Lanc checks
Hi cliffnemo,
Apologies for this late response to your note of a couple of weeks ago - I have been away.
I guess that some evil-minded techies did have a lot of fun setting oddball questions for the exams - and to figure out the answers would be most impressive, given the complexity of the beast. Thanks very much for your having taken the time to reproduce your checklists - personal handwritten too - MUCH more valuable to the historian than the printed!
I wondered whether you, or regle, or any of the bods with veeerrryyy long memories might be able to answer a question that occurred to me a while back? During training, at OTU, HCU, and LFS, a crew might be required to fly at night, and there would have been a definite possibility of German intruders sculling around. Were the guns of the aircraft used during night training exercises ever loaded? Loading them for things like night circuit bashing might have been thought unnecessary, but for longer night training flights, such as radius of action exercises, there would have been a better case.
I understand that at HCU, training crews could be sent off on Nickel and spoof raids, so I assume that on those they would treat it as a normal op and guns would definitely be ready for use, but for night training flights within mainland UK the answer seems less obvious.
Best regards,
Dave