| FL575 |
12th May 2014 16:59 |
What could go wrong
Watching this video reminded me of the time that we fired a flare at low level.
Normally, on airfields, the grass is kept cut short. However, in the 1970s, in an endeavour to reduce the number of on-airfield birdstrikes, the Royal Air Force tried a policy of letting the grass on airfields grow very long. The theory was that birds did not like to land on long grass; however, it was soon found out that the little buggers landed on the runway, and taxied in to the grass. So it did not work.
However, one evening, at the height of this trial, when the grass was at its longest and driest, Nav & I were scheduled to do a 3 hr night navex. As we gave our flight plan to Ops, they asked if, upon our return back to base, we could conduct a surprise ‘no comms’ recovery, to which we agreed.
The ‘no comms’ recovery basically consisted of routing via the normal daylight ‘Initial Point’ some 5 nm out, reducing speed to 250kts and descending to 250ft running in over the runway. When abeam the tower, we were to fire off a flare, and then climb to circuit height and fly a normal circuit, landing off a ‘green’. All this was without speaking to ‘Local’ on the radio, but listening out on their frequency.
So on our return, in the very early hours of a hot June morning, we did as described. We completed the procedure, and as we turned on finals, we did notice a bit of a glow from the airfield. Immediately afterwards we received a ‘Noduff’ radio call from ‘Local’, diverting us to Valley for the night, as the airfield was on fire. The next time Ops asked us to do a ‘no comms’ recovery, we politely refused.
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