VVCH
 

Wensleydale - dont bother.

I can't find a book definition of "Naval Troll" - one who lives under a bridge I guess, but he's a fisherman and puts bait out for light blue fish every day - and the RAF always bite...

Lucky sod lives in the south west - you'd think that would be entertaining enough.

Ignore him and he might go away.

CS:)

CS, and who pays for the Navy Historics, or the Army ones come to that?

Then there are the falling fools who are Service funded but also charge for displays.

Hey Pontius, what's with this Tacan business? Never had it in my day. Nasty modern invention which gave the purists no end of grief. My version of Tacan was Tony Down or Bob Burden standing behind me clutching a quarter mil. The compass was original and not accurate to within 20 degrees mostly. As for flying at 1000ft - forget it! Those were the days.

airborne_artist

Some of you still remember wing warping :p

and "Jump John, Jump" :E

Tacan
 

I said we had tacan, I didn't say we used it :)

Apart from instruments we had no other nav aids except the dirft sight and map reading. Gee and Rebecca were not installed. At that time we also had limited pneumatics with the bomb doors locked shut.

One of the Eng Os asked me if we would like the bomb doors to work and I said it would be a nice to nice to have option. Also after I broke the astrodome they made a fairing to cover the hole. At one airshow this chap came and asked where the astrodome was. He then said his company did perspex mouldings and offered to replace all the mouldings for the cockpit for free.

At the time there was a blister panel on the starboard side for the nav to look down for pinpoints. The new persex also had a blister on the port side too as he thought there should have been one on each side.

I had to swing that compass once when it came out of the shed. It was miles out and the corrections just did not work. The East-West/2 to give an average correction didn't work.

Had the error on east been 3 degrees left and west 3 degrees right then the correction of 1.5 would have been OK. The reading on east was actually 60 degrees in error one way and on west of the same order so that the correction was about 1 degree but did nowt for the compasses.

The error of course was trying to apply basic compass swing methology to a compass that was grossly inaccurate. This Jengo wandered up and asked how I was getting on. Not very well. I explained the problem an dhe asked if I had tried a Sperry swing. No.

He explained it and I followed that procedure and our final accuracy was well under 5 degrees.

TACAN? I seem to remember a DME but no TACAN. I did however, find a VOR that was squirrelled away in a drop down panel above the Nav's station on my second to last trip on the old girl!!!

Map, compass, stopwatch and a GPS that gives track and groundspeed for cross-check; never missed a display and was never early/late in 3 years (apart from a Medivac Helo getting in the way or bad weather) :ok:

LJ

The tacan display was mounted tdc above the instrument panel. Somewhere in the archives I may find the photo provided the other nav wasn't standing in front of it.

Here you go. Is that the TACAN display you're talking about on top of the coaming?
http://www.flyingzonedirect.com/newi...474cockpit.jpg

Leon, that is where the Tacan unit was but the other instruments were not, nor, IIRC was the second control column.

That we only had a single control column was what almost led to the loss of the aircraft 40 years ago. The Tacan was clearly removed as the aircraft was restored to nearer museum quality. It now has a mid-upper; we didn't have a mid-upper in those days.

PN

I've just looked at my old Pilot's Notes and the dial with L/R on it is the DF Indicator and the dial on the right is the Dead Reckoning Repeater Compass. I rather suspect you're right on the modification front as I don't recall a TACAN, but I do recall a modern VOR (as I said I discovered in a drop down panel) and a DME. I wonder if it has anything to do with a Lanc not having 115v 400Hz power supply that most TACANs require?

I don't know if the old girl had an inverter fitted at some point?

LJ :ok: