More memories of Farnborough.
Memoirs continued.
Unfortunately LOMCEVAK those days are gone forever.
One Saturday afternoon at Farnborough I found myself sitting in the right seat of the ETPS Sedburg glider with Bill Bedford, the Harrier test pilot, in the left seat. Bill, a former ETPS tutor, was an enthusiastic glider pilot and at the time held several British gliding records for height and distance. Bill was an informal supervisor of our week end gliding activities. We released from a Chipmunk aero tow somewhere near Guildford under a growing cumulus cloud and were soon rapidly gaining height in the cloud. The air temperature kept reducing with increasing altitude and we began to wonder how much colder we could become before leaving the cloud.
The glider had a battery driven artificial horizon and direction indicator and Bill had been doing a good job with these instruments. But without us realising it initially, the battery was going flat and the AH started to lean over. Bill followed the AH until I noticed that the turn indicator was not making sense. Soon after we entered a steep spiral dive and speed rapidly increased. I watched in horror as the airspeed went on up over the red line, never exceed, speed of 92 Kts. Markings around the dial of the ASI were from 20 Kts to 110 Kts with a gap around the bottom 30 degrees of the dial. I watched the needle go around through the gap and continue until it was showing 25 Kts the second time around. I guess we were up around 150 Kts. Sincere thanks go to the Sedburgh designer for all of that excess strength.
The airflow noise was very high, the wings had unusual twists and I was using both hands pulling on the air-brake toggle with the feeling that if I pulled any harder I would break something. We hurtled out through the cloud base still well nose down and directly over the city of Guildford. Bill slowly brought the nose up and as the speed thankfully reduced we zoomed up to cloud base again. By now the AH was unusable and as we looked at each other with intense relief we both knew that there was no way we were going to re-enter the cloud to gain enough height for us to glide back to Farnborough.
Recognising that we were now too low to glide upwind to Farnborough Bill elected to try to glide downwind to the airfield at Dunsfold just visible in the distance. We hoped to be able to pick up some rising air on the way. Our gliding angle was obviously too great for us to reach Dunsfold directly so we headed off a little towards another cumulus hoping for some lift beneath it. But we were disappointed and realised that a forced landing was now most probable.
It was the time of the year when all of the wheat or other crops in the area were being harvested and there were bales of straw all over potential landing fields. We spotted a green field beyond a small forest and decided that this was to be our place to land. Having committed ourselves to this green field, there was then nowhere else to go. Alas we soon began to see that it was a wheat-field ready for harvesting.
I tightened my harness as much as possible expecting a sudden stop and that was just as well. Bill levelled off the glider just above the wheat and it brushed us loudly underneath. Eventually stalling we sank down into the wheat until our sight line was below the wheat. Suddenly the wings sank into the wheat and we stopped immediately with very rapid deceleration. The last foot or two was a vertical drop on to the ground with a teeth jarring crunch. There was no run-out of an arrestor cable as for a carrier landing.
Suddenly all was silence except that in the distance we could hear a few people yelling to each other. We had disappeared from anyone's view and local observers all believed from the noise generated by our arrestment that we had severely crashed.
Bill and I looked and grimaced at each other in relief and having assured ourselves that we were uninjured except for the sure knowledge that we would be suffering from bruises where the straps had done their job. We climbed out to find that we were just not tall enough to see over the top of the wheat. Having noted where the farmer's house was situated we carefully made our way along the rows of wheat in that general direction. On the way Bill explained that it would be normal for the farmer to extract compensation for that portion of his crop knocked down so we should take care to minimise damage.
Soon we were being treated to a cup of tea in the farmhouse whilst curious locals turned up from all directions. Someone had reported a crash to police and soon several police cars approached. Two policeman turned up on bicycles. One came on a horse. Then came an ambulance and Bill was able to talk the ambulance crew into giving him a few swigs of medicinal brandy to steady his nerves as he so eloquently put it. The policemen were eager to help so we used them in two teams to help manhandle the wings off the glider and move them and the fuselage into the farmer's barn ready for retrieval next day by trucks from Farnborough. Wish I had had a camera.
All that remained was the completion of an incident report and a structural inspection of the glider for overstress. It was duly pronounced to be still airworthy. Two weeks later it was used to give the Duke of Edinborough his first flight in a glider. I often wondered about its continued structural integrity.
The glider flight with Bill Bedford was not to be my last such hairy experience we shared. The next was in a Hunter 7 trainer sorting out severe rudder buzz pulling g supersonic.
We ETPS students all learned a great deal from each other and also from the tutors who were all TPs with recent experimental flight test experience. As well as the opportunities to mix it with some of the best practising test pilots in the world in an atmosphere devoted for almost a year to the pursuits of practical test flying, we learned to grasp the essentials for survival when involved with the rapid mastering of complex machines powered by a wide variety of piston and jet engines. We grew to appreciate the existing and developing standard requirements underlying the design and handling of numerous types of aircraft and their systems.
The reference for British aircraft design was a publication produced over the relatively few years of aircraft development called AVP970. During those days of rapid advancements resulting from the jet engine a world standard reference was also being derived under the auspices of the Advisory Group for Aviation Research and Development - AGARD. Metallurgy was being pushed to the utmost for both aircraft structures and jet engine turbine and compressor blades. Power to weight ratios for aircraft engines were rapidly reducing. We were indeed fortunate to be so close to all of this activity.
In the next post I try to quantify the differences between expert and not so expert pilots and test pilots in particular.