Originally Posted by
Sonic Bam
Thing
Regards from another instie Phixer.
Replaced many an ODU when at LEU - pain in the a... of a job. Two people needed to lift it into the cockpit! Same thing with the big bolts on the side of the ODU as the harm fixture, either they took a thread straight away or you were there for ages with cramp in your fingers/hands. And as for the AOA indexer on the 4K's, I was that man with the spanner (11/32" ?)tied to my ovie's. Heaven help you if you dropped it behind the instrument panel. Did it once, lesson learned. Pain definitely focuses the learning experience, PC brigade are definitely missing a trick in today's educational establishments.
Would have appreciated it if more of you growbags had tied your pens and pencils to yourselves. Too many hours wasted doing loose article checks. Also, couldn't you guys just admit you couldn't hit a barn door with a SUU instead of making us harm and harm again with the banner remaining the safest thing in the sky?
Worst job I had was finding and fixing a broken wire on the CADC connector that was causing the gunsight reticle to wander off when the radar locked up on the target for range. Two days upside down in the back LH bottom corner of the rear cockpit. Fun.
Newbie's always got the piss taken by making them jump up and down on the wing to get a signal out of the roll rate gyro when doing AFCS functions - could simulate a signal by wiggling the nose for pitch and yaw channels but no way could the weight of the average JT make an impression on the MLG oleos to simulate a roll disturbance.
It was a good aircraft to work on looking back. Cursed it at the time but it had great systems to learn your trade on. AFCS, AJB-7, INAS - all good analogue sytems that you could follow signal paths through and diagnose faults without trying to read a 32 bit data word or have the machine tell you what to replace.
Enough to bring a tear to glass eye .......
Hi Bam, yeah I love the analogue stuff. You can
visualise what's going wrong with analogue. Digital stuff may be better blahdy blah but from a satisfaction point of view you can't beat analogue. I finished up working on E3's just as they came into service and they were nicely analogue, with an engineer's panel for dessert. I wish somewhere like Duxford was nearby because I would be down there most weekends itching to rip instrument panels to bits. And of course, analogue smells good too. I mentioned working at Sealand earlier on on ODU's. When I'd greased enough palms to get my stripes they said 'Well we ought to move you and let you run a team' which I thought sounded good. So they moved me from ODU's to take over the................. LCOSS gyro and amp team. I could never get away from Toom stuff. I also did a stint running the AOA and CADC team too. But it was good gear and servo stuff, real man's toys, not this bloody poxy glass crap computer toy bollox. I reckon the only reason they introduced video game cockpits is because all the stude jocks have been raised on Playstations.
I have the same attitude to musical gear. The latest in guitar amplification is 'Digital Modelling' in which they...'Faithfully recreate the classic sounds of rock using state of the art sampling techniques'.....F.....g Bu....it. Give me a valve amp anyday and I'll show you what a guitar sounds like. And when they get hot, boy do they smell good. Hot valves, the smell of a generation. I worked on Firestreak A/A hittiles when I was on Lightnings. Believe it or not all the guidance systems were valve. Inadvertantly EMP proof too.
By the way, do you remember having to take the spine panel off to get at the pitch, roll and yaw accelerometers? It always seemed to have been raining when I had to get up there to do it. A dodgy experience at the best of times.