PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Did You Fly The Vulcan?? (Merged)
View Single Post
Old 24th Aug 2020, 15:57
  #2056 (permalink)  
Pontius Navigator
I don't own this space under my name. I should have leased it while I still could
 
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Lincolnshire
Age: 81
Posts: 16,777
Received 5 Likes on 5 Posts
Time Lord has answered the question in a different way from What I thought. As far as training in flying he is correct. A sortie was put together by the plotter to meet the requirements of each crew member, a low level route, a number of attacks, fighter affiliation ,time for pilot training etc.

I would answer differently and consider ground training. Operational training was very much an individual crew thing and quite separate from BTRs. Target study was one hour per target per month. Crews were subject to no notice examination by wing staff using a Command authored questionnaire every 6 months and potentially for every target. Prificiency and safe handling of nuclear weapons was tested annually by an MOD Team that would examine all aircrew charged with nuclear weapons safety. Weapons engineers and security staff were also checked. The responsibility for on-sqn training for this was vested in a Wing Train ing Officer. Then each crew woukd be checked annually by a Group Standards Unit. Sqns were responsible for ground training programmes to meet the rigourus examination here. This was done through regular ground training sessions by leaders in the sqn.

Whilst the standardised aka 'the Trappers' were generally feared their searching questions were also intended to impart updated knowledge.

A crew failure with either weapons checks or aircrew standards could reflect badly on the San execs.

As an aside,a question that produced a WTF response was "how often does the R88 camera take a (radar) picture on a bombing run?"
7.5 seconds - correct.
"looking at the film you notice that the picture interval is not every 7.5 seconds why? "
"The camera firing pulse used the same 28b J-line as the Scan Tilt Up command"

Apart from the FFS response the reason for the question was because someone had reported a fault.

​​​​​
Pontius Navigator is offline