Danny42C
A bit of thread drift, but bear with me - WT
I'm seeing you in a new light ! And you'll take your trusty Rolleiflex and your photographic skills aboard with you, I'll be bound. Looking forward to more treats ASAP !
Small voice: why would an AQM need to be a parachutist ? Never attracted me - the flames would need to be licking my toes before I hopped out of a perfectly good aeroplane. Your pics made me feel quite faint ! ("Back to the wind, shoulders round, feet together, watch the ground", that was the mantra, wasn't it ?) Not this child.
As soon as I was on the regular trips to the Far East with 99 Sqn I was tempted (and succumbed) to the lure of 8mm cine film and bought a cine camera cheaply in Changi Village and from early 1960 onwards my photographic interest was geared to the moving image, so sadly not many more pin-sharp Rollei transparancies of my RAF service are likely to appear.
More likely screen grabs from not particularly sharp 8mm cine film as below that shows a trip we made have a close-up of Kilimanjaro and inside its crater whilst on standby in Nairobi for a brewing 1960's Middle East crises.
Ancientaviator62 has answered why AQM's did the parchute course at 1 PTS. My logbook logs one (just one!) parachute descent from a tethered balloon at Abingdon. And whilst on the subject of 1PTS; in my day the Parachute Jump Instructors at Abingdon were all gnarled and grizzly veterans of Suez or earlier and tended to shout down at you rather than talk in a civilised manner, but things change.
A couple of years ago I attended a press event at R.A.F. Northolt when a company launched a range of toys with an R.A.F. theme – present were some present day RAF Parachute Jump Instructors from (Brize Norton?). You will note from my photos they are NOT “gnarled and grizzly” at all — how things change!
At 242 OCU Dishforth, among the things we potential AQMs were taught was how to fill in an aircraft weight and balance trim sheet: Hastings (relatively simple), Britannia (relatively simple) because they only included fore and aft trimming, but the dreaded Beverley trim-sheet introduced a new complexity into the skills required to fill in the form as it introduced the need to include vertical loads into the equation as well as fore and aft weights. ISTR the whole AQM course suffered as it took ages to master the bloody thing! Sample below.
WT.