Ex-FAAWAFU Posted August 20, 2016 Author Share Posted August 20, 2016 My memories of the Sea King mainly revolve around being winched out of an MS10 dinghy, in seas going up and down at least 20ft, and after having been boaked over by my Loadmaster. Whereas my memories of Albert mainly revolve round incipient deafness, imminent requirement for new fillings after all that rattling, and the sorest of sore bums after a VERY long trip down to Stanley. 7 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dads203 Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 Whereas my memories of Albert mainly revolve round incipient deafness, imminent requirement for new fillings after all that rattling, and the sorest of sore bums after a VERY long trip down to Stanley. One should also not forget the amazing toilet facilities offered by the C-130 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatalbert Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 (edited) "OI" don't diss the Herc.At least it has a toilet,and cooking facilities 😀,and you can get up walk around and stretch your legs.☺ Edited August 20, 2016 by fatalbert Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melvyn hiscock Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 Prior to one of the Dunsfold Wings and Wheels, one of the girls that work there asked me how aeroplanes fly and I told her it was by magic. Helicopters, on the other hand, use scorcery..... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted August 20, 2016 Author Share Posted August 20, 2016 You can get up and walk around in a Sea King, too. Not very far, admittedly, but enough to stretch the legs. On busy (ho ho) passive ASW sorties the non-flying pilot often unstrapped to help chuck the buoys out and stop the Looker from losing his plot completely. Toilet? Pee tube up front (the mind rather boggles at the thought of a Pusser's She-Wee attachment with the addition of female aircrew)... and there was always the sonobuoy chute (aka hole in the floor) for anything more serious - and believe me, it has been used for such emergencies... No galley, I grant you, but happiness is an RN bagrat... I wasn't dissing the Herc. Debs started it with her "thousands of parts in close formation" slander! 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ascoteer Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 The written word is not slander. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted August 20, 2016 Author Share Posted August 20, 2016 Prior to one of the Dunsfold Wings and Wheels, one of the girls that work there asked me how aeroplanes fly and I told her it was by magic. Helicopters, on the other hand, use scorcery..... One of the (ahem) joys of foreign port visits was/is ship open to visitors (SOTV). In a carrier, unsurprisingly, this always featured some poor sods being spammed to don flying overalls and stand by a cab answering bloody stupid questions. Needless to say this developed into a competition for who could get away with telling the most outrageous lie. In my era in Ark this competition was won hands down by Ted Brown, a US Navy exchange pilot (indeed, the predecessor of Jim Taylor who was flying with me for the ditching). In Mayport Florida he managed to convince some US visitors a ) that the ski jump was a clever Limey invention to stop the jets instead of arrestor wires and b ) that the flight deck was made of specially treated balsa wood to save top weight. Magic and sorcery feel like cast iron fact in comparison with much of our b*llocks! I have lost count of the number of SOTV punters who went away convinced that the big whizzer on top holds the helicopter up and the little one at the back pushes it along... 4 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ascoteer Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 Was the sonics processor in the Sea King AQS901 (same as Grimrod)? Could you drop CAMBS and Barra or just Lofar and Difar? Edit: Surely the 'big whizzer on top' was there to keep the crew cool in tropical climes... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted August 20, 2016 Author Share Posted August 20, 2016 (edited) Was the sonics processor in the Sea King AQS901 (same as Grimrod)? Could you drop CAMBS and Barra or just Lofar and Difar? Edit: Surely the 'big whizzer on top' was there to keep the crew cool in tropical climes... We could only process LOFAR & DIFAR in the Mk5, though we sometimes carried more sophisticated buoys when we knew there were going to be MPAs about - for instance to drop one just as went off task if we knew a Pelican was about to come and pick it up but we didn't have enough gas to hang about. Mk.6 had much better sonics processing - indeed that was the main difference between it and the Mk5 (as well as composite rotor blades, better radios and a re-worked emergency gearbox oil system). Better active sonar, too, from memory - tho markdipxv711's your man for that, what with being one of yer actual ASW Aircrewmen and all. The tropical fan system only really worked with the convertible version of the aircraft, but lowering the roof in flight was not cleared... Edited August 20, 2016 by Ex-FAAWAFU 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wyverns4 Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 A question for people. I know there are lots of people on here who know every bit as much about helicopters