Chug2's post No 10261 reminded me of my first tour, also on Hastings, at RAF Colerne in the early 1960's when we had to rely upon the ACR7 to guide us home after we had first landed at Lyneham to clear HM Customs following trips overseas. There, we had to accept the lowest priority for Customs clearance if any of the 'shiny' fleets of Comets and Britannias arrived there at the same time, and in consequence all too often found ourselves making the short hop between the two airfields late in the gathering gloom. GEE was not a lot of use beyond the half way point as coverage ran out, although our accomplished navigators could make very good use of it, so if the ACR7 was still being manned at Colerne it was a very welcome aid to enable a safe arrival to be made on the airfield's hill-top runway.
It was not long after I joined my Squadron at Colerne that in September 1963 I flew as co-pilot in Hastings 582 to Middleton St George where our aircraft was to become a static exhibit for an Open Day. I remember the arrival all too clearly, for my Captain was handling the aircraft when we landed and, as happened all too frequently with our four piston-engined tail-wheeled transport aeroplane, it decided to leave the runway and take a short cut to dispersal through the long grass. (For those who never enjoyed flying this Queen of the Skies - yes, it was quite slick in the air for a piston-engined aeroplane - low-speed handling on or near the ground could be a challenge.) Anyway, we speared off towards an orange and white caravan in which its occupants, the ACR7 team, might have imagined they were safe. I shall never forget seeing the doors open left and right with the occupants leaping out and sprinting off in opposite directions, legs going flat out whilst still in the air. Happily, we stopped short of the caravan and the controllers were able to return, probably a little breathless, with muddy feet and just a tad upset!
One other issue regarding ACR7. In later years I flew the RAF VC10s when these were all in the passenger (or passenger/freight) configuration. We were engaged at that time in supporting the return to the UK of Service personnel and their families from Singapore, for which we generally used Changi aerodrome as it existed in the early 1970s. The weather in the late afternoons there tended to be very wet with either vigorous cumulus or thick stratus, both resulting in poor slant-range visibility as observed when making the final approach to land. As part of the withdrawal, the ILS (their only precision approach aid) was one of the first pieces of equipment to be uprooted and decommissioned, leaving us to rely upon the good old ACR7 to see us down. This, I should add, was at the end of a very long day that would have started at Bahrain with a refuelling stop at Gan: the night stop at Bahrain was 26 hours (the worst possible rest period) following a midnight departure from Brize Norton! Thus we were very tired by the time we got to Changi where an approach in poor visibility to be followed by landing on a really very wet runway was far from ideal.
But we couldn't have got in without the ACR7 team, to whom, "Thank you".