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Old 10th Feb 2006, 06:36
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ORAC
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
 
Join Date: Jul 2000
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Worked with a Sqn Ldr Bob Bonas, an ex Javelin nav. He had two favourite stories.

First was "Operation sweet Relief". They had just started tanking and a trial was required to develop a means of the crew being able to reieve themselves on long trips. Somebody came up with the idea of a sheath with a tube running to a bag in the leg pocket of the flying suit and it was deemed that a couple of hot water bottles would do. Off toddle Bob and pilot down to boots and they buy a couple of kiddies bottles, Capt Pugwash or some such.

They then proceed to fly several trips. Problem, they have such well trained bladders they couldn't go. Eventually, it was decided that the situation had to be forced and they sat drinking copious amounts of coffee until they were full. They then slushed their way out to the jet and got airborne.

At last Bob had success and felt water start to flow. Unfortunately the tube had come out of his hot water bottle and gone down his flying boot and he quickly felt a warm fuzzy feeling. And once you start you can't stop, and he had drunk rather a lot of coffee....

The walk back to the sqn was described as a sort of step, slurp, squish, step, slurp, squish.....

The second was concerning the layout of the control runs. Apparently, the nav could reach down the side of the cockpit and grab the control runs on their way to the rear of the aircraft. It was not unknown for a nav, on a boring trip, to give them a quick jerk. "Did you feel that?" the pilot would ask. "No, what?" The nav would answer, before doing it again a few minutes later. Leading to the pilot eventually recovering to report a control restriction.

I always wondered how many techie hours were spent investigating javelin control restrictions so that navs could get back on the ground a bit sooner.

It was also, IIRC, known as the dragmaster. Constant speed, variable noise.
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