Hi M2Dude - keep it coming! I missed all this stuff from the early days......
Tim00 - good question, and very relevant.
It takes a lot to incapacitate a Flight Engineer - beer, cigars and scary women were no issue - they were definitely the most relaible part of the operation. (And arguably the least attractive.....)
If the unthinkable happened the First Officer would find himself on the FE's seat. We practised it less often than you might think, but thought about it a great deal. Especially the fuel system management.
Which brings me to your second point - yes, there was a preset for the 'automatic' fuel transfer system, although that wasn't the mechanism used for the pilots to 'take control' of the CG. The critical thing was to be able to get the CG forward if a rapid decel had to be made - for this reason there was an override switch above the First Officer which used various pumps and valves to txfr fwds - primarily by txfring from tank 11. It would be used in various recall checklists (supersonic 4-engine flameout and Continuous Ssurge at M>1.3 seem to register from the dim past) until the FE was able to take over the txfr system himself.
I didn't ever need it - in the surges I encountered the FE was always ready to manage the txfr before we needed the override.
Oooooooh!!!! There's a new topic for someone: Surges.
Theoretically the correct checklist to call for was the "Continuous Engine surge above M 1.3 Conditional Procedure, please". In reality the call was always much more succinct.
Monosyllabic, in fact................
I'm off to the pub, but I bet Bellerophon can speak with erudition on the operational aspects, and if M2Dude is who I suspect he is, I KNOW he'll be able to cover the technical aspects in great depth!
WOK
Last edited by EXWOK; 26th Aug 2010 at 22:50.