Here’s my cr@p old bone dome: originally issued on Eagle in 1970 or 71, and starting to look like it! Ignore the boom mike fitting, they’ve been added in a later life, but you can see the various screw fittings to hold the Mk2A visor, and also the plastic plugs to hold the hard visor cover in place. A lot of holes to cover up, although the later 2A’s didn’t always have the hard plastic visor cover, so the holes for that wouldn’t necessarily be in the shell.

I bought a new Alpha Eagle earlier this year, to replace my 10 year old Alpha. When Aunty Betty was giving me all those neat bits of flying clothing, I’d never have imagined I’d be shelling out $A3k for my own bone dome. Back then, that was nearly 9 month’s salary, including flying pay 😮

I realise that this thread has gone way OT, but I have my original “Instructions for fitting and maintenance of Mk2A” in the box with the bone dome. Anyone interested? A lot of the fitting instructions are pertinent to Mk 3’s, and it also has a part number list.

I must sound like a right geek :p

there is also the reflective tape crossed on the top of it which was not normal practice for heli pilots helmets.

Yes it was: all helmets had the white reflective cross on the top, whether FW or RW.

Is the helmet white? All bone domes were white until well into the late 70’s/early 80’s 🙂

The Mk2 also had the G bar across the shaped visor, with extra mechanism on the sides to control and lock the bar/visor down under the G forces of an ejection.

John,

It was the P Type, but the helmet (in the 70’s) was the Mk2A, not the Mk3. Mk3 was for helicopters, and wasn’t issued with O2 clips. Also it had an unbroken lower curve on the visor, which wouldn’t allow it to lower fully around an O2 mask. The 2A also had the G lock on the visor for protection during banging out.

My 2A is still sitting in its carry box, amazing how heavy the darn thing is compared to my new Alpha Eagle 😀

I’ve got quite a few photos from 899 on Eagle, I must go through and find some of these some time soon. Most are colour, but this was a scan of a B&W shot I took back in 1970:

PhII,

The pics are scanned from slides, and are a bit dark: I’ll try to lighten them up next time I’m home. The 4B was from the Kennedy, around late 74 I believe, probably in the Med. The visiting helicopter is a USN -46, and the Intruder is just waiting on the waist cat. We sent some Bucc’s and F4K’s over for crossdecking, as we did with Forrestal in the earlier USN F4 pics. I often was tasked to transfer maintenance crews over to the US carriers, compared to our deck, they were huge ! I had a close call with a fire truck on Forrestal one night, they gave wind relative to the helicopter, not the ship, so I was struggling a bit at max Tq, facing out to port with no visual reference, when my co pilot pointed out that we were about to drift left into a fire truck. Overtorque and out of there 😉

Another one for you:

If it was to be rolled out tomorrow, the Valkyrie would look futuristic. Way ahead of it’s time, like so many of the 50’s/60’s designs it “should” have made it into production.

Production jets? The EE Lightning, the memory of standing yards away from 111 Squadron doing a burner stream take off at Farnborough: the ground shook 😀 I’ll never forgive my Senior Pilot for refusing to give me permission to go for a flight in one, when we were out East 😡

Most graceful? Got to be the Hunter.

Just for something different, we operated all around, and on a flight into Roosevelt Roads, I snapped this shot of some USN B47’s. I never bothered to enquire at the time just what the USN would have been doing with them, anyone enough of a history buff to enlighten me?

Also, another (fuzzy) shot of an Intruder on the waist cat of Ark