Well Dougie, I don't know anyone who liked AGE on the K. Certainly the despatchers did not like rigging the chains for the forward barrier or having to climb over to remove the restraint chains. they then had nothing to do save an emergency after that. Appeared a waste of a S80 drogue to break a couple of copper wires in the aft barrier.
I think we were determined to do better with CDS on the J. the Buffer was an advance and with the Centreline restraint no over the top chains required. everything else was reusable as an aim. In hindsight this became expensive and for want of a few yards of webbing we should have used the American cutter and had done
I did prepare proposals for fitting CDS to the K but it never got support with only a few years to roll.
Yes the climb technique: on the K you could give it a jolt with throttle and stick. on the J the rate of climb and jolt was just too benign under the automatic throttle control. I think we finished up at 7 degrees in the end. We did not know how to frig the computer.
The climb technique defeated the object of staying low. We did trails with the SC20 but more for wedge not CDS for some odd reason. I think the planners had assumed air superiority would have been gained before resupply was required.
I remember suggesting that we used the 7ft extractor having extended the strop to 100 ft to pull the loads positively from the aircraft with break ties daisy chained between the loads which would snap as the mains opened. The alternative suggestion was just to drop a couple of house bricks form the "bomb rack".
I remember there being significant variation in roll out time for the CARP.
Airbus had proposed driven conveyor rollers on the A400M.
When we had an issue with S80 not breaking the barriers I remember testing batches of shear wire to find that steel welding rods that were copper coated had been found. I just did not believe this. Also measuring tashengurts and developing better means of measuring porosity having been told we needed to replace all our "out of date" chutes.