Belfast @ SEN

[HZ123]

This a/c has had an engine fitted in the last week with another expected to be fitted this week. Clearly it appears destined to fly again.

[Dash-7 lover]

Bloody hope so. Fantastic machine. I was sad enough to buy the Heavylift DVD the other day and was amazed at the performance for such an old lady! You can tell with my name that I'm a bit of a sucker for props!

[GuppyEng.com]

Performance :confused: :confused: :confused:

[southender]

She still needs two more though to take to the air.

Although, how about a two engined taxy along the runway with the Vulcan at the airshow!

That could be worth going there to see.


Southender

[Dash-7 lover]

Well, when it was empty, anyway..................

[Bert Stiles]

DHC-7. Even empty it would take imagination to call it performance. We once positioned one from Bangor direct to a UK air display - about 9 hours airborne I should think, by which time it was pretty light. Not having a regular sequence to perfom we decided to do a standard four engined yawn but preceded by the old Britannia display entry which was pleasant and effective - when done in a Britannia. Downhill to Vmo to the start of the display line, then flight idle allowing the speed to bleed off while faintly whistling along level to the end. The SH5 appeared to stop about half way down the line with no option but to go back to torque 300 and more noise. As for runway "performance" it's no Herk even empty, no matter how many Muricans tell you they jumped out of them in 'Nam. God Bless.

[Hockham Admiral]

:} Bert and D7, Hi.

Performance? Bert, do you remember a V2 cut at SPL at 220,000lbs TOW on 01L on a Sunday afternoon? We were legal, just, 11000lbs below MTOW. I remember a long pause before Tower asked "er, HeavyLift 501, are you in trouble?". Apart from the sweat factor, (it was 30deg C and there was no cooling on the flight deck before about 5000ft) , I had the pucker factor! (You were RHS TRE and I was LHS).

For real, departing Saigon in '80, 10wet, 30deg C, we unstuck with no runway left at V2+10kts, (just), missed a 30ft tree about a mile later, and it took 1.15hrs to make 10,000ft!!! (normal was 45mins to 12,000ft). We had a load check in SIN after landing and we had taken-off at about 250,000lbs (about 10 tonnes over max). The litre of amber never tasted better!

But she is a delight to fly and I don't know anyone from HLA days who didn't enjoy the life.....

[Bert Stiles]

I'd successfully forgotten that T/O. +30, 220,000 - would that 've been 10W or was it possible to get off dry ? Can't remember. It would just've been an interesting use of water meth to climb up to sea level and a few hundred feet beyond on three. Still it was good practice for the next job getting a close look at the reds at the far end of the T/O run only a bit faster.

Pm'd you a couple of weeks back - appeared to work - it's enabled...

Aye - Bert.

[JW411]

G-BEPS was the first Belfast to fly on the civil register (if we forget that XR362 was marked as G-ASKE by Short Brothers at one time - for publicity?).

The date was 14 Feb 78 and the deed was done at Manston. I was co-opted by TN who was about to join Danair on the 727 next day and we had the sadly-deceased Zebedee as the F/E.

For reasons that I am not totally prepared to tell you, the aircraft HAD to fly that day or else no more money was going to appear.

Manston was run by the RAF at that time and the CO and I had not been on the best of terms in the past so he was probably not best pleased to see me on his station conducting such a dangerous exercise as flying a Belfast which had not flown in 18 months.

The great day arrived and Manston was shrouded in fog! We did a couple of runs down the runway to make sure that all the "doll's eyes" worked and were then waiting for the weather to clear.

At this point, some old mates got airborne in a Geminair Britannia and I called them up and asked "what is the cloudbase?".

They knew we wanted to go flying so the answer was "well, we're at 1500 ft and we haven't got there yet" - so that was therefore logged on the ATC tapes.

And so it was that we got airborne in G-BEPS. We went "around" the cooling tower on the downwind leg twice before deciding that enough was enough.

I would dearly love to fly G-BEPS again.