Trident simulator visual.
The Trident sim was fitted with a visual display - it was a rubber conveyor belt around 6 ft wide and 20 ft long and mounted vertically.
The black and white TV camera was mounted above it and positioned by two threaded rods to give vertical and horizontal displacement from the belt centre line.
The cloud base was controlled by a sheet of frosted glass positioned in front of the camera.
The airport buildings and runway were made of paper and card with trees and grass made form those bits of kit used by model railway enthusiasts.
On one of the last exercises taken by a non flying simulator instructor I was given a main gear collapse after landing, the belt flexed and the camera lens touched the paper runway.
Unfortunately for the crews for the next few days the lens tore the paper which proceeded to peal away in an ever increasing roll.
I shouted to my fellow trainee to duck as we were going to hit a road roller and we careered across the tarmac and destroyed the hangar.
We P****d ourselves and were taken down into the guts of the machinery to see the results of our incident - looked like the bark on a silver birch.
The instructor had humour failure and talked about the consequences for us but after I reminded him that he had initiated the gear failure he calmed down but still didn't see the funny side of it!
Fortunately never did the Trident high fly but was told of a stick push exercise which nearly went wrong - the nose just remained pointing skywards after the push fired - it took several seconds before it slowly descended!!!!
Believe it was stopped soon afterwards.
Did a High fly on the Duck though - scared me s******s.
We didn't do the full Trident stall rubbish but dutch roll recovery. I still believe that dutch roll was a necessary exercise whereas the stall exercise was stupidity personified.
The Duck had a periscope to observe the huge T tail. The exercise was limited to 30 degrees of bank after a trainee had put in the wrong correction with 60 degrees of bank and got the wings through the vertical.
I am still amazed how much the T tail flexed without breaking off - the tips must have moved at least five feet.
My only real emergency was a dutch roll type of incident on the Duck when we thought it was going to break up - after declaring a mayday, reversing course and initiating the descent I decided to try and hand fly it - contrary to my trident teachings - the movement had got so bad that ceiling panels were falling down.
Punched out the A/P and the dutch roll type of movement stopped - runaway roll or yaw damper which apparently had never happened before.
Got plastered in Hong Kong.