The odd towing tale.
A few memories involving towing and the attempted towing of aircraft ..
Jaguars, as already mentioned, the tow bar had a shear pin that would fail if overloaded in a tight turn at too fast a towing speed. One early morning, 54 Sqn tow team pulling a GR out of 1 Hangar at Colt, way too fast and in a turn. Shear pin fails and the Jag goes off on a tangent, no braking apparent. Suddenly Electro Hydraulic pump powers up and aircraft bunts down on its nose oleo as the aircraft skids to a halt. Vendee has already explained what didn’t happen. That was in the late 90s.
Wittering in 1990. I’m up with RSS doing repairs to wings in the wing bay. Had to pop around to see another of our teams working up at the OCU. Around the corner I walk and find a GR3 stopped with a unimog very close to the cockpit, its windscreen smashed by the pitot probe. Around the corner comes Simon, a guy that I had just done TMT with and was on the OCU. “What happened mate?” “We towed the aircraft out, stopped, disconnected the tow bar and realised there was no brake accumulator pressure”. The OCU hangars were on a slope, so the aircraft had started to move. The tower realised the only thing to do was to use the tow bar on the unimog as a chock. It worked but the aircraft caught the windscreen. I believe OC MT wasn’t very pleased.
The last one was a farce. Lossiemouth in 1986. The Flight Sargent of the bays and VASS (surname sounded like D*** Head) asks the Chief who ran VASS to move the old Argosy that was on the grass near the lighthouse over to the burning. The Chief replies “bad idea, it’s been raining solidly for 4 days!” only to be ordered to send a team from VASS to do it. The VASS team goes to the other side with the big tug master, only to get halfway across the grass before the tug sinks 18 inches to its chassis. Radio calls gets the other VASS tractor across with a winch. That tractor even with a snow plough on it does a great impression of a plough trying to winch the tug out. Even EOD get involved with their AFV. It’s standing on the back of its tracks trying to pull the tug out with no effect. By this time the rest of the lads from MCSF had been called over with shovels and boards. We dug trenches for the wheels and laid down boards in between and ramps out the back. Then the tug was then driven out slowly with boards placed in front of its path back to the taxi way. We were covered in mud and the Flight Sargent wasn’t seen at the beer call that evening..