He’s on the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme at the moment and I have to say that I have never heard him so inarticulate before and stumbling over every other word.

Break them up for spare parts and send the hulks to assorted scrapyards (e.g. in Hitchen). Oh, they have been doing that already.

They are not going to do it.

It’s all about making you look one way when they are doing something they would rather you didn’t know about until it’s too late.

It’s still a bit special. The intake for the cargo bay air conditioning pack has been moved to the top of the undercarriage blister, and both blisters have been considerably extended.

Probably some of the stuff installed for the Compass Call conversion. there was some discussion on one C-130 message board I saw about bits on various leading edges being from the aerial mountings.

So nJayM,

What you are advocating goes something like this?:

Fly, Navigate Communicate – in that order
One head up at all times
Cross check the accuracy of the FMS
Know your FMA at all times
When things don’t go as expected – TAKE OVER
Use the proper level of automation for the task
Practice task sharing and back-up each other

exmpa

Even I, as a non-pilot, know that the first priority is to have one person flying the aircraft whilst the other crew member(s) does the comms etc and that one person needs to be looking out the windscreen.

To see the truth in this you only have to remember the Eastern Tristar that went into the Everglades because the flightcrew were fixating on some nosewheel problem and didn’t notice the aircraft descending.

Could the references have been to Royal Netherlands Air Force (who did fly Meteors) rather than the Royal Norwegian Air Force?

Just a thought

We are drifting off topic, the attractiveness of this sole Comet C.2 is its importance to RAF Transport and Signals Commands, something that shouldn’t be forgotten. As pointed out, there are other airliner Comets about.

I agree absolutely with the Signals Command link

awesome, thanks for the enlightenment! 🙂

So basically, the oceans are not covered as there is not enough need to do so, in a comercial sense.

Perhaps this incident will prove we need full coverage on all civilian routings?

I don’t think so. Why would you need it really?

The change a few years back to the minimum flight level seperations on the NAT tracks was due largely to the precise global positioning systems being introduced in the cockpit as part of the FANS (future air navigation systems) initiative. Thus, the burden of maintaining separation was moved from the ATC provider to the captain/INS.

Automatic ‘health management’ reporting systems (and ACARS) etc provide regular position reports and engine/airframe system information which again are far in excess of what could really be achieved with long range radar.

It amazes me however, that short wave radio is still used over the oceans as a means of communicating to aircraft. I suppose you have to run at the speed of the slowest competitor.