Warship Tour of duty, 7pm BBC2 covers the F35 accident

[Mortmeister]

Originally Posted by Compass Call

I have worked for two Air Forces and in both it was standard practice when preparing a fighter for flight to lay out the aircraft blanks/locks for the pilot to see when he arrived at the dispersal.
After he had checked that all were accounted for they would then be stowed as appropriate while the pilot did his external pre-flight checks.
It was the responsibility of the pilot and airman in charge of the see-off crew to ensure all were accounted for.
I have never heard of an intake blank being left in during an engine start.
In a twin intake aircraft the blanks should be joined by a length of tape/cord. That way you cannot forget one.
It would seem that standards have dropped very badly and somebody in authority needs his a**e severly kicking.

CC

Ever tried to lay out all of the blanks on a flight deck with 20 knots of wind blowing over a deck doing 25 knots?
It is mighty difficult!

[Mortmeister]

Originally Posted by idle bystander

But it is a bloody awful report, written by someone with almost no understanding of, and seemingly little interest in, the norms of carrier operations. Sharkey's point is that had the BOI been conducted by people with the appropriate experience it would have properly addressed the issues that are really behind this entirely unnecessary accident. These issues all flow from the catastrophic decision in 2000 when the Joint Force Harrier was formed and the Navy permanently gave up (was robbed of) direct control of its fixed-wing aviation, effectively reversing the Inskip Award of 1939 which returned naval aviation to where it belonged.
I guess it is career suicide for any light blue officer to suggest that naval aviation is anything more than aviation from a floating airfield, but this accident drives that point home.

Why thank you, as someone from Joint Force Harrier that worked bloody hard at trying to make it work, your comments fill me with pride….
Were you there? Was ‘Sharkey - I won the war and hate all things RAF’ there?
I was an SNCO Flight Deck Supervisor on both Invincible (once with 16 Harriers + 3 Sea Kings) and Illustrious on multiple deployments, which I think qualifies me as being SQEP to talk about life on a busy deck. I worked with some truly excellent FDOs and CFDs and we always got everything back safe.

Yes there were certainly RAF aircrew elements who were vehemently against JFH, mostly because they lost control of their train set when at sea and tried everything to stop it working, but there were just as many RN officers trying everything in their power to screw us around. At Senior Rate level we made it work, if that meant a de-brief in the Mess then that was what we did.

This whole debacle on 617 could so easily have been avoided if LfE from JFH had been employed, but it wasn’t.
We lost plenty of inflatable intake blanks until we worked out that tying them to the lashings meant they never got a ‘float test’ or we removed them during the flying period (let’s face it, once you’ve done a FOD walk, how does FOD get on the deck)?
A Liney or Plane Captain would sign the F705 to certify they have been removed and secured in a Lacon in the catwalk.

As they had been successfully at sea for months, there can be only one reason this happened, complacency brought about by fatigue. They didn’t have enough ground crew to start with, as they lost some they were not replaced. Less bodies, fatigue add in some complacency and they went straight to the scene of the accident.

This was avoidable, but no-one either had the courage to speak up, or (as I suspect) they were ignored from above when they did.
As a ‘crabmariner’ I agree, flying from a CV is a whole different ball game and needs to be respected or it will bite you.

Really glad that the armourers did their bit (as always & despite being shafted by the NEM) and that HUX continues to fly the jet.

[NutLoose]

As much as you want to make things idiot proof you cannot 100% of the time, there is always ways of beating the system, silica gel bags in the Vulcan intakes instead of the jet pipe for one. In my 40 plus years of aircraft engineering I have seen several examples of WTF from two aircraft taking off with 10 foot of towing arm still attached to the nose leg and wondering why the gear wouldn’t retract, through to pitot covers left on or taxying and landing with tie down weights attached. I am afraid sh*t does happen.

The VC10 used to have hard plastic intake blanks that would be removed and dropped by the fwd freight door for stowing, a new mover was told to stow them, asked where he was told the opening on the stb side, of course the freight door had been closed so he walked down the side until he found an opening and shoved them in, as it took off and retracted the gear, 4 engine blanks appeared from the Stb main U/C doors and fluttered back down to earth.

I myself missed a missing beacon on a Jag A/F, not all Jags at the time had a lower anti col and I did a walkround looked underneath but couldn’t see a thing wrong, it had a bird strike cleaning off the beacon flush but not hitting anything else. So there was nothing visible to see unless you got directly under it and looked up which one guy did later fixing a snag..