Looking for Historical Post-Flight Reports
 

Many years ago, I read the obituary of a noted UK test pilot. One of the things that was remarkable was that he had a very short flight in a very bad aircraft, and in that flight discovered (I believe) 7 deficiencies.
Does anyone have a copy of that report??
I'd love to be able to use it as a good example of what a test pilot can do in terms of observing and reporting.

Shawn, you don't give us much to go on! Any idea of the person or a/c?

For most retired UK military aircraft the formal reports are all in the UK national archives - it's not a brilliantly searchable tool, but there's a lot of good stuff in there. Generally they allow you to track down what's there for free and then charge you for scanning and Emailing it to you.

A very elegant bit of short testing and even shorter reporting that I have got is the Boscombe initial evaluation of K5054, the prototype Spitfire. If you want to Email or PM me your current address I have a hard copy and can photocopy and post it to you late next week.

G

'A Most Secret Place' (Boscombe Down 1939-45, ISBN 0 7106 0203 0)

contains a number of flight test reports of interesting aircraft of the era.

it does not contain the famous (possibly apocryphal) 'Entry into this aircraft is difficult. It should be made impossible'.

I'll have to dig out the obit- somewhere in my scanned files.
It was fixed wing (that doesn't help much), and it was a company airplane. He got it around the circuit and had identified 5 or 7 serious deficiencies in less than 10 minutes.