Trials and Errors

by Mike Brooke

  Then there was the RAF contingent. Apart from myself there were two ex-Lightning pilots, Flt Lts Vic Lockwood and George Ellis, and you soon learn that you can tell a Lightning pilot – but you can’t tell him much! George was our youngest RAF course member and had only just acquired the minimum number of hours to qualify to be here. However, he was a bit of an academic star, being a Wickhamist and Oxford graduate. George affected his exceedingly English image by the wearing of a deerstalker hat, plus-fours and waistcoats with a pocket watch on an Albert chain. His party trick was to twirl the glittering timepiece around and then catch it in one of the waistcoat pockets. This usually brought loud acclamation from the ‘foreigners’. Tom Morgenfeld gave George the sobriquet of ‘Mad Dog’, taken from the title of Noël Coward’s song ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’!

  The other Brits were an ex-Canberra and F-4 Phantom driver, Flt Lt Chris Yeo, and a ‘Jump-Jet’ Harrier man – Flt Lt Roger Searle. From the V-Force world, a Scottish ‘Flying Flat Iron’ Vulcan pilot, Flt Lt Duncan Ross, and two helicopter guys, Flt Lt Terry Creed and Sqn Ldr Rob Tierney. Terry was a dead ringer for the missing Lord Lucan and it became de rigueur to proclaim this loudly when we were in public places. Due to his elevated rank Rob was made the Course Leader. As is befitting, I have saved the Senior Service representative to the last among the pilots: a smooth operator called Lt Simon Thornewill RN and yet another Rotarian. Then there were our four civilian FTE aspirants – Neil Sellers, Dave Morgan, Rob Humphries and Jerry Lambert. I had already flown with Jerry in the Canberra, when he occupied the right-hand seat of the T4; he hadn’t seemed all that taken with aviating.

  But all that flying experience would be put on hold for three weeks of all-day classroom lessons. We were to be put through a rigorous introduction to a wide variety of subjects: from the composition and characteristics of the atmosphere, units of measurement, basic aerodynamics, stability derivatives, the solution of polynomial equations, the fundamentals of aircraft design and many more such esoteric topics. It rapidly became like an intense first year university course crammed into three weeks, and no time off between lectures.

  ‘Chalky’ Rodgers didn’t operate solo. He had a small but excellently qualified support staff. The first of these was Sqn Ldr Brian Johnson, an education officer who specialised in matters aerodynamic and mathematical, especially the mysteries of non-dimensionality. Vic Lockwood later observed that to measure non-dimensional time we would need non-dimensional watches and the RAF didn’t issue us with those. The other ground instructor was a navigator, Flt Lt Harold ‘Wedge’ Wainman, the Systems Instructor. He had been a navigator on my first squadron, No. 16, in Germany in the mid 1960s. I had known him well there and we had survived a Winter Survival Course together. Wedge taught us all about magic black boxes and how they and their computerised innards worked.

  So our amble, at the speed of light, through the fertile fields of scientific academia continued apace. At the end of those first three weeks we felt like there had never been any other existence. I was getting thoroughly bored with the view from the window by now, and it never gave me the inspiration for the questions racing through my head. But there were lighter moments. One morning during a lesson examining the relationship between Imperial and Standard International (SI) Units, French fighter pilot Gerard Le Breton, who sat immediately in front of me, was thumbing frenetically through his petit dictionnaire. He did that a lot because the French Air Force kept his posting to England a secret until the last minute, so he had received no English language training! He turned round to me and asked in a whisper, ‘Why eez a small animal from ze garden used to measure force?’ He had looked up the word ‘slug’!4

  Then one afternoon, during one of his by now famous high-speed blackboard rolling sessions, Chalky asked, ‘Now how do you think that we could eliminate this variable?’

  ‘Rub it out?’ came the reply from Vic Lockwood.

  It’s funny how time flies when you are having so much fun and so on our third Friday we were subjected to a progress examination; it was actually more like a speed writing test. From now on we would attend Ground School for one or two periods each morning and after that it would be up to the hangar and flying! However, it still being Friday, we all repaired to the Officers’ Mess Bar for Happy Hour. I believe that was when we hatched a plot for future Fridays. It was decided that we would instigate Pot Luck Suppers, with our wives each producing a dish of something delicious and representative of their national origins. Fortunately a large majority of our better halves were in favour, so one of us would, each week, volunteer our Officers’ Married Quarter (OMQ) as a venue, and the guys would arrive with the booze! Magic!

  Notes

  3 The McKenna Dinner was the graduating event held at the end of the course and named after Sqn Ldr J.F.X. ‘Sam’ McKenna. He was an eminent pre-war test pilot with the A&AEE at Martlesham Heath and, in 1944, was appointed as Commandant of ETPS. He was killed in an accident in a P-51 Mustang when an ammunition box left the aircraft and one wing subsequently detached. The aircraft crashed close to Boscombe Down.

