How high have you been?
 

We have read about how low and fast some of you have been. but how high and how fast have you been? rolleyes:

Does Heaven and back with the help of Suzie from down the pub count?

Rivetjoint.

I said how high not how low

We like girls like Suzie don't we? Anyway, before the thought takes over......... I managed to get a Gazelle over Mt Kenya at 17650 ft give or take a few feet as I'm not sure that the Altimeter was that accurate up there. Not something I will forget in a hurry as the view was outstanding and the aerodynamics concentrated the mind, it will rank up there on the naughty achievements list!!:D

Trout, have you had your lips done?
;)

Called VFR on top at FL 670 in a Lightning. Boulmer were sharper than normal and came straight back with "Ceasing radar service, you're clear en route, click." Speeds as best I can recall were in the order of Mach 1 and 150 Kts IAS at the time, having zoomed from Mach 1.95 (never did see Mach 2). :ok:
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All I can say in my defence Your Honour is that alcohol was involved.

Flygunz.

No need buddy, i could allready drink a pint of guiness without using me hands.

55,100 ft - SUSTAINED, and a piccie to prove it. None of your fleeting glimpses of some silly altitude as the aircraft peaks during a ballistic trajectory!

Rivet.....the pressing question is you readily admitted to the event calling for how "High and Fast".....you said how "high"....care to enlightened us with a description of how "fast" you were?

When you're that high, speed is just a number :)

I've been 3500 metres above sea level (FL 115 i think) in a Blanik glider in the mountain waves... not very impressive, but I still remember that trip. I saw the tops of the clouds, and I had gotten there only by natural powers!:)

The speed was 150 km/h if you need to know.... hehe.

PP

FL490 sustained, Mach 0.93 sustained, both in a 4-jet.........but not that speed and that height at the same time.

F500 @ M2.5 F111 - rules prevented a higher altitude
yeah so what I hear you say -

some years earlier:

43,217' in a C-130H over Canberra
Yes Really!!!



Any Vulcan drivers out there??

16500 in a Weesex HC2 over Dungannon..in my silly, younger daze

M0.9 and FL510 at the same time in a 4-jet. 25 years ago in a Vulcan.... Nearly dropped a boom on Bawtry once when descending through FL450 and had forgotten about the airbrake trim change....saw M0.97!

Even on your IRT you did M0.84 at FL410 - in a sustained 45 deg turn!

"Washington centre, 364 request FL660"
"364, if you can get up there you can have it"
"roger, 364, descending to FL660, U2 with victor, request vectors for the field"

Anyone else heard this famous "heard on the airwaves".

Like, that depends on the substance man...far out:8

Zoomed an F-4 from M2.0 to FL630, chickening out when I remembered that the cabin conditioning system was cleared to only FL480. Made it home 200nm away using about 250lb of fuel. Not a bad glider, actually.

18000 ft (ish) in a Chipmunk and 45000 ft at M.095 in a sustained 60 degree turn in a Victor B1 (with nose flaps).

Not the Chipmunk I know and love. 18,000 feet would have needed a real big thermal or an engine upgrade!

SH Monkey - course not an F3 entry. If the Alps had been 2000ft higher we would have needed to offload stores to get to the last Gulf war.

I can't believe I've been bantered into this, but Monkey's got a bite....

F3: 48 000, M1.6 (not much more than 200KIAS)
Nothing remarkable; but I posted this to point out they can go above block 2. Oh, and that was with 8 rockets.

There was another F3 that was going for the big 50 at M2.0, he slightly misjudged the apex, and peaked at FL600+. Then it all went quiet, bu99er.:(

26,500 without an engine - mountain wave near Sisteron in Les Haut Alps. 2 1/2 times that figure in a PR-9 (plus a little bit). With a pressure jerkin , but still illegal - if I remember correctly the official limitation was the O2 regulator - 55K

F530 in an F-111. So what? All I was trying to do was go from F400 to F500 at a constant M2.0. B*gger me if the thing didn't climb at 20-25000 ft/min, happily holding Mach 2 (but obviously reducing IAS). The F530 was where we topped out in the resultant inverted pulldown, attempting to stay below F500. No idea what height it would've gone to if we'd kept going!

80 000, Warp Factor 5:

A colleague of mine immediately after being told by unit Pongo that as he hadn't paid his mess bill on time he may be nominated as Orderley Sgt on Boxing Day. He achieved height/speed minus an airframe and only powered by blind fury.

To all who may be disappearing please do not get into a situation where the talent gained from our "chats" in Cornwall is required.

