I remember the early days, as an FRS2, of ZE695. She was the first of the new toys we got to get our hands on, when she was based at Boscombe Down with the OEU.
Unfortunately, the wrinkles had definitley not been ironed out and, I believe, the RN (one officer in particular....no names, no pack drill etc) were so keen to get the over-budget and way, way, late machines into FAA hands that they accepted a crock. The SHAR TP at the time, a very good mate of mine, was equally scathing and had a toilet roll list of things to put right on the machine. Of course, these eventually got done and the FAA ended up with a very good weapons platform, in the guise of the FA2.
I flew ZE695 a couple of times at the end of June 1993, when she was on the OEU. Comments in my logbook include better radar pick-ups by the target FRS1 than I was getting with the still very early days Blue Vixen radar. Also, decidedly unimpressed by the 'new' pitot/static system that had the head down altimeter climbing and descending +/- 700' by simply wiggling the stick back and forth, whilst remaining in level flight (important to remember that at this point in time, the head down instruments were still the primary ones as the 'kit' was prone to topple at a moments notice and, therefore, could not be relied upon to provide a reliable platform and horizon). Moving Target indications in the air to ground mode were unusable. Did like having the RPM/JPT indications in the HUD
As I said, this really was the first time we saw the FRS2 and it was very much early days for us (shouldn't have been but, then, we are talking about British Aerospace
), so there was a lot of new stuff to play with, if and when it worked. ZE695 gave us our first glimpses of the potentially excellent radar, which then went on to prove itself to be just that.