OK I’ll bite. I’ve stood back while ignorant insults have been poked at the totally lovely Long Belslow, Queen of the Skies, and the envy of lesser trucky mortals throughout Transport/Air Support Command. I had the inestimable privilege of being the last Flt Cdr Ops on 53 Sqn (the Belfast sqn) until an ungrateful and ignorant government disbanded the sqn and sold the fleet of 10 aircraft to Heavylift - only to find they had to rehire them in order to keep the airbridge to Ascension going during the Falklands Unpleasantness. So I’m not biassed at all.
Anyway, where to start. 53 was a great outfit, shared a sqn building at Brize with 10, then the sole VC-10 sqn. Amongst the sqn bon mots,
Four good screws are better than a blow job any day
. And the great thing about Belfast ops was that there were no schedules, no slip crews, just ‘specials’, where you went off down the route as a crew, nightstopping all sorts of interesting places en route (and some less interesting) and brought the beast back similarly.
One of the good things about the Belfast was that it had no doors that could be opened in flight. Hence none of that nasty brutish tactical stuff. Interestingly, although these days we’ve moved into the sunlit uplands of C-17 ops, RAF C-17s are not actually used for tactical ops as far as I know - too expensive, or something. I’m not even sure that the USAF really uses C-17s in the TacT role. So, maybe there is still a role for Strat T, even though the C-17 boasts its cross-role capabilities.
Incidentally, 53 would have been a much better number for the C-17 sqn than 99 - 53 dated back to the first world war, had a distinguished second world war record with Liberators et al, and, of course, had been a heavy-lift transport sqn in its most recent incarnation, rather than a sqn of mere ex-airliners like 99’s Britannias.
I’m not sure I buy the arguments about speed either. When you need to get a big, bulky load, or quite a lot of troops, into a theatre where normal airliner ops aren’t feasible, I don’t believe that mach number is necessarily significant. Often the important thing is to get the load there within a day or two, rather than instantaneously.
Another good thing about the Belfast was the size of the flight deck. I’ve seen 16 people comfortably fitted in, in flight. Not quite sure why that’s a good thing, but it seemed fun at the time. Especially when you could use the Smith’s Flight System (very advanced for those days) to demonstrate to a visiting pongo (Major) that it was an ‘audio auto-pilot’, and if he just used the correct tone of voice and command, the aircraft would do as he said. We only realised afterwards that his RSM had been standing at the back of the flight deck falling about laughing at his boss’ antics. The Major’s sense of humour failure warning light began flashing rapidly when he cottoned on......
I could go on.....
airsound