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stever219

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Everything posted by stever219

  1. Boeing’s military division also has problems: the KC-46 programme has been plagued by delays, cost over-runs and quality control issues that have cost them many millions of dollars; the saga of the replacement for “Air Force 1 and 2” also just about beggars belief, but some of that is down to the customer.
  2. Oh what should have been. Designed at the behest of a committee that hadn’t consulted the customer on which the type was foisted by a disinterested government. Hamstrung by a “use as much existing kit as possible” policy inflicted on the design team and a string by of changes demanded by the prime customer (shades of the VC-10 fifteen years later) this was an aeroplane facing an uphill struggle from the moment of its conception. BSAA had faith in the type, but two unexplained disappearances didn’t help its prospects. I used to love drawing the basic Tudor shape, especially the stretched Mk. II and VII, and re-imagining them with tricycle undercarriages and either turboprops or pure jets in Ashton-style nacelles. Sadly future developments of the Tudor were never to be.
  3. I cannot believe (or maybe I can) that the FBI is crass enough to be telling passengers from the Alaska Airways Fligt 1282 incident that they may have been victims of a crime before they've actually determined that a crime has indeed been committed. I know that there are crimes of omission as well as commission but each must be the result of some degree of intent: if the problem is down to tired/bored/poorly-trained/poorly-supervised production line worker/s deliberate intent may be hard(er) to prove, especially at Board level. I suspect only the ambulance chasers will do well from this.
  4. There is some video footage on t'internet of ops at Dover showing arrivals and departures. I'll never forget the sounds of the engines running down at the end of a flight: most of the noise was due to the air from the cushion escaping under and between the fingers at the bottom. Engine starts could be interesting. One afternoon the final, final, final!! callfor Flight 559 to Calais had been made. The Departure Lounge hostesses had taken the foot passengers out to the craft and had come back in for a final tally of boarding cards. As they were doing this an American tourist came charging down the lounge, heaved both of the very heavy double-glazed doors open and legged it out onto the apron. By now the bow door had been closed and the steps had been pulled away from the sides. He went all the way down and turned right to try to get on via the stern door: as he did so the second pilot started number 2 engine, the starboard inner which produced a large sheet of oily orange flame and smoke just above head height and about eight feet in front of him. I have never seen anyone stop dead and turn white as rapidly as he did, before or since. By now the hostesses had legged it after him (short, close fitting skirts, high heels and summer blouses), they grabbed him and frogmarched him back into the lounge, heaving the doors shut very firmly. "Boarding card, NOW" demanded the senior hostesses. His hand was visibly shaking as he pulled it from his jacket pocket. The two hostesses looked at the card, looked at the man and informed him "This is for the next flight!" The look in his face was even more priceless as the hostesses strode off with their fisttfulls of boarding cards and I sloped off back to my office trying not to laugh too obviously.
  5. Sorry to hear of your loss Pete: like others here I‘ve been there too, three times so far. The most recent, Sooty, four months short of his 18th birthday, was paradoxically the hardest. Treasure your memories of Franko in the good times and be happy that you did the best for him m and that you gave him a safe and loving home. 8 months after Sooty’s passing we took on two 2-month old ex-pub kittens; they’re not replacements for our previous trio but they’re good company just the same. Maybe you’ll find a new friend to care for (or be servant to) but that’s for you to decide, just take your time.
  6. The model represents an early SR.N4; the vehicle-deck cabins were soon deleted as, with no view of the outside world, anyone susceptible to motion sickness would make it painfully obvious very quickly. The wing cabins were extended inboard to afford more seating with some sort of view, but the ride could still be “stimulating”. The depressions that Airfix have moulded either side of the pylons are the lift fan intakes and, as such should be open at the bottom but I suppose the extra cost in tooling the fans and their chambers would have pushed the kit beyond the bounds of affordability. The fans themselves are 11 feet in diameter and around three feet deep; they operate centrifugally and were balanced to within two ounces diametrically. Each fan and its associate propellor, the latter 19 feet in diameter, was driven by a 4,500 shp (approx,) Bristol Siddeley Marne Proteus gas turbine. The engines were mounted in pairs either side of the stern doors, of which more anon. Like nearly all of the conventional cross-channel ferries the vehicle deck was drive-through with loading at the stern, using mobile ramps, and offloading down the built-in bow door-cum-ramp. On one occasion we’d had an arrival from Calvin and the vehicle deck was chock full. As was normal practice as soon as the bow door was open the deckies would signal drivers to start engines and then marshall them off (the flight deck access ladder being slap on the centre line and quite close to the not over-wide doorway was prone to being clouted in the break-neck rush to clear Customs and Immigration). Also normal practice was to open the stern doors to help to clear the vehicle deck of exhaust fumes. Last on at Calais had been a bloke in a Range Rover with a speedboat on a trailer in tow. He’d seen the doors open, though ‘I’n not waiting for that lot to get off!” and stuck it in reverse. Without the ramps in there’s about a four-and-a-half foot drop from the vehicle deck to the ground as he discovered in short order. The trailer went off the edge, the front end, with overhanging boat bow, pivoted upwards and before he hit the brakes got very firmly wedged against the roof and the stern door frame. To say that the Hoverspeed people weren’t impressed is a big understatement: it was nearly peak season, all flights were fully booked and suddenly they had a ‘craft going nowhere. It took about two and a half hours, a crane, quite a lot of bad language and a degree of ingenuity to get boat, trailer and Range Rover off (two return flights lost) before the engineers could get in to assess for damage. I don’t think that that particular customer was ever welcomed back but ‘d love to see the correspondence with his insurers......
