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Fun in Mil Research Fun in Military Research I

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Fun in Mil Research Fun in Military Research I Fun in mil research Fun in Military Research I started as a Ministry of Supply student apprentice at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough in 1957. This involved a year divided between college and learning the basic skills of fitting, turning, skiving, etc, before moving on to the research departments of Aerodynamics, Weapons, Radio, etc. The first time that I took a hacksaw to an aircraft was when I was asked to dismantle a De H. Venom wing for examination of the main spar. No problems had been experienced until 1956. Remember, this was the time of the Suez war. During the war the naughty Egyptian gunners unsportingly shot at our brave aircrew, causing them to pull higher g than they did in training, to avoid being colanderised. This resulted in creaks which might indicate cracks. My job was to reveal the damage. From there I went onto bigger things. I was asked to start dismantling a 4 engined Avro Lincoln. I had the job of removing all the fire extinguishers and letting them off. Throughout the 5 year apprenticeship we had rag weeks in September immediately after the SBAC Farnborough Airshow. We were allowed to borrow bomb trolley flat beds to build floats on prior to the procession and to use as much of the material left over from the dismantled Airshow stands as we wanted. It was good training in design. Someone built a quarter scale submarine complete with deck gun that used sodium chlorate and sugar. I built a fire breathing dragon which had a Tiger Moth fuselage as a tail. Unfortunately, the smoke blew back inside at speeds above 4m.p.h. All my floats incorporated a barrel of cider which was mandatory. Unfortunately, this led to a disaster when my galleon float capsized. We had been plying the tractor driver with too much cider and he took a corner too fast. The weight of the 3 scaffolding pole masts was too much and the whole galleon was ripped off by centrifugal force. My friend Graham Rood and I had our fall broken by landing on a girl called Natasha who was then taken to hospital. She was diagnosed as suffering from a serious excess of alcohol. On another occasion we, the RAG committee, were taken to court for aiding and abetting the driver of a motorised bedstead. He had cleverly attached 4 wheels and a Villiers motorcycle engine to a YMCA bed. He was fined £10 (two weeks pay) and had his license taken away for 6 months. This did not endear the police to us. We were let off with a caution. Perhaps I should digress, or regress, to the first year of the apprenticeship. We found that personal things were disappearing in the hostel. (Lawrence of Arabia had lived in the hostel as Aircraftman Shaw when it was an RAF barracks but we could not blame him). As we were all new and didn’t know each others background, we suspected each other of the thefts-except for “Jock” who was the heart and soul of the party-until someone spotted him wearing their Cavalry Twill trousers. The “authorities” were alerted but nothing was done and he remained. Some of the lads with a car tied Jock up and delivered him to the altar stone at Stonehenge and left him there. Unfortunately, the police found him and returned him to Farnborough before the lads got back as their car had broken down on the way back. Life is SO UNFAIR. 1 Car rallies were frequent but not all had cars so I decided to have one around the RAE using the internal bus service that ran every 20 minutes or so. The clues were such as : “Go to Q153 building room G4 and find out what is marked on the calendar for 6th May”. Now I had already found that that date had written on it: “Meeting with Smith here”. So a succession of strange apprenti would be knocking on the door with all sorts of weird reasons for entering the office and looking at the calendar. I often wondered what the poor bloke using the office thought. It was all good fun and a help for further educating the uninitiated Degree types at Cranfield who were sadly lacking in RAE apprentice expertise in rocket/bomb making. After 2 years at Cranfield I moved to Boscombe Down to help with research into ejection seats, parachutes, helicopters and aviation medicine. It was fun blasting ejection seats with air in front of a blower tunnel powered by 6 Merlin engines. The sound from 10 yards away was awesome. It was also the time when we had TSR2. I saw every flight except for the first which took place on a Sunday. If we hadn’t had it cancelled by the Wilson Government we would still be selling spares for it all over the world. That reminds me. Wilson had a house on the Scillies. There was a lovely picture of him boarding a Sea King to get there, wearing a Mk.1 bone dome the wrong way round. I reckon the Navy did it purposely. We found a new way to drill holes in the Salisbury Plain chalk. We dropped field guns from Beverlys and sometimes the parachutes didn’t open! At other times we flew the Beverly at just a foot above the ground to drop platforms out of the back. I asked the pilot what it was like to fly such a large lumbering aircraft so low. He replied “It’s like flying a council house from the top bedroom window”. Helicopters were more fun but still had some risks. I was doing some de-misting trials in a Wasp with Marvin Buss –an ex-‘Nam pilot. He was also built like a council house but shorter. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the windscreen to mist up despite the O.A.T. being below zero. So we started “hurrring” on the screen with deep breaths. I soon began to hyperventilate and felt very dizzy and hoped he didn’t. I met him years later in Alabama but he could not recall such a minor incident. In the Aeromedical section there was a RAF Medic who was trying to make an automatic blood pressure meter (sphygmomanometer). He had a tall tube of mercury with electrodes situated at 1cm intervals. As the mercury rose and fell as the bags inflated or deflated there were a series of sparks. The mercury column was open at the top so we were all exposed to mercury vapour. (Moral: Never let the Medical Profession try to engineer anything). One of the good things about Boscombe Down and, indeed, most airfields is the mushroom crop, especially if you can get to normally “out of bounds” parts by helicopter. Return to RAE Farnborough I was not doing much ergonomics at Boscombe so I moved back to Farnborough to the Human Engineering Division which was concerned with making life easier for aircrew by better cockpit design, controls, displays and clothing, etc. It was in the days of Blue Sky research and my boss Bob Thorne said I could choose what I wanted to do (within reason). As hovercraft were the up and coming thing I chose to examine their controls, vision, noise, thermal environment. 2 This entailed flying up each day to RAE Bedford where I learnt to drive a Britten Norman CC2 Cushioncraft. The controls were almost unmanageable, especially on a sloping airfield. The original CC2 was underpowered, so 2 Volkswagon engines were mounted either side driving propellers. They were controlled by small stiff throttle levers mounted on top of 2 whipstaves used originally to control yaw. It was almost impossible to set up the same revs’ on both engines. Starting at the top of the airfield I soon would begin a pirouette all the way down to the bottom-unless I drifted over the 1127 (later to become the Harrier) engine test grid, where I lost all my air cushion, and therefore lift. Embarassingly, a crane had to be called up to lift me off. About this time the Ministry of Technology had funded an expedition up the Amazon but got little in return. The next year the BBC and Daily Mirror asked the Ministry to help fund another expedition to Africa. This time the Ministry insisted upon sending one of their people on it to do scientific research. Who had hovercraft experience, was both capable and quite expendable? They came up with my name. So on the 12th October 1969 I set off for Dakar in Senegal. All expedition members were issued with Kit bags. This was the first error in a poorly organised expedition. At Baggage Claim I saw my cylindrical Kit bag reach the top of the moving luggage ramp, hit the top sill and then roll back down again. Eventually I had to get the device stopped and retrieve it manually. By this time it was early morning. I took a frightening taxi ride to my hotel, (converted French prison) checked in and went to sleep. I was soon awoken by a pimp knocking on my door offering the services of the fattest, ugliest woman I had ever seen. I politely declined the offer. We set off in an SRN6 hovercraft up the coast to St Louis at the mouth of the Senegal river to await the rest of the party of scientists and journalists. Over the next month we travelled up the Senegal river as far as we could. We dismantled the craft, put it on a narrow gauge railway and reached the River Niger where we reassembled it.
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