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Old 26th Mar 2011, 11:51
  #14 (permalink)  
BEagle
 
Join Date: May 1999
Location: Quite near 'An aerodrome somewhere in England'
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Occasionally you meet the odd person who has other problems with navigation....

When I was at Biggin Hill doing my post-Bucc/pre-Vulcan reselection session (brightened up considerably by the presence of several chopped fighter control WRAFlettes), a mate turned up for reselection who was the last person I would have expected to have seen there. I knew him from JP/Gnat/Hunter days as being pretty $hit-hot; he'd always breezed the courses and had been posted to the Harrier - the top posting there was in those days.

"WTF are you doing here, mate?", I asked him, "was the Harrier that difficult - I always thought you were the ace of the base!"
"Oh, I could fly the jet OK - and that V/STOL stuff is quite fun really. It's just that they discovered I couldn't really map read! I got through training on heading and time and flew as accurately as I could, so never got off track or particularly early/late. But I'd no bŁoody idea where I actually was for most of the time!"

We didn't do 'free nav' in those days -it was all 'heading and time'; the LFAs were tiny and it was only when he got onto the Harrier that they realised he probably couldn't even find his own ar$ehole without a mirror, let alone some obscure ground feature.

But he didn't get posted to Vulcans as were most of us - they sent him to the F-4 as at least it carried a navigator!
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