Beagle
90 KIAS??!! Good grief! I never saw anything below 125 when airborne
Maybe it had been removed from the OCU syllabus by the time you went through, but I recall Reg Wareham showing me the bottom left hand corner of the envelope one Friday afternoon over the Humber, very impressed I was!
WRT Vulcan autoland I was once told that a secondary purpose for its procurement was to enable a large number of landings to be carried out so that the system could be certified and sold for civil use. As it turned out, the leader cable system was overtaken by the ILS based system and the requirement to make 3 out of 4 landings an autoland never arose. Myth or some truth, can anyone expand?
I am somewhat doubtful about how much real capability the Vulcan (and Victor) autoland system represented. As far as I know it was a single channel system, unless the Alnd Prime function armed a second (redundant) channel which engaged when the leader cable guidance commenced.
From my subsequent Low Visibility Ops (LVO) experience; 3 types with Cat 2 or better capability, current aircraft Cat 3B; I would be very cautious about relying on a single channel system without adequate visual reference. Under present regulations the Vulcan with the 10B autopilot would be limited to Cat 2, i.e. Decision Height (DH) not below 100' above TDZ Elev and IRVR 300mtrs. The problem that might now arise is the adequacy of visibilty forward and down from the Vulcan in the approach configuration to allow the pilot to obtain the required visual reference at a Cat 2 DH. Having had the opportunity to carry out numerous LV approaches on simulator base checks and been able to watch them replayed immediately afterwards (snapshot facility) one quickly realises how difficult it can be to detect and assess the visual references on a Cat 2 approach. I suspect that in the Vulcan, given the relatively restricted forward and down visibility, acquisition of the required visual reference in limiting RVR might have been marginal. I should be interested if any of the TPs can recall the RVRs/visibilities that were anticipated for operational use.
Incidentally, the Victor would have had a lower visual cut-off angle than the Vulcan. Might it have been an acknowledgement of this that led to leader cables being installed at Wittering; that was I believe the first installation.
YS