Ar 5

[southside]

Great article in COCKPIT. Well written and well said fella. 'Bout time this article of torture was removed from service.

[MightyGem]

Only ever wore it once, for 5 mins in a classroom, and that was enough!

[HeliAviator]

Read the article today, well written Had to wear the thing in anger in Iraq - not nice!

[Rakshasa]

NBC gear in the cockpit = Fun!.... not. :ugh:

[charliegolf]

Does it still come with the 20 lbs hissing handbag?

And has it really not been superceded since I used it in the mid 80's?

The groundy respirator went from S6 to S10 by the end of the decade, I seem to recall!

CG

[Ginseng]

Aaahhh, AR5

What fond memories stir at the very mention of the name.

Anyone else particularly enjoy the inverted snorkelling session in the pool at North Luffenham.

Or how about the sweating off 3 stones per minute just getting dressed in all the gear.

And that whistling handbag was just so cute!


Ginseng

[16 blades]

....or sneaking up behind your mate and closing his outflow valve, watching his head slowly inflate whilst he fumbled around to open the valve again...sadistic, me? Never....

16B

[tarbaby]

Or some stupid **** saying you had to wear NBC kit out to the aircraft from Ops, if you were going down the route during a Taceval. Notional bunkers were something else again. Talk about playing at war for the CO's promotion.
Almost as good as having to file flight plans to Ascension during the war, and then being told your coms security was diabolical.
Plain ruins my day thinking about the whole stupidity.

[BEagle]

I didn't mind it once it was on and you weren't moving about - it was that farce of hopping about on one leg trying to get those ba$tard overboots on that pi$$ed me off! There had to have been a better way.

Yes, I had the fun of wearing the b£oody thing in the pool at North Luffenham. Such fun......

Thank heavens we didn't need it in GW1. We all took it out with us, the engineers tried to lose mine whan they moved everything from Bahrein to Riyadh when I was back in the UK (that prick of a SEngO thought it was sooo funny), but it finally reappeared. Then the movers tried to lose it when we finally got back to the Covert Oxonian Aerodrome. But it reappeared a few weeks later - finally said goodbye to the $odding thing a decade later.

[maxburner]

On a list of 10 items I don't miss about the RAF, this sits at number 1.

[AllTrimDoubt]

Remember being asked to fly with mine in theatre in the run up to GW1. Accidentally put hook on helmet through rubber seal when donning. Cancel trial, fly normally, reschedule for 24 hrs (curing time for repair)

Next day, accidentally etc etc. Reschedule. Warn my maintainer he will run out of seals before I become more adept!

Trial cancelled!

(My CO was a v.savvy ex F4 driver who got the picture instantly and accepted my explanation and promise that we would be better off in the old S10 with it's "rubber band mods"!)

[The Gorilla]

Had a captain during GW1 who insisted we all spend a few hours wearing the dam thing in the cruise. Each and every cruise just to get used to it! Like we didn't wear it enough in the sims!

The same idiot who insisted on opening all the handbag batteries on the flight deck, eventually finding one lithium battery that was leaking badly. Oh how our eyes watered. We had to depressurise at FL250 and crack open a para door and dump it. I suspect we may have given an Italian trawler a scare that night..

:rolleyes:

[Lima Juliet]

It was binned for GW1 when 2 'Guinea Pigs' went all wobbly after 30 minutes in the Darhan heat - one was carried to the med centre with total heat exhaustion! It was decided that we would let the Iraqis try and kill us rather than our own kit - very sensible.

LJ

[Thud_and_Blunder]

It was binned for GW1
Not for everyone - our little det of 5 Chinooks had entire crews practising beforehand. Certainly not comfortable, but workable - perhaps that's the diff between living in air-con splendour and then getting sweaty versus going from tent to cockpit. Agree with all the other respondents though - don't miss a thing about it, least of all the amount of baggage space it took up alongside all the other deployment crap plus 5 sacks of crypto that had to be kept in sight at all times.

[ShyTorque]

Thoroughly awful bit of kit, not well suited to field conditions.

Once lived and flew in mine for 3 days in the early 80s during a deployed site field trial, in the European summer heat. We were given short breaks in a shelter to ablute and eat but apart from that, we were constantly kitted up, always dripping wet with sweat. No help was given with moving our full personal deployment kit to and from the aircraft each time we flew, which I remember as the one thing that really p1$$ed me off the most!

