Notes on 4FTS Valley from "Flying Freestyle" by Jerry Pook:
Sorties in the Gnat were action-packed. A standard General Handling sortie would be as follows: First, an instrument departure using the TACAN departure procedure to send you off on an accurate track into the upper air; this had to be flown exactly on the radial and at an accurate 360kt climbing speed. After a few minutes of climbing through cloud you were in the deep blue at 40,000ft and ready for a supersonic run over the sea to practice high-Mach number handling. From this height on a clear day you could see 100miles or more to the East Coast of England. To the north the peaks of the Lake District were hazy blue shadows, seemingly just a few miles away, the Isle of Man a sand-coloured leaf floating just offshore in Morecambe Bay. Lower down we would carry out some steep turns, followed by maximum rate turns, winding up to a breathtaking 7G in a descending spiral. Now we zoom climb again for some stalling. We slow down to minimum control speed and recover as she falls away into an incipient spin. (fully-developed spinning was prohibited: it was far too unpredictable to be safe). Aeros next: loops, slow rolls, point rolls, Cuban 8s, Lazy 8s, Vertical 8s; everything to be entered at the correct speed and height and all linked together as smoothly as possible to practise our sequence for the end-of-course competition. At the top of the last loop the inevitable hydraulic failure warning comes on as my instructor pulls the throttle to idle and switches off the hydraulics. "Simulated engine failure," he says helpfully, having made sure that you were pointing straight at the biggest cloud he could find.
"Into the STUPRE drill: easy really, can't understand why they make so much fuss about it: - CHRIST these controls are heavy!"
And now a sweaty glide back towards base for a Flameout Spiral down throught the cloud, (same as the Jet Provost procedure) followed by a glide landing on whichever runway we see when we pop out underneath. And now circuits. Too busy at Valley, so off down the road to Mona, our relief landing ground, via a complicated set of departure and recovery procedures. We whistle round the circuit at impossible speeds, coping with the inevitable screaming crosswind which makes us overbank to 80deg to get round finals. Normal circuits, Manual circuits, Flapless circuits; get the speed right, get the touchdown right, all pounding the runway in tandem with other sweating students. As always my instructor takes over now and then to redemonstrate a circuit, just to avoid getting bored and to give me a bit of a rest. His flying is immmaculate, as always, quite sick-making to see the precision of it. We students know just how much more difficult it is to fly from the back seat with severely restricted forward view. At Valley I discovered that I began to stammer a bit under pressure. It became a sure indicator that I was working almost to capacity, and I had to make a conscious effort to steady up and keep a grip. Whatever the pressure, never let it show through on the radio. Stay cool: keep your voice low-pitched, calm and slightly bored: Only 'Spastics' and actors scream on the radio.
Night flying would involve a similar profile, with less General Handling. Naturally, there would be a lot more IF as we flew in quite dirty weather conditions. The many All-Weather pilots on the staff would think nothing of doing night circuits in heavy rain under a 400ft cloudbase with poor visibility underneath. By far the most difficult exercises were Manual circuits on Standby Instruments. With the splendid Attitude Indicator and electric altimeter completely covered up we had only the tiny Standby Artificial Horizon and, worst of all, the minute Standby altimeter down by your left knee. On this single-pointer instrument the difference between 1000ft and zero feet was represented by a needle movement of just a few millimetres. In the poor light in that corner of the cockpit it was very difficult to read with any accuracy. On my final night check I ended up flying downwind at 400ft instead of 1000ft, trying to read this wretched instrument in the dark and wrestling with Manual Control.
Don't complain: if you can't take a joke you shouldn't have joined.
Magic times!