isopropyl Nitrite ( 2 Oxygen atoms ).

Quite different properties and uses.

TT18 ,it was used by Hunters MK9/10 .I served on 8 sqdn and we had our share of fires after a start .One of our tools was an asbestos glove to hold over the starter exhaust in the event of lingering flames.Fumes were nasty as well.Our plastic refill bottles were kept out in the open ,about 35degs C!!!

AVPIN was being looked at by NASA in recent times as a method of initially accellerating a scram jet vehicle until it reached the speed when the scram jet could sustain.

Hyper-X used a Pegasus Booster which is proposed for several new projects and AVPIN was one of the options investigated for Pegasus II derivatives.

Out of the loop now so I do not know if it is still being considered.

Regards
Ross

Still used in the RAF until 2006 on the venerable Canberra PR9, Its fierce reputation wasn’t lived up to in practice particularly in my experience as a liney on the type. Obviously we handled it carefully, replenishing the tanks with task-specific plastic cans with air-tight valves stored in lockers waaay out on the pan but when handled correctly nothing untoward ever happened. The most fun I personally had was an AVPIN fire on startup – excess AVPIN dumped from the starter and ignited in the drain which spouted a glorious heat haze onto the pan. You can barely see burning AVPIN other than through the misplaced haze and trying to extinguish it using the prescribed method of “patting with heatproof glove” just makes for jolly but futile japes. Letting it burn itself out was a lesson quickly learned.
Oh and the hydrogen cyanide fumes are mighty wholesome when the wind blows them your direction!

The problem with Avpin was it was a mono fuel, as it burns it produces its own oxygen, so putting the damn stuff out was nigh in impossible, most extinguishers work on cooling or removing the air from the equation, with Avpin it didn’t need that air to burn..

I know of an RAF ground equiper having problems starting a diesel towing donkey, thought after seeing how good Avpin works he would try a bit of that…. The resulting explosion saw the head disappearing into the distance 😀 at least it fired lol.

I can’t think of anything that would use Avpin today, one of the reasons it and cartridges were used in the past was that electric starters and batteries hadn’t evolved to the state of play today.

Tstoff was more than nasty, they used to park both tankers at other sides of the airfield, after one had refuelled and departed back to one side the other would then come and fill up the aircraft. The other problem with Tstoff was it would dissolve organic matter… Ie human beings..they had cases of Komets landing and the pilot having died and been literally dissolved, hence why they wore special rubberised suits.

From memory,

I thought that HTP – High Test Peroxide that the Blue Steel carried was far more nastier, and wasn’t that what caused the Submarine Kursk to go with a bang?

As for T-Stoff/C-Stoff Didn’t the first flight of the Me 163 come to a nasty end as the two mixed up after it had a heavy landing. ???

Tim S

I don’t know, but would be surprised it is was as serious as mixing T & C Stoff, because they used to explode violently when mixed, I thought that the problem with Avpin was more like the tendency to burn uncontrollably?
I don’t think I would want to be on board either aircraft, but especially the Me163, I worked on a Walther rocket motor and it was easy to see why the fuels could mix in the fuel pump instead of the combustion chamber.

Pete