My crewman and I were required to sleep wearing it, as best as we could. I remember being required to plan, brief and lead a 4 ship early morning task wearing full kit, having slept in simulated contaminated conditions, which was an interesting experience to say the least, not least the actual difficulty of communicating verbally outside of the aircraft.

The worst part about sleeping in it was that despite using a head harness, the mask moved off the face unless you slept flat on your back, allowing cold air to blow straight in your eyes. My colleague woke up at midnight, screamed, pulled off his still hissing AR5 and threw it on the straw (we were sleeping in a barn hayloft under the watchful eye of trials team staff). He rubbed his eyes, uttered a few choice expletives, then re-donned it, fastened up the head harness and went back to sleep. The following morning he couldn't remember anything about it! He was deemed "a casualty".

At Endex, on finally getting home and undressed to have a shower I found I was covered from neck to foot in ingrained charcoal from the undersuits.

No doubt everyone would be very glad to see the AR5 gone!

[richlear]

I was on one of the AR5 test crews at ISK in the late 80s - what a nightmare. I remember the medical bods meeting us on the steps as we disembarked to take photos of our hands...all wrinkly after 6 hours in a pair of washing up gloves.....

Remember the stupid little drinking straw - we had soup but all the little bits clogged up the straw....and how about the vomiting drill?? excellent.

We did some AAR practice with a safety pilot on the flight deck. our skipper at the time refused to play the game and removed his stuff - flight safety hazard!! Bravo!

[Lima Juliet]

Thud

Point taken on GW1, I should've added "binned for FJ ops" - I have no knowledge of mechanical palm tree ops :ok:

LJ

[Thud_and_Blunder]

Leon,

Fair go - neither did I really, but I got away with it for an awfully long time.. :D

[27mm]

I'm sure that AR5s have been seen for sale in those special shops in Soho - not that I've ever been to one, you understand - imagine, all that rubber and talcum powder (well, Fuller's Earth) - gives me goose bumps just thinking about it (not to mention LLAD in RAFG in an F4 in it.....

[Devil's Aardvark 8]

Richlear!

Seem to remember the vomiting drill was to move the face mask up and away and then to throw up neatly into the neck seal. What one did with it from there is anyones guess. Another vomiting drill 5 minutes later I should think.

Apologies to all who have, or are just about to eat.

[richlear]

Yes - that was it.....A most amusing half-hour watching grumpy Pete Marks practising drills at N Luffenham after a heavy night out on the beer & curry.

Think he got picked out to demonstrate because he had fallen asleep..

Good times

[Charlie Luncher]

Ahh the dinghy come snorkelling come drowning drill, does'nt someone quite Short still have the AR5 mask imprint from the inert user friendly rubber??:ugh:
Charlie sends

[adr]

Some delightful marketing prose about the AR5 and the CBRR (they might as well call it the AR5 Mk2) on the maker's website (http://www.camlockuk.com/camlock%20home.htm).
greatly reduces thermal stress to the user under hot and humid conditions
adr

[Data-Lynx]

Ginseng and BEagle. Did you try it in the dunker? I admit that the face plate made water entry easier but it's those memories of floating around with your hand in the air, trying to keep the intake out of the water, that are so special. Do you remember having to deflate the life jacket before cranking your head over far enough to release the bayonet connection on the hose to the neck valve? Just delightful, especially if your brain could not remember which way to turn it.

Not all recollections are bad; it was novel watching a trapper's face as he received the preflight brief from his victim in AR5.

[AllTrimDoubt]

ahh..the memories of the anti-drown valve vs Dunker!!

[Ginseng]

The dunker! Good god man, are you mad!! I'm not that much of a masochist!

Regards

Ginseng

[AllTrimDoubt]

"Ready in the module...."

What memories....Oh how I laughed when my QRB jammed in the 90 open position during the inverted run and they raised the thing with me expecting to fall out on headfirst at any second...

[richlear]

Quote

"To accommodate changes in environmental pressure while wearing the AR5 Respirator, the valsalva manoeuvre can be performed by operation of a nose occluder. The nose occluder assemblies are sized to allow for variations in individual physiological features."

excellent.....

Imagine being paid to make this sound attractive