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.
Ah, the canvas countryside conveyor!! I thought my career was over with that thing. Not the Trident one actually but a similar thing on the Vanguard /Merchantman. It worked by projecting the TV picture onto a set of mirrors in front of you.
After 9 years almost to the day as a Trident man (boy really!) and still with only 2 stripes I got a Merchantman command. Did the 1st days sim with my “buddy” then had 2 days sick and had to catch up.
So it a dark and stormy night, and it was me and a ground instructor who I think was probably a retired Base Training Captain and not too pleased to be spending Christmas Eve in an otherwise almost totally deserted Heston Training Centre doing exercise 2, engine failure RTOs. Careful explanation of what to look for – stop the nose swing, instruments move, etc. The emphasis was on watching for a heading change on the compass I think. The Trident had pretty good clear Smiths SEP5 instrumentation and of course virtually no swing on losing an engine. The Merchantman had the Smiths Flight System (in my opinion the worst instruments ever designed) and of course big asymmetry! So this was a big deal for a Gripper boy.
Anyway line up on that cardboard runway with the grey flickery TV visual, instructor in RHS opens up, we accelerate, he pulls an engine, I think I am correcting the right way but can see the runway swing, frantically try again and the world goes mad as we ground loop off the runway.
Instructor says patiently “you corrected the wrong way didn’t you” and goes through it again. Repeat exercise with same result. And again. And again. My heart rate is rising exponentially. His patience is getting sorely tested! I am sure I am doing what he is telling me to and the damn thing is not responding correctly - poorest excuse ever but I can see my career vanishing down this black hole! Eventually he says “look I’ll show you”.
Instructor in RHS opens up, accelerate, he pulls an engine. We see the nose swing, and the world goes mad as we ground loop off the runway.
Long silence then instructor says “There IS something wrong here!” and swiftly departs the sim to get the engineers. Leaving me to deep contemplation of bad news for Christmas. When he returns I timidly point out my recollection that when I saw this on day one, the “airport buildings” were on the left – now they are on the right. Lo and behold the engineers had been working on the visual, and had somehow reassembled it so the runway image was for the reverse of the simulator direction, e.g. the sim thought it was on r/w27 while the image was for r/w 09. Or something. Don’t ask me to explain how you would do that. Anyway if you tried to correct a swing on the visual, you actually went in the wrong direction. In retrospect I can’t understand why we didn’t detect it even before the failure, I suspect that I was keeping straight by a combination of being frozen with fear, focus on that damned compass, and a combination of errors which totalled out to zero!
Anyway they fixed it an I eventually got one nailed for Christmas. And was very glad to get back to the Trident about 2 years later!