dragartist,
did your father have anything to do with my second choice transport a/c, the Caribou ? When I was on the group EU we used to visit the RMAF annually on a two week standards inspection. I used to like spending most of my time with the Caribou squadron at Labuan.
However at the start of one visit not long after they received their Hercs I was asked to investigate a problem they were having re weighing their a/c. No good saying not my job, I had to get on with it. I had only seen our engineers do it once back at Lyneham . Off I went to see the re weighing team who were getting some flak about the problems. I have a very high regard for the personnel of the RMAF some of whom had been trained at Halton. It was obvious that my presence was resented as they naturally thought I had come to make them look stupid. The usual hospitality was lacking.
I had no clear idea of how to proceed so fell back on my tech training. I asked them how they went about the task and was shown the weighing kit which seemed not dissimilar to ours. I then asked to see the calibration charts.
There were none. The kit had been procured 'nth' hand by their bean counters.
They did not have a hangar big enough to put the Herc in and the pan on which the reweighing had to be done had a marked slope. None of this was
conducive to an accurate result. I looked at the result they had obtained and checked it against the delivery weight and index . It was markedly different.
So I asked for the other a/c details just as a comparison.
What a shock . All their a/c had the same basic weight and index ! This was impossible. They had been given a 'fleet mean' set of values. Not surprising on first reweigh the results were different.
I briefed the engineers on what I intended to report and the coffee appeared
as did an office to write it up my report. Really given the constraints under which they worked they were on a loser to nothing. I was just relieved to have found some way to explain what was going on.
No apologies for the pic of 'aa' and the 'Bou'. If it were not for being on the 'K' I would not have been there.