  4 A slug is an imperial unit of force.

  3 A PLETHORA OF PLANES

  Finally we were going to get to grips with some aeroplanes! Resplendent in our bright orange flying suits, small teams of us could be seen crawling over various examples of the School’s flying machines. Initially this was for our first written report – the Cockpit Assessment. I, along with a couple of others, had been directed to assess the flight deck of the Armstrong Whitworth Argosy: a transport aircraft and the last aeroplane to be designed and built by Armstrong Whitworth. The Argosy was adopted by the RAF in the early 1960s and had a freight carrying capacity of 13 tonnes; it could also be used by paratroopers. The flight deck crew consisted of two pilots, a navigator and a flight engineer.

  We pored over the pilots’ bit of the cockpit and assessed its utility. We measured the field of view through the letterbox-like windscreen and side windows. We checked the escape facility, via a long rope, which we deigned to use, as it was about 20ft from the window to the ground! We looked at all the dials, switches and levers and their layout. We assessed the static qualities of the flight controls system, looking for such esoteric characteristics as breakout force, centring, running friction and backlash. To do these things we had each been issued, along with our voice recorders and kneepads on which to carry test cards and make notes, various implements that looked like medieval instruments of torture. These tools helped to measure forces and deflections of the control systems. In addition to these we had been able to hone our skill at estimating control forces using an old Hawker Sea Hawk cockpit set up in the ETPS Hangar for just such a purpose; once we had been introduced to this simple but effective apparatus a queue of guys waiting to use it soon formed! After we had finished our Cockpit Assessments we wrote our individual reports and handed them to our tutors for their assessment of our assessments. During the course we would each have three tutors. The course was split into three terms: the first up to the Spring Bank Holiday, with a week’s leave to follow, and the second up to the end of July, after which there would be three weeks off!

  My first term tutor was to be Sqn Ldr Graham Bridges. He had done a tour on the Canberra PR9 with No. 13 Sqn in the Mediterranean and had been a test pilot at Farnborough. Graham took four of us under his accommodating wings and started us on our journey of discovery into the mysterious world of test flying. Alongside me in Graham’s syndicate were pilots George Ellis and Gerard Le Breton, and FTE Neil Sellers. Once we had converted to type, Graham would be the one to brief us and demonstrate in flight the required test techniques, as well as use his red pen to constructively criticise our reports; aka ‘rip them apart’! Reports had to be handed in no later than ten days after the final test flight of the topic to be examined. Then the reports would progress from the Tutor, to the CTFI and then to the CO for each to make their comments, each with different coloured ink. It really was a school! Graham was a bouncy sort of
character and full of boyish enthusiasm. He possessed a good pair of lungs and his laugh and more sarcastic comments could be heard clearly emanating from his office or the Ops Room, all the way down the long corridor to the coffee bar in the crew room. This was Graham’s final year on the school, so he was also the Principal Tutor Fixed Wing (PTFW), which meant that he had the unenviable task of organising each day’s flying programme. This had to satisfy the needs of the syllabus and match student progress with tutor and aircraft availability; and there was the English weather to be taken into account.

  Apart from Graham Bridges and the aforementioned Duncan Cooke, the other two members of the Fixed Wing Tutorial Staff were Sqn Ldr Peter Sedgwick RAF and Lt Cdr Walt Honour USN. Like Duncan, Peter originated from the southern hemisphere – the Falkland Islands – and had joined the RAF and become a transport pilot. He had spent a tour at Farnborough as a test pilot before returning to ETPS to educate and torment folk like me. Walt was the nominal American in the permanent exchange appointment with the US Navy Test Pilot’s School at Patuxent River in Maryland, USA. He had flown the LTV A7 Corsair operationally and tested the Lockheed S3 Viking for the US Navy. A crucial character, who worked alongside the Tutors, was the ETPS QFI, Sqn Ldr Mike Vickers. Mike was one of those people whose experience was written all over his face. He was older than the rest of the staff, indeed he had flown during the Second World War. For a part of that time he had flown Hurricane fighters from naval fleet support ships. This was on what now seems like a crazy, almost kamikaze-like scheme, where the Hurricanes were launched from catapults on ships that had no landing decks. After flying their defensive fighter missions the pilots then had to find their way back to the vicinity of one of the ships and land in the sea! I cannot believe that anyone would have volunteered for that tour of duty. But Mike survived to fly another day and stayed on in the RAF post-war to become a jet fighter pilot and instructor. It would be Mike’s dulcet tones and calm instructional manner that would get us through many of the all too short conversion sorties.

  Before we started each test flying exercise we had to be checked out on each aircraft type. My first one was the Jet Provost T5; aka ‘JP5’. It really was a re-familiarisation for me, as I had flown the T3 and T4 versions during my basic flying training and the T5 when I was at the CFS. The ETPS JP5 XS 230 was an interesting aircraft. It was the second prototype of the mark and had been converted from a T4; its sister ship XR 229, the first prototype, had been lost in an accident during development flying. XS 230 had never been used for flying training, other than at ETPS, and had several slightly non-standard features. We would use it for stalling test exercises this term and spinning next term.

