JW411
Prentice G-AOPL was mine and that pic brought back some memories; I have recounted the story of flying it to Sharjah from Sywell, where I bought it for £700 in a rather dilapidated state. The trip added 50% to the hours in my logbook.
To close the story, it went on to South Africa. The reason was that when I bought it I did so for its Gipsy Queen engine (with about 100 hours left on it), which Gulf Aviation knew all about and said they could overhaul, but by the time I got there they had changed their mind. Harry Bromley (Twin Pin Flight Commander, possibly Squadron Commander, forgive me, Harry if so, offered to fly it to Durban on his leave, and a South African Navigator in the Flight - whose name is lost in the mists of time - went along to navigate. Remarkably, they got it there, not without some challenging moments on route, and found a buyer.
The only navaid was a VOR display attached to a continuous-tune radio, both of which I bought for £25 and installed for the purpose, after an engineer at Sywell mounted the antenna in the fin for a fiver. It had limited range and functionality, so map-reading was the order of the day, made easier by the very slow cruising speed of 90 Kts. (Going over Iraq, from Damascus to Baghdad, was only permitted in Airways. So I had to file an IFR flight plan for the lowest level (80, also the highest level a Prentice could hope for) and then map-read from NDB to NDB, trying to spot the installation on the ground and report passing it as though I was using ADF.)
The radio was a 4-channel ex-RAF set, WWII vintage, I believe; it took large crystals. The set itself was mounted behind the LH seat, and the pilot (when solo, as I was) had to change the crystals by feel; it was a laborious process. Unplug aerial, feel for and remove the unwanted crystal(s), select and insert replacements from box of 70 or so, plug piece of wire with a bulb soldered to the other end into aerial socket, press PTT switch and twiddle aerial tuner to get brightest glow, repeat for each channel with new crystal, remove wire, replace aerial feeder. Usually you could prepare for the next frequency changes well in advance, but sometimes an instruction to change to a different one, say at 800 ft on a straight-in approach, meant trying to do quite a lot at once. Saying "I'll orbit here for a bit while I change frequency" did not go down well, at least at the larger commercial airports.
Last edited by old,not bold; 17th Nov 2015 at 09:08.