I recognise one of the two NCOs in the last 17 pdr photo as George Rogers who was the AD craftsman at Boscombe Down when I arrived there in 1987. He was a fund of stories of Heavy Drops gone wrong during his army and civil service career. They included the specially bulled Land Rover for a demonstration drop for the Queen wrecked during rehersal. The Catepillar D2 bulldozer that separated from its platform in mid-air over Salisbury plain (its still there, all they did was shovel the soil back into the crater). The parachute extracted load from a Beverley during take off and most horrifically the MSP that left an Argosy mains extracted even though it was rigged as extractor retarder (luckily all the canopies passed under the tailplane)