  My next conversion was to the propeller-driven Beagle Basset: an odd little dog and an odd little aeroplane. It was similar in size to the Hunter but, as a light communications aircraft, obviously quite different. There were two 310hp Rolls-Royce/Continental engines mounted on the wings and a cabin that could accommodate five people including the pilot. The Basset had first flown in 1961 and then a military version, the CC1, had been developed for the RAF. Twenty examples of this model were built and they were equipped with a new entrance door incorporating steps down from the rear of the cabin; these were known as the Air Stairs. Possibly because they had been designed so that air-rank officers could dismount gracefully while wearing their full regalia including a sword! The Basset CC1 entered service in 1965. ETPS had two Bassets and the one that was not modified to take the Variable Stability machinery was XS 742. It had briefly been on the Royal Flight, when Prince Charles had been taught to fly a multi-engined aeroplane.

  With two people on board the Basset’s performance on take-off was hardly startling. One wondered whether it would climb after an engine failure near the ground or whether one would just have to steer it to a crash landing somewhere near the airfield. Goodness knows what it was like on a hot summer’s day with full fuel tanks and all the seats occupied. But once it was safely away from the ground it slipped along quite well. It also handled nicely, the forces on the manually operated controls being reasonably light and well balanced. The cockpit was not a bad place to work either, with a great view, fairly spacious and well laid out and with a control yoke instead of a stick. The only thing I remember being tricky was the landing. That was because the tailplane and elevator sat in the slipstream from the propellers and there was not quite enough elevator authority at low speeds to keep the nose up. So if I closed the throttles smartly just before touchdown the little beast tended to drop out of the sky, nose first, while I tried desperately to stop it by applying lots of pull on the yoke, usually to little effect. I learnt to take lots of nose-up trim during the final approach and slowly reduced the power as we got close to the runway. It still didn’t guarantee a nice, smooth arrival – but it stopped the nose-down lurch and the naval-style arrival! With the Hunter, Jet Provost, Canberra and Basset under my belt I had just two more aircraft types to attack: the Argosy and the Lightning – the ridiculous and the sublime!

  Conversion to the Lightning would not come until much later in the term so it was now time to tackle the Argosy. I had a bit of a head start because I had, along with the others in my syndicate, already become very familiar with the flight deck of the big beastie. But that was with it sitting stationary on the ground. Now we each had only two flights, totalling all of three hours, to qualify to act as captain. I had never before flown a four-engined aircraft or operated turboprop engines. The Argosy had four of them, Messrs Rolls and Royce’s excellent and pioneering Darts, as installed on the UK’s first and enormously successful turboprop airliner, the Vickers Viscount.

  The Argosy was known by all and sundry as the ‘Whistling Wheelbarrow’; a reference to the high-pitched, ear-piercing whistle of the R-R Darts, the Argosy’s twin, handle-like tail-booms and its tendency to land on the nose wheel at the slightest provocation. Some cynics said that the Argosy had been made out of other people’s leftovers. It was reputed to have wings of the Avro Shackleton with Meteor rear fuselages used as the tail-booms. It could have been true! Messrs Armstrong and Whitworth manufactured both aircraft types at one time or another! We also learnt that when the Argosy was first tested by the RAF the floor was not strong enough to take the Saracen armoured vehicle, for which it had been procured. Unfortunately, strengthening the floor increased its thickness, which meant that there was now insufficient headroom in the freight bay to get the said piece of Army kit aboard! Moreover the resulting extra weight cut the total load carrying capacity so much that the range with the required maximum weight was now less than the specified requirement! Hence those aforementioned cynics said that the Argosy could carry a maximum volume load of table tennis balls to Cyprus or a maximum weight load from RAF Brize Norton to RAF Lyneham! We were learning how to be very cruel, but not yet very objective.

  It was on the Argosy that our air engineers came into their own. They acted as flight engineers and co-pilots for us and often, during passenger flights (more of which later), as loadmasters or rather butch air hostesses! Their mission, it seemed to me, was to make our very brief conversion flights as easy as possible and then make sure that we didn’t do anything silly when there were two student test pilots in the driving seats. During the conversion phase the ninety-minute sorties were flown back-to-back throughout the day, there being enough fuel on board to do an all-day, non-stop series of flights. Thus several of us got to do our first ‘solos’ as captain without ever having started the engines before! This wasn’t a real drama, as we tended to arrive at the aircraft, walk around the outside just to marvel at flying something so big and then climb the ladder up to the flight deck in the attic. There, we would find an engineer with absolutely everything ready for us to start the motors. This was done with switches on the overhead panel and all we had to do was put the start selector switch to the correct engine number and push the starter button. The engineer would do the rest. However, we did have one important thing to do and that was to look out of t
he window to make sure that the propeller started going round. Ex-Lightning pilot Vic Lockwood, who had only ever flown with a maximum of two engines and both of those out of sight behind and beneath him, pressed the engine start button and looked out along the port wing. ‘It’s not moving, Terry,’ he called. A large engineer’s hand came down on the top of his head and rotated it 180° to the right.