  7. As far as I can tell the F-100 was on loan from USAFM and/or had been funded under MDAP so were scrapped as the USAF didn’t want them back and they had to be “de-militarised”.
  8. @Colin W that looks beautiful. I have an on-line-auction-win Airfix MRCA that I want to finish in this colour scheme but the decals are beyond help: I certainly don't want to do '946 in her current weapons loading trainer colours though. I think you've at least inspired me to dig the kit out and get all of the big bits together. Please could you tell me how wide the red areas of the tailerons are? That way I can work out the masking for the outer wing panels, thank you.
  9. @bentwaters81tfw thank you for that! I'm presently in paid employment but that may not last much longer; I may have to quit on health grounds, so DWP here I come!!
  10. I left my original day job after 38 years and 5 weeks when my employer closed our office and left me (as a non-driver) with nowhere else I could get to without spending half the day getting to and from. By then the job had become a nightmare of self-justification and political-correctness gone mad and I couldn’t wait to go. The next morning, lyrics no in bed well after normal getting-up-time the feeling of relief that I never had to go back to the Fun Factory again was overwhelming! I vowed that I wasn’t going to slob around the house all day, although I had (and still have) a fair few d-I-y projects to get on with, and Her Late Majesty’s DWP wanted me to justify my entitlement to Jobseekers’ Allowance by actually seeking a job (WHY....?), so I wound up doing a number of training courses of dubious long-term value, but found a part-time job in a local department store coffee shop for 6 months and a volunteer post with a local charity which led ultimately to full-time paid employment there; I‘m still there over 7 years later but maybe for not much longer as, guess what?, we’ve had a bad attack of box-ticking, self-justifying politically-correct capability reduction seasoned with a big dollop of management ineptitude. I suppose that if I chuck the job, or it chucks me, I can get on with the d-I-y and to get some of my stash built before the Grim Reaper hauls me away to the manure tanks adjacent to the fire pits of Hades for eternity, but my state pension doesn’t kick in for another 29 months and my daughter’s petrol habit isn’t getting any better, so a further spell of low-paid employment beckons but I’ll see what I can get from it.
  11. Externally the Valiant tankers were identical to their B and PR siblings. All of the refuelling equipment, including a supplementary tank, was concealed within the bomb bay. The Airfix 1/72th kit has a fair representation of this in the current boxing or available separately for the initial release; there should be a few images on one, probably even on this august forum. I don’t think that any of the tankers appeared in the final camouflage scheme (I’ve an idea that some of them in the WZ- serial range were still in High Speed Silver) but I’d like to be proved wrong on that.
  12. Personal choice. I wrecked a set of roundels trying to get them over the stall-warning vanes and guards (SWS) and I've been wracking my brain cell for an "easy" way to avoid repeating the experience ever since. Using a template to locate them (use a known pair of vortex generators or skin joints as your fixed points to locate the SWS bits), removing them, applying the roundels then using the template and PVA to reinstate the SWS bits in just about the right place seems to be least likely to result in roundel wrecking. Others may know differently/better. If you're going to tape the template to the wing it's probably best to leave applying stencils 'til afterwards. HTH.
  13. @wimbledon99 the "other bits sticking up from the wing" are the stall warning vanes and their guards: Airfix haven't quite got them right for a parked Javelin, or one in controlled flight for that matter. From memory the vanes lay flat between the guards under most circumstances: as the Javelin approached the stall and the airflow began to break away from the wing upper surface the vanes would pivot about their leading edges, breaking an electrical circuit, illuminating a warning light and setting off an aural alarm in the cockpit. On my next Airfix Javelin I'll make a tape template of the vanes and guards before removing them, applying the roundels and then reinstating guards and vanes using PVA and the template to get them back in the rigtt(ish) place.
