The dreaded "night stream" was mentioned earlier. Two Puma stories come to mind.
The first was told to me by one of the participants, an ex RAF instructor of mine. Pre TANS or GPS days, all navigation was done by DR. All very well in good visibility but his particular night was at the end of the summer, the air extremely hazy due to the build up of smog from the farmers' corn stubble burning (thank goodness this process is now banned in UK).
The night stream was a "Round Robin" between RAF Odiham and Salisbury Plain and back again. Aircraft took off five minutes after the preceding one, in radio silence. This spacing often got eroded if there was a delay in unhooking, or whatever so it wasn't unusual for aircraft to bunch up a little at times. The route was an oval "racetrack", to give lateral separation between outbound and inbound aircraft. In theory...
My colleague was flying back to Odiham when he saw a white light ahead. He knew this was the tail light of the preceding Puma. So he carried on, just intending to calmly keep an eye on it. But almost immediately it seemed they were catching the light up far too quickly and it got much bigger.
With split seconds to spare, my colleague realised the white light wasn't a tail light at all. It was the reflection of the white cockpit lights on the face of a Puma pilot coming the other way, head on! The Pumas got so close that my colleague even recognised the other pilot.
Thankfully, both pilots broke hard right. The two Pumas passed belly up to each other with minimal spacing. The rider to this was that the crewman wasn't strapped in and nearly departed via the cabin door. A very lucky escape indeed for all concerned.
The second tale: 230 Sqn were tasked in RAFG to carry out a night Rapier missile resupply exercise. These were netted loads of missile canisters. We knew the weight and the speed at which they were cleared to fly, the exercise was possible, but only just. The Puma was always short of fuel so it was necessary to fly USLs everywhere as fast as they could go. There was a very strong wind blowing, no problem, what fuel we gained on the outbound leg was a bonus and these dense, netted Rapier canister loads would go fast.
We picked up the netted load. It came off the ground really easily. The significance of this didn't hit home until we transitioned away and tried to accelerate to cruise speed. The loads were
far too light! Although a lighter load meant less fuel burn against the wind, the very light weight in this case meant that the loads wouldn't fly anywhere near the published cruise speed. So overall we lost out, big time. We landed the load with both fuel low level lights on (less than ten minutes fuel remaining). Other aircraft didn't make it back, having diverted (I think PCP was one who diverted).
The problem was, for training use, the Rapier canisters obviously didn't contain real missiles but they
were supposed to be ballasted to the same weight. The Army hadn't put any ballast in them.
