Many thanks for your replies to my last post. I can only say what a pity, it seem s that none of you experienced true Auto landing due to the fact that you were not adequately equipped. For the record let me point out that Leader Cables were used in the earlier years but due to their obvious disadvantages and improvements made in ILS , they were discontinued and were not necessary for an Auto Landing.
When I speak of Auto Landing system I include Auto Throttle also, because serious automatic touchdown in nil visibility requires this.It must be remembered that I am talking of the necessity of diverting the Vulcan in any visibility conditions during the cold war
I have carried out many full auto landings on the Vulcan including some at 90 Kt approach speed.
All of these have been completely 'Hands off' save for selecting 'Glide path' when a 3 degree pitch down was injected and switching 'Auto land' at about 200 ft.
I am not talking of bringing the a/c down to 150/200 ft but to full touch down including kicking off residual drift.
In my opinion,when an a/c moves through 150/200 ft without sight of the runway and without Auto Land it ceases to be a controlled vehicle, but a missile where the pilot is accepting the fact that if he was in the correct 'window' at those heights and he changes nothing then all will be ok and he will hit the concrete.
I refer to some landings carried out at London Airport in 1962 when the RVR was 45Ft!! True, not in a Vulcan.
I am most gratefull for the information on the lead up to the LAP crash and I must say that having read the official report on this I can only say that, once again the terms of reference for this report made it impossible for a true analysis to be decided and I am sure an Auto Land system would have prevented this unfortunate accident. A few more ejection seats would not have gone amiss either!