as I do. Equally, there are a lot who know very little - including some aviators who seem to regard them as a cross between a Device of Beelzebub and one of Heath Robinson's more dangerous jokes (you know who you are, Debs...). Errr, me too... As for egg beaters and jolly jacks in grow bags But, this looks like its going to be fun so and Christian, exiled to africa 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ascoteer Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 We could only process LOFAR & DIFAR in the Mk5, though we sometimes carried more sophisticated buoys when we knew there were going to be MPAs about - for instance to drop one just as went off task if we knew a Pelican was about to come and pick it up but we didn't have enough gas to hang about. Ah the good ol' 16 buoy. I do know that FAA DIFARs differed from RAF DIFARs - they weren't cleared for dropping from Grimrod owing to the fact they were a tad shorter and would foul the Alpha and Bravo (rotary) launchers...Ask me how I know this! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted August 20, 2016 Author Share Posted August 20, 2016 (edited) Rotary launchers are the sort of luxury that only came in with the Merlin for the FAA. In the Sea King it was simply racks of them all along the side in the back, which you prepared manually and then dropped through a hole in the floor. When I told my Dad this he thought it highly amusing that his son was using exactly the same method as he had in a Barracuda in 1946 (his squadron was an ASW trials squadron and they did all sorts of stuff with early sonobuoys immediately after the war). I can never remember the difference (they had different size classifications - G size & F size???), but when I first started we were still using the old large size buoys - about 3' tall and weighed a ton? Probably had bakelite and valves in the bloody things. Only later did we start using the (relatively) dinky little buoys that were about a foot tall. Mind you, I once recovered a Soviet buoy dropped from a May; we lowered out poor crewman down on the winch and he wrapped his arms around it. I thought the poor bloke was going to blow gasket - it weighed about 30 kgs (even without the sea anchor dragging beneath it). Edited August 20, 2016 by Ex-FAAWAFU 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted August 20, 2016 Author Share Posted August 20, 2016 (edited) For those of you who have absolutely no idea what Ascoteer and I are blethering on about... LOFAR (LO Frequency Analysis & Recording) buoys do what it says on the tin - i.e. they don't provide you with any directional information; whereasDIFAR (DIrectional Frequency Analysis & Recording) buoys also give you a bearing of the sound. You need both to narrow down the position of a submarine target. CAMBS (Command Active MultiBeam Sonobuoy) was, as its name suggests, an active buoy (i.e. it emitted a "ping"), and the FAA in my era didn't use them. Since this also gave away that the submarine was being tracked (though more modern submarines were easily capable of hearing the buoys dropping into the water), it was generally only used for the final check just as a weapon was about to go into the water. The US Navy used to call these "Cadillac boo-eeys", since it was reckoned that each one cost about the same as a brand new Cadillac. BARRA buoys were Australian and we never used them. I think they were passive too. Basically, they are all detection and tracking devices for anti-submarine warfare, which was the UK's NATO Bread-and-butter throughout the Cold War; we (by which I mean the RN and the Air Force MPA force, with whom we worked extremely closely) were essentially the ASW specialist arm of the US Navy. The decision to bin the Nimrod Mk4 was nuts - at least we have got round to ordering P8s now. Anyone would think that we had ceased to be an island, that 90%+ of our imports no longer arrive by sea, and/or that the Russian Navy had scrapped all its submarines.... Edited August 20, 2016 by Ex-FAAWAFU 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ascoteer Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 I think the large Jez buoys were the 'A' class buoys but I could be wrong (it was a long time ago). Talking of retreiving buoys... We were operating in the Med hunting for (IIRC) a Tango (or it might have been a Kilo) ie a diesel boat. We had a field of LOFAR/DIFAR deployed but TBH, unless the sub ran into a buoy the chances of finding him were about the square root of damn all. Now the Med is quite different acoustically to the N. Atlantic and it's also more transparent visually. All of a sudden on the intercomm we hear from the Port Beam: "MARK, MARK! Submarine in the water!" rapidly followed by the hollow 'thud' of the retro firing... We manouevre hard to get back to the datum and my Nav (an irascible short Scottish fellow who had been banned from the Officers' Mess for telling the Staish to 'eff off' during his post Dining Night speech, but a superb TacNav who really understood submariners) decided to surround the sub with DIFAR and then chuck a Ranger buoy right down the sub's throat. Author's note:DIFAR was a Directional Passive buoy (DIIrectional low Frequency Analysis and Recording) whereras Ranger was an American made Active buoy (ie a 'pinger'). Unlike CAMBS it would start pinging as soon as it went in the water. The sub went to flank speed