Originally Posted by
Brian Abraham
the author says “Avro aircraft were built by ‘simple folk for even simpler folk to fly.’” Now before either Beags or PN become apoplectic he was referring to the bicycle chain operated speedbrakes. The question I ask, was this a reputation Avro designed/built aircraft had, and in particular, was the Vulcan regarded as simple when compared to its contemporaries in terms of ease of maintenance, systems and ability to fly/operate? Many thanks.
Brian, not sure I can really answer your question except to point out that the Vulcan was in many respects a product of its time, ie the 1940s. By the time it came into service many of the groundcrew working on it would have been through the various RAF apprentice training schemes, simple they were not.
Many of the early aircrew were ex-wartime aircrew. Many of the new intake had the requisit 5 O-levels; no grades in those days and no A-levels required for direct entrants.
The aircrew course was quite long with the early NBS course, pre-OCU, lasting a year. Later these were shortened to just 4 months but no significant change in the syllabus!
As for ease of maintenance and ability to operate it was probably designed with that in mind but it had its moments. Dozens of zeus fasteners to be undone every trip to access air charging points when a later mod simply moved the access point the other side of the bulkhead. The doppler aerial door could be opened and shut with the aircraft either fuelled or unfuelled but not opened before fuelling and closed afterwards. There were many little tricks and I am sure the engineers knew many more. No engineer was without his little note book of facts, figures and tips.