Originally Posted by
Allan Lupton
Yes indeed!
Happily John was one of us that did so which, as I've always pointed out, adds appropriate weight to what is written by real people.
Personal memory includes seeing and hearing him in a Harrier hovering more or less level with my second-floor office at Hatfield - as I wrote some years ago, if he'd worked at Hatfield (which he nearly did) his demos of the 146 wouldn't have been as much fun (for him and us) as his Harrier routines.
I'm sorry we have this thread, of course, but it can't be helped that we lose people of our generation rather often these days.
The '146 didn't do too badly in the hands of production TPs.
Returning from Bergen with DanAir, we had a full load of pax and the LHS was a Hatfield pilot. He cancelled the FMC for takeoff to show me how it could perform; we easily made 2,000ft by the upwind end of the runway.