Originally Posted by
stopbar
Early 70's I was an ATC cadet and used to pitch up in uniform at the ATC college at Hurn Airport where the CAAFU Doves provided live ATC training for the controller cadets. You used to just wander through to the the pilots crew room/office. No security in those days! Mostly I would sit in the cabin because an ATCO cadet would occupy the right hand seat and off we go and fly radar patterns directed by the ATCO cadets to give them practise, simulators were in their infancy then. Must have been quite interesting for the actual ATCO's at Hurn, fitting their own traffic in with the training Doves on separate frequencies, I have no idea what system they used but suspect it would have been quite interning at times, I think they tended to be vectored for the little used cross runway.
My highlight from these time was being able on occasion to sit in the right hand seat if the cadet did not turn up, yippee! On one of these occasions we were out over Bournemouth bay being vectored by the cadet, for the radar pattern and the pilot turned and said 'Ever seen one of these on one?' I shook my head. Within seconds after a swift bit of lever fiddling the right hand engine was silent and stationary! We continued around the radar pattern with the cadet, and indeed all on the ground unaware of what was happening. A few minutes later the prop was unfeatered and we were back to normal. The memory of that day are still fresh and it was my highlight of all the flights I did in the Dove that summer. A fabulous memory of a beautiful aircraft.
I was one of those ATCO Cadets who flew in the right hand seat, so was talkdownman.
We all had PPLs or were trained to the PPL syllabus (part of the ATCO Cadet training in those days - alas no more) so we had the opportunity to handle them ourselves. The ATCO Cadets were split into small groups during this part of the course - I think it was 4 to a group - and whilst 3 would make their way to Hurn Control Tower with an instructor to do the actual live training, the fourth would fly in the aircraft.
The College of Air Training (Hamble) had their Beech Barons based at Hurn at this time (1973/74) and on one occasion, a Hamble student was told to 'follow the Dove' on final approach. The Dove was carrying out a surveillance radar approach (SRA) which involved the pilot following heading changes passed by the controller. The Dove pilots would follow their instructions to the letter, so if they were heading 175 deg and the ATCO Cadet wanted them to turn to 180 deg, they would say 'turn right 5 degrees heading 180'. Often however, we were so new to this game, we would mistakenly say turn left and the Dove pilot would do this and turn left through 355 degrees . Anyway that is what happened on this occasion, so the Baron pilot followed him!!