I picked up VZ in Antwerp from the Ro Ro. It still had traces of its pre-Bristow paint job in the door liners. Somebody told me it had started off life with the FAA.
It had pressure guages, normal A/H and low-tech HSI. The navaids, twin VOR/ILS with OBS presentation were U/S. It had the small, low centre coaming with a blanking plate for the Litton and the tyres were flat. Luckily I was flying back with Avgas who had a normal example except the Litton did not work. As the weather was not very marvelous it was, or I, decided to fly to Gatwick as his No2 in formation as he had an engineer who could watch me.
His tyres were flat too so we hover taxiied and punched out of Antwerp. VZ was making all the right noises so I settled down in a loose echelon. Pre-start I had stacked the usual 20 Bensons and lighter at the back of the centre consol so in the cruise I reached down to light up.
They weren't there! The reason was that there was a gap at the back of the Litton blanking plate and they had both slid in to the depths of the consol. I could not possibly survive the trip to Gatwick without them plus they were a loose article hazard. We were issued in those days with a circular four-blade miniture screwdriver thingy to undo the Dzus faseners on the doghouse so I wielded this, undid the blanking plate and recovered said items from a tangle if wiring; at the same time keeping two rotor spans from Avgas.
However, it was not finished. Duing my exertions my maps had slid off the left hand seat and had fallen between the seat and the LH collective. Fortunately being a low consol I could unstrap, park my backside on the consol and lean over and recover said items; at the same time keeping two rotor spans from Avgas.
After a welcome fag the trip continued without incident until we crossed the FIR boundary and then the weather socked in. As we were above cloud and I had no navaids we ended up doing a formation ILS to Gatwick. The cloud was pretty thick on the slope so I had to close up to a span and a bit. It was OK for me; flying in cloud in close proximity with another aircraft whilst he was flying a GCA or ILS was common in the RAF but I could see the engineer in Avgas's aircraft was having kittens.
To get an idea of how much work had to be put into it to make it like a standard S76A I picked it up from Antwerp on 10th February 1982 and it wasn't until June 24th that I went to Redhill to start the post-reassembly airtests.
Last edited by Fareastdriver; 23rd Jul 2010 at 18:24.