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Westland Lynx Prototypes


Lynx7

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4 Skua in the Gulf was doable - just - as my avatar shows (larger version below) although only when Gem 204/5 series engines were fitted post about 1987/8 and even then, if we lost an engine on take off we were ending up in the water.  I seem to recall TCrit times (the time it took after take off to reach safe single engine flying conditions after take off) of 49 seconds whereas in normal operations in the N Atlantic without a weapon load it was closer to 1-2 seconds.

 

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I only flew 4 warshot a few times.  As Crisp says it was more common during Op Granby to fly with 2 Skua to starboard and the Yellow Veil jammer to port.  During my first Gulf deployment in 1988 which was during the tanker war, our usual load was the 0.5 inch Heavy Machine Gun pod to starboard and Yellow Veil to port with for some aircraft the Sandpiper IR camera mounted on the inboard port weapon carrier though not every flight had one as there were only 5 turrets procured.  We also used to have the M130 Chaff and Flare system mounted just forward of the transportation joint.   And finally some aircraft carried the Challenge IR jammer on twin turrets just aft of and above the Pilot's/Observer's doors but it wasn;t very successful.  Even though I flew all of the introduction into service trials, operationally I only flew the system 3 times before I consigned it to a corner of the hanger! 

 

Note if you are modelling the jammer pod there were two versions.  The Mk 1 used up to ~April 1989 and the Mk 2 variant thereafter.  The visual difference was the smaller antennae.  The Mk 1 had pointed side fitted antennae fore and aft  whereas the later pods had a larger, more bulbous side mounted antennae reflecting their wider frequency range.  You can see the two different versions below; I'll see if I can find an image showing the Mk 2 actually fitted to an aircraft.

 

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As an ex-Sea King driver (with an ex-ASW Observer, too; we were a very rare all-Pinger Lynx crew), it always used to make me laugh when the Lynx world got all excited about TCrit going above a couple of seconds.  The Sea King HAS5 was horribly over-loaded (it improved somewhat with the HAS6), so we’d routinely spend long periods of a sortie (an hour or two, easily) not Safe Single Engine, especially if you were doing active ASW (i.e. hovering a lot).  
 

It had to be bloody windy at high all-up weights / high fuel states for you to be able to lose an engine in the hover / slow speed flight without ditching; indeed, I proved that by ditching following a fuel computer failure with associated engine runaway down while hovering off Southern Spain.  We were at least an hour into that sortie and it was quite windy - but the moment the engine started to run down, the aircraft was only going in one direction… one which involved a large splash.  Luckily it was a computer problem, not the engine itself, so we could over-ride it and take off again.

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