Originally Posted by
Buster15
I had the privilege and pleasure of working on the RB199 engine during both development, production and in-service support.
I spent time working at Warton, TTTE, Marham, Honington, Bruggen, Laarbruch, Coningsby, Leeming, Leuchars, Lossiemouth and St Athan.
Of course the engine had a number of problems in service but it was an extremely challenging design requirement given the technology and materials of the time.
The RB199 certainly came a long way. I remember my first engine bay tour at Honnington in the late 80's when the mean time between removals was just 176 hours. The classic "VIB" caption followed by the boroscope inspection that confirmed that half of one of the HPT blades was missing. Still, after the introduction of single crystal HPT blades, the engines were doing 400 hours between removal. When I returned to the Tornado as a civvy in 2008, I was pleasantly surprised to find some engines were lasting 1000 hours. On the squadron, our biggest problem was during GW1 when the oil consumption for those long hot flights was marginal.
I do hope they manage to sort out a farewell flypast for the Tornado. Yes, I know the Lightning, Vulcan etc were iconic and who doesn't love them but I reckon that the Tonka has been our most utilised strike aircraft in combat situations since WW2