  14. I think it’s time me to chuck it for today: I’ve just mis-read the title of this thread as “UK’s (possible) new Chipmunk procurement”!
  15. There have been several threads on here about the original Lou IV that strongly suggest that the areas of the upper surfaces that had had the invasion stripes applied had subsequently been overpainted in a dark blue-grey. At least one eye-witness account from a respected aviation historian supports this. I'm currently stalled most of the way through building an Airfix P-51D-5 in these colours, mostly because the invasion stripes decals are about as thick and stiff as a sheet of deep-frozen lino.
  16. Thankfully not on our watch; we left it for the night sh1(f)t!"
  17. The latest generation of Airfix “tin wing” Harriers are good representations of the jet but the Sea Harriers leave quite a lot to be desired accuracy-wise. Like all 1/72th Harriers there’s not a lot going on in the cockpit but the instrument panel decals look a lot closer to the real thing than that in the ESCI kit. The GR. 3 lacks the fin tip extension of the real jet but Freightdog Models do/did a replacement. You can, of course, build an early, pointy-nosed, GR. 3 straight from the kit using suitable markings and colour scheme. IIRC Freightdog also produce a Blue Eric-fit gun pack for an Operation Corporate GR. 3 to park alongside your Black Buck Vulcan.
  18. I used to work in the Import Freight area of a well-known cross-channel ferry port and can still remember the import entry for a German-built Sch!tt-blasting machine (that was the description on the invoice) although, maybe fortunately, I never saw the machine itself!
  19. I must confess that this is the first e-mail that I expected to get back; it's often used as a holding reply to let you know that your e-mail's been received and to give a very rough idea of the timescale for a response. Airfix's turn round time has always been better than that in my experience.
  20. I’ve recently had to ask Airfix for a replacement cockpit canopy part for a 1/24th Spitfire IX due wholly to my own special brand of crack-handedness. I coughed to it in my initial e-mail and asked how to make payment for the part; the next I heard from Airfix was a polite e-mail saying that my replacement part is on its way! Two days later it arrived so well packed that it took me over 5 minutes to get int it. Brilliant customer service Airfix. And now back to your scheduled thread......
  21. You could do worse than try to contact the de Haviland Aircraft Museum at Salisbury Hall in Hertfordshire. It's a fantastic museum and has access to much archive material and a complete Dove airframe IIRC.
  22. @Lord Riot I'm enjoying watching you slaving over this one: I also have an Academy F-4J to be built in 'J(UK) fit lurking in The Loft of Doom so I will, of you don't mind (or rven if you do!) shamelessly pinch at least some of your fixes for it. I ws fortunate to be able to get a set of the Alley Cat seamless intakes for this kit: they certainly helped with some aspects of the installation but I might need to revisit this. I'm not sure if they include the air data probes that live about 12 inches back from the lips on the outer walls (have a look through the images on the BM Walkaroind pages or BPAG's posts on here that cover the rescuing of ZE360 from the Fire Pits of Manston (there's got to be a book in that description!)).
  23. @Navy Bird wishing you well for tomorrow. Please don’t go too heavy with the panel line wash: I was fortunate enough to get up close and personal with XL231 in 1970-something (as a Grey, Green and White K. Mk. 2) and later, in the early 2000s, at Elvington (it was hammering down with rain), and XH672 at Cosford several years later. The panel joints on the latter looked like they’d been drawn on with a 2H pencil at most. Admittedly she’d been bulled up for her position in the museum but the “bucket of instant sunshine” delivery vehicles were generally pretty clean too.
  24. @Navy Birdhoping that SNOT & FESS go well for you; I've got some mildly invasive investigation due in a few weeks and I'm not really looking forward to it, even for a day off from a job that I'm liking less by the nanosecond. With regard to the monochromeness of the Victor you can break some of it up by using a different shade of white on at least some of the dielectric panels, e.g. the H2S and a couple of panels between this and the "elephant ears" above and behind the nosewheel bay and, IIRC, a big one on the lower rear fuselage. There are some lovely air-to-air images of Victors showing various quantities and qualities of crud around the ventral engine access doors and the main wheel bay doors. Fingers crossed for you on the 29th.
  25. There would be quite a bit of work to convert back from Blue Steel to free-fall weapon(s); the Blue Steel was suspended from a trapeze-like structure inside the weapons bay which would have to come out, as would the environmental control pack for the weapon. The Victor weapons bay doors were more complex than those of the Vulcan, having sections that matched the upper profile of the weapon which slid inside the outer/upper sections of the doors whilst the weapon was in position and slid down to restore the original profile once Blue Steel had been launched.
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