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Old 5th Mar 2009, 07:40
  #48 (permalink)  
BEagle
 
Join Date: May 1999
Location: Quite near 'An aerodrome somewhere in England'
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A couple of years ago she was the school nurse at a junior school in Salisbury - see: http://www.leaden-hall.com/internati...ationalday.pdf


My god-daughter attended that school - I don't know whether Nurse Roz was there at the time, wish I had though!

Back to the VC10 - I trust that Boeing didn't copy the crazy load distribution of the VC10K with all attitude systems connected to the no.s 1 & 3 busbars, due to the HDU creating massive load spikes on the no.s 2 & 4 busbars when started (whoever certificated a 'direct on line start' of a polyphase AC motor??)......

'They' said you would never have a double bus fail of the no.s 1 & 3... 'They' were wrong as it happened to me on an Air Test of ZA141 (a.k.a. 'The Lizard') which had been lovingly preserved in open storage at St Athan and was then urgently needed for one of nuLabor's 'bring a bottle' wars.

Lots of fail flags and pretty red lights, no attitude systems, quite a few PCUs failing and the cabin slowly rising.....

We'd just shut down no. 3 engine as art of the schedule, the no. 1 gennie system couldn't take the load and went off line - but not cleanly enough, so with a slowly decaying voltage on the no.s 1 & 3 busbars, the SSB thought 'bugger that' and went crossline as the no. 1 gennie finally GCR'd itself. As did the other BTB for the no. 2 and no. 4 busbars. After a few minutes explaining to ATC that we might infringe an airway as we weren't able to turn, we restarted no. 3 engine and recovered everything as the 1 & 3 BTB was happy to tie the no.s 1 & 3 busbars.

And then we went home! The cause was corrosion in the no. 1 alternator regulation system, thanks to months of Welsh weather.

Good job I hadn't dropped the ELRAT; when I tested it a few days later it filled the aircraft with smoke because its regulation system had also become corroded during its period in storage. Just to make things more interesting, the rear smoke detector was later found to be faulty after we'd dumped the jet into the hands of the maintainers.

Fun days though!

Last edited by BEagle; 5th Mar 2009 at 08:18.
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