One thing that annoyed me about the news reports of this crash was that every reporter seen praised the captain but not the co-pilot and cabin crew. The captain was celebrated throughout the USA as a true hero.

OK, the captain probably had the controls, and deserved the accolades, but the co-pilot was probably working damned hard too!

The reports also made the point that the captain walked through the cabin to make sure all persons were out before leaving himself, but didn’t the cabin crew have something to do with that as well?

BAHH, STEENKING NEWS MEDIA!!

Bri 🙁

The RAF had Andovers/748s, so the beef about the 146 not being a military aircraft is not relevant.

Besides, didn’t the Hastings start out as a civil type?

Bri 🙂

Have a look at the railway carriages on the UKs preserved steam railways. Then you could design the interior like the Russians did with their Tupolevs in the 1960s…

Bri 😉

Our 1-11s had fin lights in the late 1960s.

Bri 😀

Feel free to become our Doppler Radar expert!:dev2:

Ollie

Thanks for the offer Ollie – but I was an instrument basher. My ‘thing’ was navigation and I bench-tested many Mk 4 GPIs.

In fact, for several years I was the only person in the intrument department at A&AEE Boscombe Down who knew how these wonderfully complex electro-mechanical computers worked!

Incidentally (I hope I’m not boring people here) I designed a modification for these units and got the princely sum of £10 award from the MOD – 2 years after I submitted the design.

GPIs were being sent back to us as inaccurate, when they were bench-testing OK. Suddenly, with the case removed on the bench, I noticed a flexing of the frame – and that was causing the heading mechanism to rotate about 2 degrees when the unit was secured in the rack on the aircraft. My mod was a bracket between the rear frame and front mechanism.

THe Green Satin provided the GPI with groundspeed and drift, and these are displayed on the Green Satin Unit. I did learn the basics of the doppler and functions of the antenae from a radio technician, so that I had a good overall understanding.

Bri 🙂

B&N design methods ensured a lower cost than other planemakers, one of the reasons for itsa success. All ‘fancy bits’ were excluded at the design stage. Perhaps that is why it became such an enduring design.

A couple facts follow about the Islander design you may not know, from my distant memory of an RAE lecture given at BAe Weybridge by one of the designers (Britten or Norman, can’t remember which one).

All rivet pitches were the same all over the aircraft, and the plane was sized to suit this rivet pitch instead of working out different pitches for each location. For this feature, ‘one pitch’ metal templates were made for the draughtsmen, and the same templates were used by the people who built the planes.

The designer angered our draughtsmen by saying that all aircraft designers loved drawing nuts, bolts and the like – so he forbade his designers to do that!

The cabin was made just the right width for a standard ‘barrel’ of oil, an important consideration for Islanders of the human kind!

Bri 🙂

I’m yet another fan of Miles Aircraft: have been for many years!

I have seen a few references to the Miles lightweight auto-pilots on this forum. As someone who worked on avionics equipment for many years, I am interested in the technical details of these particular auto-pilots.

Anyone know where I can read about them?

Bri 🙂