and we spent several enjoyable minutes repeatedly lobbing Rangers down it's throat. Eventually it surfaced and a Russian Matelot Frogman went over the side and retrieved one of our DIFARs and took it onboard the sub. Our Lead Wet (lead sonics operator) was a fluent Russian speaker. Listening to the bouy he patched it in to the intercomm and you could clearly hear Russian being spoken. When quizzed he translated: "Will it explode?" and "How do you turn this thing off?" Shortly after that the system went dead, I assume they'd cut the hydrophone cable. However we did get some interesting recording of the noises inside the submarine. HQ18 Group just about had kittens over that! 12 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted August 20, 2016 Author Share Posted August 20, 2016 Passive ASW in the Med was a hideous game. Especially in the Eastern Med; the temperature and salinity layers around the Nile delta are so ludicrous that you could drive an acoustic hammer around and be pretty safe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ascoteer Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 CAMBS could be commanded to ping and commanded to listen. It could also be commanded to change depth. Finally it could be scuttled when you'd finished with it. BARRA was an Australian-made Directional passive buoy with a 16 hydrophone array. It was particularly good at broadband tracking whereas DIFAR was better at narrowband. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miggers Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 (edited) Listening to proper musichttp://www.1940sukradio.co.uk/whilst reading the latest goss in here. Crispo,don't you,Deb or markxv dare STFU,if anyone tells any of you to STFU then I'll send some of the big lads out to have a word with 'em. We all know what the big and little whizzer's do(make noise,lots of draught and blow things away),but we don't know just eggzactly how they do it,so dunna worry about explaining anything to us armchair pilots/navs/backseaters/lookers and WHY. Edited August 20, 2016 by Miggers 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted August 20, 2016 Author Share Posted August 20, 2016 CAMBS ...could be scuttled when you'd finished with it. That's just showing off! I sometimes wonder just how many hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money that our respective services chucked into the North Atlantic in the 70s & 80s... 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ascoteer Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 Well it was pretty Secret Squirrel at the time. I was always told that CAMBS cost the same as a Rover Metro. On a 'Riser/Sinker' (submarine 'snort'/periscope) we'd put CAMBS/BARRA/DIFAR in short of the datum, CAMBS/BARRA/DIFAR on the datum and CAMBS/BARRA/DIFAR long of the datum, before turning back into a MAD (Magnetic Anomoly Detector) hunting pattern. 60 degrees AOB at 500 ft was sporty stuff in a '50's airliner! We did this in the 'tube' (MCT - Mission Crew Trainer) all the time. I don't think I ever dropped a CAMBS for real though. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miggers Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 (edited) That's just showing off! I sometimes wonder just how many hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money that our respective services chucked into the North Atlantic in the 70s & 80s... Yeah,but it kept those Soviet subs on their toes.... And don't worry,every time a Spey 'Toom roared off one of Ark's cats in full re-heat it burnt enough AvGas to keep Crispy's Sea King aloft for two hours(so just a touch less to the gallon than your average Rover Metro or similar noddy car ), never mind the cost of the bridle strop that went splash into Oggin. Personally,I think it was very worth it...... Edited August 20, 2016 by Miggers 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ascoteer Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 Psst Miggers AVTUR, or rather, in the case of the FAA, AVCAT. AVGAS is what Bulldogs burnt... 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
At Sea Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 Passive ASW in the Med was a hideous game. Especially in the Eastern Med; the temperature and salinity layers around the Nile delta are so ludicrous that you could drive an acoustic hammer around and be pretty safe. I spent an 'enjoyable' week on a Research ship doing a lawn mowing pattern across the med dropping CTD buoys every 1/2 mile to get an accurate map of this. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ascoteer Posted August 20, 2016 Share Posted August 20, 2016 Hmm. It appears I've just thread crapped all over you Crisp about MPA ASW. I do apologise! I shall shut-up now. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyf117 Posted August 21, 2016 Share Posted August 21, 2016 (edited) Content withdrawn - I will NOT be threatened by a moderator, simply because I queried the actions of another... Edited June 27, 2020 by andyf117 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyf117 Posted August 21, 2016 Share Posted August 21, 2016 (edited) Content withdrawn - I will NOT be threatened by a moderator, simply because I queried the actions of another... Edited June 27, 2020 by andyf117 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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