Originally Posted by
Buster15
Excellent. I know Seams and Brian well but not John.
The transfer of RB199 repair from Marham to Bristol went well with some help from the RAF.
It is interesting that Bristol built engines eventually turned out to be more reliable. A number of reasons which I ought not go into in this forum.
Anyway, this will all pass into history in a couple of months for the UK while German, Italy and Saudi Arabia fly on for a number of years.
In my days, engines were pulled initially due to mechanical failure i.e. M08 blades failing and combustion chamber unzipping. Other than that, they were pulled when the thrust was below the minimums during the pyro clean/cal.
A lot of people hated working in the engine bay because of the repetitive nature but I enjoyed the challenge of getting my engine pass off with the required thrust. It was easy if you were supplied brand new modules to build your engine but that never happened. If you were given a HP comp with 300 hours on it, you knew it would be a struggle because although it was life'd at 1200 hours, after 300hrs, the internal seals were worn and it was losing thrust. The trick was to try and manage the other rotating seal clearances throughout the engine. When the manual gave a min and max clearance, you had to aim for the minimum to give you a chance. I don't recall us having any problems with badly built engines. (edit... just remembered one which self destructed on the test bed)
When I last popped into Marham engine bay in 2009, they were operating a pulse line system where the teams didn't get to build the entire engine, just part of it. It must have been soul destroying and I know that morale was at rock bottom.