I joined HSA at Hatfield in September 1973 for a job in Future Projects. The enlightened management at that time decided that I should work in the Instrument Lab for 3 months so that I could touch, see and feel some real aircraft before going into an office. During this period, we did all sorts of noise trials work using a 125 with a Hartman noise generator mounted above one wing for noise shieilding tests; we used the Miles Student with its top mounted engine intake for some trials, but I cannot remember all the details if I ever knew them and, in a rare combined programme with BAC Weybridge, we did a whole heap of airframe noise trials with a VC10 at RAE Bedford at Thurleigh.
These trials required the VC10 to fly over the two sets of microphone arrays with flaps, slats, undercarriages and undercarriage doors open and closed in combinations that the good men of Weybridge had never imagined at the design stage! Naturally, the aircraft was required to fly as consistently low as possible and obviously with as little noise-generating thrust as possible.
At the end of each pass, the lucky guys on the ground got used to the aircarft overflying the site and at a given point in time, the ear shattering Conway Crackle would tell us that all was well in the world.
As you can imagine, the clean passes were quite 'fun' since airspeed had to be not too disimilar to the full-flap-and-slat passes and yet that thing called lift was not quite the same!
After one clean pass, the Conway Crackle was very late in coming and we all left our kit and rushed out our wee caravan just in time to see and hear the VC10 start to generate smoke and noise and start a very slow climb having missed the ground by what seemed only centimetres. No gear down, no flap, no slat. Heaven only knows what it was like on board but it certainly caused us to need a drink on our way back to Happy Hatters that night!
Rumour had it that the VC10 in question was ex-BUA. My unreliable memory has it in RAE markings and the word was that it had a major rear spar or centre section corrosion problem following a chemical or battery acid spill at some previous point in its life and that it was grounded and 'reduced to parts' shortly after these trials.
Can anyone help with this 30 year old memory? One thing is certain; it was twixt October and December 1973. 'Our' mikes were close to the 'VTOL pit' where I believe the SC1 and the P1127 were tested in the hover many years before.
Around the same time, the Hastings and Comet that were at Bedford, left for the great hangar in the sky and did a combined photo sortie with a Dove as the photo plane taking pics of the two aircarft flying over Thurleigh. Never did see the pics!