As Chief Eng of G-APWN in 1978 I noticed that the paint scheme of the pax door didn't match the rest of the aircraft, around that time we lost a pax door over Reigate Hill, we had a few problems with loose doors and it wasn't until a student pilot mentioned that he had kicked the emergency door release with his right foot whilst trying to find the step that we realised we had found the problem. This would have occurred after the aircraft had been pre-flighted so the damaged safety wire would not have been found. G-APWN is now at Coventry.
I also had WN in Abu Dhabi in the early 70's, I did a test flight with Jerry Beecher RIP as we had had several computer faults, we took off and climbed to about 100 feet when the engine ran down Jerry, of course, immediately raised the collective but we were sinking fast, I was shouting go into manual (throttle) when suddenly the effect of raising the collective came in just before we were going to hit the ground rather hard and we fortunately landed softly. After looking at the actions taken in the past we changed the loom between the computer and the throttle actuator and solved all the previous intermittent problems. Jerry was a good friend, we hacked our way around the Abu Dhabi golf course for months. The greens were brown and the only grass was found in the bunkers. After playing the round, in the nineteenth hole, the Club supplied salt tablets with bottles of filtered water, we dutifully dissolved these tablets in a glass of water and drank them until we tasted the salt in the belief that we had replaced the salt that we had lost whilst playing in 120 degrees F. I have never found out if we were right?
Last edited by Oldlae; 21st Dec 2007 at 22:09.