Wow! 447 Buccaneer photos:eek: If only you could scan and post them all!

I would love to see all six photos of XX894 so please please post them!

Thanks, Plazz

A further progress report on our Buccaneer complete with video clips can be seen here:

http://buccsociety.conforums.com/index.cgi?board=restorations&action=display&num=1166290082&start=15#1170876727

We are working on getting something ready for the open day, we just not sure what yet! I’ll keep you all posted.

Cheers, Plazz

I spoke to a friend of mine last night who lives over that way and says he saw the incident take place!
Apparently it may have flown into a flock of geese, and then came over and flew two tight circuits at about 300ft near his house making a lot of noise before flying out to the bay where the crew ejected.
The crew were then airlifted to hospital, current status unknown.

Plazz

That’s good news Plazz we were down at Bruntingthorpe for the open day and were watching you when you were trying to light up the engines, I recall one went and the other one wouldn’t. I assume you got the problem sorted?

I notice that the Artificial Horizon was not erect, are the flight instruments next on the list?

Again brilliant to see her moving again and she looks fantastic

Ollie

Saturdays run was done on one engine (starboard) as unfortunately the one you saw not starting correctly during the open day has to come out again for more rectification work 🙁

As for the flight instruments not working, the reason behind this is quite straight forward. When we started out XX894 had hundreds of disconnected, cut and sabotaged wires throughout the airframe. As a precaution we elected to remove all of the non-essential fuses from the aircraft until such time that the re-wiring was carried out. This exercise was completed about 12 months ago but we are only reactivating each system as we require them. The flight instruments will be reactivated and checked but some systems such as the radar and HF radio will never be made live again due to safety reasons.

More footage from the run can be seen here:

http://s44.photobucket.com/albums/f39/plazzdaman/?action=view&current=XX894.flv

Excuse the quality as it was taken with a camera phone and must be credited to fellow team member A. Webber

Plazz

What was the reason for an engine change?

Peter,

The Spey 101 fitted to the Buccaneer has 10 fuel spray nozzles in each combustion section. They are spaced equally around the circumference of the engine towards its rear. The nozzles are made up of two parts, a ‘primary’ jet and a ‘main’ jet. The primary jet is very small and sprays a fine mist of fuel into the combustion chambers where it is ignited. The main jets spray a large volume of fuel around the primary fuel which is to wet to ignite by itself, but ignites of the back of the already burning primary fuel.
After lots of diagnostic work we found that due to lack of use of the engines for the best part of 10 years some of the primary jets have become blocked just like they can in any fuel system.
We attempted to clear them with the engines in situ using very high pressure nitrogen (1500 psi) but found that although some of them cleared it tended to alter the angle of the fuel spray and therefore the fuel atomisation was not correct for ignition.
Our spare engine was checked and ground run, so we know it works ok. So to be able change the faulty fuel nozzles the engine had to come out to get access to the ones around the back. We have replacement nozzles so the plan is to change them in the starboard engine that we have just removed, ground run it and then swap it for the port engine which has the same problem.

I hope all this makes sense!

Plazz

Off the back of this thread I thought I might post a picture of XX894 taken two weeks ago just so that you can all see how great she’s looking at the moment.
A gratuitous plug I know, but we are very proud of the work that we have been doing over the last couple of years!

Plazz