OT The Vulcan Bomber

[Adrian]

You've got two months, ffs.

[Huge]

I used to fly to Copenhagen every Wednesday morning from Heathrow and more often than not the aircraft in front of us was the morning Concord flight to Washington. When he opened the taps for takeoff, everything in our aircraft rattled & on a couple of occasions some of the overhead lockers fell open. As he accelerated away down the runway you could see two things, one impressive - into the exhausts of the engines, the mouth of Hell, one less so - the huge plume of filth the thing chucked out the back.

[Vir Campestris]

That's a B17.

Andy

[bert]

Fantastic plane. Flew back from Monaco Grand Prix from Nice - just before it crashed. Same pilot.

Taking off was like riding down the runway on a rocket.

[Vir Campestris]

Harriers don't have afterburners.

On another note...

I was at Farnborough one year. There were two things which particularly stick: One was that they sat a Tornado on the end of the runway. lit the afterburner, set the brakes on full, and gave it as much throttle as they could without it moving. Everyone was watching it, and no-one saw the other 4 coming the other way down the runway at 0.8...

And Brian Trubshaw, Concorde chief pilot IIRC, brought one empty over from Heathrow, did a touch and go, then did his damnedest to to a fighter full-afterburner-vertical-climb. He got quite steep!

Andy

[DerbyBorn]

[e-mail] wrote in news: [e-mail]:

I think that relates to a RB211. The VC10 was its flying testbed.

Also:

[Dave Liquorice]

What makes you think that modern jets aren't shove out a huge plume of filth? Just because you can't see it...

Sounds good, I hate flying in jumbos and the like, they just take far too long trundling down the runway. Quite liked the Trislander, that felt as if it went about 20 yds and then leapt into the sky. Proper flying, fold down canvas seats, two per seat, everyone with a window, pilot lines the passengers up on the tarmac and then loads you in to keep the plane more or less in trim. B-) Hercules are good as well, it gets noisy, it gets very noisey (you are issued with earplugs), it stays noisey, it gets less noisy and lo you are somewhere else and you can watch the control rods moving in the roof.

[tony sayer]

Well I might, @ 19.8 stone. fit in the bomb bay as long as they aren't feeling that grievous to anyone.. make a hell of a bang;!..

[John Rumm]

Yup 'Sharkey' Ward's book was not exactly complimentary...

[John Rumm]

The command on Hermes also did not have any faith in the Blue Fox radar on the harriers and hence wasted hundreds of hours of flying time (both crew and machine) sending up harrier pilots to do ineffectual "visual" scans of areas rather than using the radar. The squadron based on invincible had already setup and proved that the radar was performing far in excess of its theoretical specification. Enabling one plane to scan thousands of times the square area for hostile forces as was being achieved with 4 planes on the other carrier.

[tony sayer]

And no sheep were caused to shit themselves in the making of this film;!...

[tony sayer]

In article , fred scribeth thus

Suggest you read a bit more about the subject;!...

[fred]

You know nowt of what you speak . . . .

[John Rumm]

The Argies made any number of fatal strategic mistakes - mostly not fully committing to the engagement, flying some of their best aircraft to neutral countries so they were impounded etc, rather than lost in dogfights, and telling their pilots not to engage with the harriers. (Even if they had lost aircraft at a 5:1 ratio, they could have won simply by attrition).

[Dave Liquorice]

Depends on the weapon yield and burst height. The megaton weapons have blast areas (as in everything effectively destroyed) in the tens of miles radius depending on burst height.

And travelling at, as near as damn it, the speed of light. The shock wave will be way behind it. Modern example the the shock from the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion(*) arrived with enough umph to shatter windows minuets after the explosion had been witnessed.

(*) Estimated to be 400 to 500 kilotons. Hiroshima was about 16 kilotons, Nagasaki about 21 kilotons.

[Robin]

Thanks for that link - the more so as one of the comments on the page led to the where they sell flights *in* the Lancaster in Canada (and for less dosh!)

It'll take some planning to get away for long enough but there's nothing like a really big carrot at the end of the stick :)

[PeterC]

I don't know if this is right, but I saw that one problem arose from automated welding with the welding rod on a reel. With manual welding the weld runs for the length of the rod then stops; with the automated process the weld is very long and when it starts to unzip it keeps going.

[Tim Streater]

Girlfriend at the time (some 25 years ago) was a NASA Program Manager so I got a tour of NASA Ames. Not just a Harrier in bits but also one of their ozone measuring planes that she was a program manager for. They had the ceiling down so you could see all the control wires - never seen so many.

[Tim Streater]

Seems to me he was just cautious. Lose a carrier and it would have been game over.

[Adrian]

Ah yes, Concorde taking off. Follow the line of the runways west from Heathrow, and just past the M25 you will find the Queen Mother reservoir, home to Datchet Water Sailing Club. You didn't want to be sailing on the south end of the pond when Concorde took off, the whole boat would shake.

Adrian