Shannon base training
The 1st Trident sims were very sophisticated - by the standards of the day!!
I was on one of the first Hamster courses so if cremeegg's dad was a trainer he may have done me.... be interesting to know but would kind of bust your anonymity. Anyway at that time (winter 65-66? again I'll have to find the logbook) the sim. was not approved for stall training, so we did full aerodynamic stalls in the aircraft at Shannon. Must have been exciting for those skippers, with a kid with all of 250 hours in each of the other 2 operating seats, and a T-tail aircraft with a known deep stall potential! The supervisory F/Os assigned to "mentor" us had their work cut out and were outstanding guys as well.
One story about the Shannon Base Training.
We were on day 1, Geoff Fowkes (lovely gent) was the boss. We must have spent 45 mins doing the preflight setup (remember we had no "part function simulators" or "procedures mockups"), while the Shannon ground mech is hanging around underneath on the headset in the winter breeze. Eventually Geoff says "Hello Ground, we're ready to start".
"Sorry skipper, it'll be just a moment now, we've got a shift change". Click of intercom, we watch him walk off to the hut. We twiddle our thumbs for 10 minutes and there's another click on the intercom. "OK skipper you're clear to start now".
Geoff: "are you the gentleman who was here before?"
Ground "that's roight"
Geoff "I thought you were having a shift change?"
Ground "That's roight, oi'm on a double shift today! Do you want to start up?"
So we start, taxy off and fly circuits for several hours before returning to the pleasures of the Limerick Intercontinental Hotel, our first experience of the lavish lifestyle we were to become accustomed to as "BEA pilots on the fastest jet airliner in the world" (well it was at the time !!)......