Just out of interest John, is the Avon you have an early ‘cannular’ 100 series or one of the later annular 200/300 series, where is the museum?

With my total pedantic hat firmly seated on my bonce:

Early Avons were Canned or Cannular (you can see the combustors)

Later Avons are Canannular (the combustors are moved inside the engine)

And Annular where the bit between the back of the compressor and front of the turbine is effectively one big combustor, ‘modern’ engines such as the RB199.

Pedant hat off.

The Avon is the stand out gas turbine of all time. First flown in the late 1940s and operational in the first Canberras in the 50s. 62 years on it is still fully supported by Rolls Royce in the gas generator variants for the oil. gas and power generation industries. I think they even ran them on liquified coal dust!

Those two looking motors will have gyros in them if they are artificial horizons. If they haven’t then they must be remote indicators.

I think they more likely to be Desynn pots/motor drives. One looks to have a torque figure on the label and there is no ‘gyro – handle like eggs’ type warning on either the internal drives or the casing.

It looks very aircraft part, but just to add another penn’orth to my catapult man theory, the small needle could be something to do with making sure that the wind is within limits for launch? Indicates the yaw element on a corkscrewing deck? I will get me coat………..

Was it a manufacturer thing to save the complexity of dual control and instruments? I seem to remember the Vulcan was supposed to be (and the test flights were) single seat ‘up the front’.

Would any of you kind souls have an image of the Stick Shaker Cancel Buttons from a Jetstream T1 LH Instrument panel please? (A part number would be even better but I mustn’t be greedy!)

Thanks in advance!

All RAF aircrew operate in a mutual support club and if you aren’t cutting it in that club you will soon become a former member of that club. I witnessed many people get chopped at very very late stages in their flying training because they weren’t up to snuff. I have also seen some withdraw themselves because they couldn’t cope. If you take that ethos right to the top of the profession, the Red Arrows have always been the elite section of the club; and have not and I would say will never accept anything except the very very best. So to include a token woman/gay/ethnic minority pilot is beyond belief. She would not have got past her first Cyprus Det let alone 2 years with the team if she wasn’t good enough.

To even get as far as her first selection interview she will have jumped through hoops of fire and been signed off by an awful lot of people who would have safety and competency as their only criteria of approval. Then the AOC has to sign off on every team member and authorises the team to display every season based purely on safety. If during her work up she was not making the grade the axe would have fallen well before the press were told that the first female Reds pilot was inbound. So all this tokenism mumbo jumbo is cobblers IMHO.

Personally, I think that IF the reason she has elected to fly a desk is because of stress, she has shown herself to be in possession of the biggest set of brass ones going. It is not easy on anyone in the armed forces to say that stuff is getting them down – even in these enlightened days, it is just not the done thing. So well done for showing the kind of moral fortitude many will never aspire to.

Thanks Ma’am for providing the world with two years of flying excellence in what is IMHO still the world’s premier aerobatic team.

Now all that aside is it a good or bad thing the Red’s going to 7 this year?

It may help them, as two jets in every display will not be eating fatigue life. This will help the engineers to manage the rate effectively across the fleet and in effect make the jets last longer. Don’t forget these aircraft are 30 odd years old now and with probably no hope of replacement when they get to lifex, so dropping to seven could well prolong the life of the team in its current guise.

There is however the spectre of a beancounter post Olympics and the Jubilee saying “The RAFAT is an unnecessary expense and we are canning it”. Cue public outrage blah blah, Cameron steps in and says “not on my watch” And the team is reduced to 7 permanently to save a lot of political face in front of the populace, and the beancounter gets his pound of flesh in return.

How do you think the future looks?

Saints was a Marmite posting – you either loved the place dearly or hated it with a passion.

I was ‘fortunate’ enough to only do my driving course and RB199 off aircraft course there, but what I saw of 8 Sqn (Engine Repair and Overhaul Sqn better known as EROS) made me shudder with fear when we were taken around it.

The visit started in the Cleaning Plant which was the closest thing I have ever seen to Dante’s Inferno. we walked along an elevated walkway between colossal vats of hot degreasing fluid with components on a huge conveyor being dipped in and out of them.

Next was a bay where engines were stripped and components were then passed to Inspection. It was here I met an old mate of mine, who had delivered to him in the morning a basket containing 1000 turbine blades which he had to examine for any obvious failures and then either put in the scrap bin or send off for Non Destructive Testing. After lunch he had another thousand blades delivered.

I don’t know if there is any truth in it but he said that EROS had the highest
incidence of mental health issues in the RAF! whether this was the work or the fumes from the cleaning plant I wouldn’t like to say.

There was only a small RAF contingent in there and apart from my mate they seemed quite happy with their lot. There was a large number of civilian staff and a fair few of these were Rolls Royce Field Service Reps. The lady who worked the tea bar was known as the Bristol’s rep but I am not sure it was anything to do with Bristol Aeroengines……..

After my mate got a move to Tornado Major servicing on 10 Sqn he became a die hard fan of Saints and when they shifted the Majors out, he pulled the pin and went to work for GE.

St Athan used to be the epicentre of aircraft deep maintenance in the RAF at one time and the last servicing is a sad milestone.

Back in the annals of time when I did my FT at Halton; one of the last phases was Preservation and Packing, where, after the inevitable death by OHP, the practical section was inhibiting a Gnome engine on a stand and then putting it in an MVP bag. After wrapping each pipe in miles of green polythene we then had to spray the green stuff on; and as I recall it was referred to as Anhydrous Lanolin. It came in a tube and it was thinned down for spraying using lots of Avtur.

When we finished doing that and had sealed the engine in a MVP Bag (using the daft zip system which provoked more bad language than any other kit I ever used) we had to take them out, and you guessed it – strip all the lanolin off with Avtur and take all the tape off ready for the next course. We were all like gardeners for a week after that phase with bright green fingers.

PX9 rings a bell – but it was 1985!