Originally Posted by
212man
I don't think there is any connection between the events and the fixed doors policy, but someone like ShyTorque will no doubt know the history. All of which is probably better placed in a separate thread to this one.
My recollection is that at least one cockpit door had come adrift, resulting in the engineering edict, which most of us saw as an overreaction and at times a great inconvenience. But it was before my time (I didn’t join the Puma fleet until 1979, around the time when “Far East Driver” left the RAF.
As I mentioned earlier, it was very difficult to properly secure an RAF Puma for the night. The cockpit door keys were removed from the aircraft; although the cabin door keys were kept on the undercarriage switch pin. In my experience, problems sometimes occurred when aircraft were left parked in army barracks! Drunken squaddies do some very stupid things, such as climbing on top and jettisoning doors from the outside. I remember flying from base early one morning and passing two of our squadron Pumas returning from an overnight stop, going in the opposite direction with no cabin doors fitted! That certainly got the brain going, bearing in mind previous accidents caused by cabin doors coming off in flight. As soon as we landed we got on the phone to base to ask if we had missed some new edict about doors. In fact both aircraft had been parked up for the night and the crews returned to find the door jettison handles had been pulled! The aircraft were being flown back at low speed with the doors stowed internally.