Tanker trivia
My apologies for joining the debate on the tanker strakes so late but I have only just seen the thread on the forum. As one of the four G.E,s who were selected to go to Marham to do the HDU course even before a HDU had been fitted to Albert, I was in the position to follow the early days of the conversion and operation of the tankers both during the build and the first days of operation in ASI.
We departed to Marham on a fortnights detachment to do the HDU course, both Prop and Leckies side of it each of which was a two week course. Even my maths worked out that both courses wouldn't fit into two weeks so we were allowed to pick and choose which bits we thought relevant so we left out most of the specific Victor airframe bits and ended up with the HDU "Q ". Before we left the Ground School we helped the remove the training HDU, a MK 17, from their classroom for it to go back to Flight Refuelling for refurbishment and updating for it to be fitted to a later Herc!
On finishing at Marham we decanted to Cambridge for a night stop, not four star I'm afraid, and then spent a day at Marshalls as they were carrying out the fit of the first aircraft. The degree of suck it and see involved in the fit was apparent in that Marshalls had not been given any information on the specific requirements to operate the HDU,e.g., Air supply pressure and temp, fuel supply pressure etc. they were going to plumb it straight into the bleed air system and the fuel dump lines , both of which were at too high a pressure and would trip all the pressure switches in the relevant systems and the bleed air temp would also trip everything off which is why you could see air intakes and intercoolers plumbed in. We left them some photocopies of our course paperwork which I believe was about all they ever had to work with.
At a later date we went back to Cambridge for an update on the fit and trials during which we were shown the films Marshalls took of the initial deployment trials of the hose and drogue. It was a result of these trials that the scoop to assist the deployment of the hose was introduced as the hose was rather reluctant to leave the stowed position. It was also as a result of these trials that the strakes were introduced as on the first deployments the drogue and hose slid up the cargo door and flailed around the duck bill causing quite a bit of damage and did not drop away into the correct refuelling trail position. It appeared that the airflow around the ramp and door sucked the hose back up along the door until the strakes were fitted to redirect the airflow and allow the hose to drop away. Marshalls had asked Lockheed for info on the airflow around that area with regard to deploying a hose and Lockheed had said when you find out let us know! There was no structural element to the strakes, purely airflow.
As for the agricultural style of the build this possibly truer than one might think as during the first trips at ASI there were failures to transfer fuel from the internal tanks to the main tanks which would only happen when airborne and depressurised. This was traced to lengths of fuel hose used in the internal tank vent system collapsing due to the pumps used to transfer the fuel causing a depression in the tanks greater than the rigidity of the hose could cope with. We decided that the fix was to reduce the length of unsupported hose and contacted Lyneham to send us some of the rigid pipe they had used in the initial build, The reply was that we already had some, they had cut up lengths of the Highway staging used to service the aircraft and used that and what is more it did the trick beautifully and cured that problem.
There are a number of other examples of the ways this was built and operated which would normally would have people screaming and running for the hills which I could relate but what was a rushed task went on to serve its purpose for many years, another example of the Labours of Hercules. (Apologies to Air International for pinching their article title)