Cara Cara
Torque,
my apologies; I never could manage to sort out East and West. Yes the operation was on West Falkland.
Rolandpull, the operation that I refer to was not the initial deployment from the ship but the relocation when it was found that the radar cover was not ideal from the first location. The crew judged the weight of the load to be in the order of 11.7 tonnes; it certainly required all available power to haul it off the ground and none spare for the transition until a lucky gust of wind allowed a small surplus to initiate the transition. To give us the best chance, we had stripped the aircraft of anything not connected with the lift.
I would add here that the hookers were really fantastic. We picked up all kinds of odd loads in those days and never had a single problem with rigging or instability. They worked in foul weather, received massive static kicks from the strops on occasions yet never let us down. Brilliant effort.