Tornado NVG Flying Helmet Types...

[TonkaMick]

Hi,



Looking for some help and advice!



I am interested to find out which Type/Mark of Flying Helmet would have been used by Tornado F.3 and GR crews for night NVG use in the 1980’s, 90’s and 00’s please?



I understand that some marks/sub variants of Helmet have Visor Arms fitted that increase the gap to allow for the NVG Mount and also allow the Visors to retract further back, which made me wonder, were the standard twin Visors removed for NVG use or just retracted back to allow for the NVG Goggles to be mounted?



Many thanks in advance,



Mick

[Tashengurt]

Hmm. For the F3 force, early to mid 90s they wore Mk4a helmets. I can't recall if the NVG mod changed their nomenclature.
the visors did have longer arms fitted. I think these were blue anodised metal.
At the time of GW1 and just after the helmets were painted black and had black bodge tape over the reflective cross on the crown.

[Just This Once...]

Early to mid-90s I had a Mk4D, green, black tape over the cross, save for a square at the intersection with grab-folds at the tape ends plus the NVG auto-detach plate.

Felt pretty heavy after wearing a Mk10 by day, especially with a sudden open-loop pull-up.

[Easy Street]

(GR) Until the late 00s it was usual to wear a Mk4A with all visors removed and a detachable face protection visor under the NVG. In the late 00s it became commonplace to fly lengthy night-into-day sorties on Op TELIC, and to address the need for a dark visor (sunglasses had been the workaround for short day segments, but they were unsatisfactory for 4 hours of Gulf sunlight) they introduced visors which could be retracted over the NVG mount. The visors would be pushed all the way back and the cloth visor cover removed to allow the face protection visor to be used with NVG. At dawn you would stow the NVG and FPV, refit the cloth visor cover and lower the visors for the rest of the sortie.

[Tashengurt]

I'd forgotten the seperate face plates. I'm not sure they were much used on the F3?

[TonkaMick]

Many thanks to you all for the info, that is interesting to hear!

Mick

[Stitchbitch]

MK4A/4 with extended 'bronze' visor arms, NVG auto detach mounting plate and 12 (?) pin NVG lemo downlead. Black tape covered the reflective cross. If the crews had a 10B day helmet they would invariably have a long chain mask for night use. Same set up for AR5 fun, at least on XXX.

[TonkaMick]

Many thanks Stitchbitch !