PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - GAF Tornado loss in 80's due to HIRTA flyby?
Old 1st May 2007, 17:13
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muscat329
 
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CSAS was analogue

At the time of the GAF incident I was still test flying at Warton. My recollection is that the aircraft was approaching the Voice Of America transmitter near Munich from the west with the navigator doing a radar fix. The significance of this is that this high powered aerial was directional beaming its signal into Eastern Europe. The aircraft flew over the top of the transmitter from the west and straight into the beam. The CSAS which was analogue got severely overloaded and went loopy. Hence the unfortunate loss of aircraft and crew.
If I recall, we already new there was a problem because a full power HF transmission did exactly the same. That led to some interesting test flying sorties! The HF's were depowered to a quarter power I think. But significantly, again if my memory is correct, GAF tornados did not have HF therefore they hadn't seen the problem at first hand

regards, muscat329
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