PS ALL to ensure you are in date CCS - it is SO important!

73, 000 ft

Honest!

Lightning T5, me frightened teenager with UTP. Off Victor tanker, to sea level. Burners in, accel to almost boom time, whereupon boss says, 'let's go up.'

Speed strip display wound down rapidly from 500kts ish, steadied at 350 kts, then started accelerating again.......going vertically!! Fuel gauges were going the opposite direction at the same rate..

Time frame for next para, about 25 secs..

'45k - that's the LSJ limit....
55k, that's the aeroplane's limit.....
60k..
65..
70.. (thump)
WASSAT?!
Oh, the burner's popping out..(THUMP).. and that's the other. We'd better go down now.' (Understatement of the year!)

Peaked ballistically at 73,000 ft or thereabouts. Completely black (and I mean dark black!) above, and very bright below - the opposite to that which us earthbound mortals see every day walking on the planet.

Saw Norway, Berwick (Edinburgh), Snowdonia (Wales) and the bottom of England......

Had a VERY strange feeling of 'we shouldn't be here. We're going to get into trouble.....we might have an airmiss with a sattelite....MOTHER!' A bit like sitting on top of a pine pole 60ft off the ground and not daring to move in case you fall off. Can't really explain it. Odd feeling of wanting to draw my legs up onto the seat with the rest of me...

Controls were not very useful, but we ballistic-ed over, pointed the nose at Binbrook, idle/fast idle descent at huge rate and did a run and break. Landed (above min fuel!!), opened the canopy and shut down. UTP was out and off for a cup of tea while I sat there in a dazed state. One minute near space, 5 mins later on the deck listening to birds twittering......Ga Ga!!

And it took the other side of the pond quite a few years to build a production fighter that could do that!!

Oh, and we did Mach 1.75 on the airtest before tanking - still got me Ten Ton Tie (1000mph)

After 24 years of flying, it's still the most exhilarating thing I have ever done.

Ahhhh... them were the days.

Lizzie, good post, you get the prize so far for me!
All you go getters in the fast toys get oxygen and squezzzze suits so spare a thought for the humble helo jock who has to perform in a faded flight suit and flip flops. Before I joined the Mt Kenya altitude club my other seat offered to fly with only one glove so that if I saw his fingers turning blue I could assume hypoxia and recover the situation for tea and medals. It was only climbing through 10k that I figured that if his fingers were blue would I care or would my giggling affect the ROC!!
I really don't know man.
:cool:

So from a techy point of view, its getting to FL800+ and staying there for a couple of hours that makes the U-2 and exSR-71 so different?

Not me I know and we all know it can do it but I still remember the first time I heard Concorde doing Oceanics on the HF. I was a numbskull 4th dry on a Nimrod MR2 doing radios reporting to Shanwick about every 45mins at m.69 at about FL280. He was reporting every 15mins at FL560!!
The highest I have been in a Nimrod was with the Boscombe guys, FL420. FL410 was the highest on a normal flight.

I'm a spotter (and non Brit too) but with a big interest on the Lightning.

Good to see some Lightning jocks around on this thread!!

I've heard some wild Lightning stories from at least two different airframes but don't know how true they are:

94000FT from an F3 (XR749?)

...And over FL870 from both a Lightning F/O pilot from 74Sqn down in Singapore around 1970 and again from XR749 from Mike Hale, 11 Sqn I believe, 1980's...

The other legendary stories concerning the latter pilot/aircraft combo include a stern converion intercept by XR749 on a Concorde at high alt doing M2.2 as well as a U2 intercept by another Lightning at 66000ft!

Heard of a Lightning intercept a U2. U2 didn't see it as he was looking down and the Lightning was above.

Made 550 in a Vulcan on an air test. Still climbing over Glasgow but didn't have the fuel to cotinue.

Made 560, sustained, in an exercise. Very quiet. Could see all the Canberras, Victors, Mk1s etc being picked off by the Lightnings and Sea Vixens but nothing ame our way.

Heard Huggis (44 or 50) made 650 over Darwin. Very dark and again, very quiet watching all the Mirage tooling around 30K below.

Once they changed out O2 regulators they tried to keep us below 50 and ideally below 450. We made 510 out of Nairboi before Mombasa and then flew north at the height 'to avoid CAT' he said.

One crew made Goose Bay to Waddington in just over 3hours. Doppler on the stops at 750 all the was (tail wind) and beat the customs officer from Scampton by 1 1/2 hours.

Hughes 500D....ferry flight from Deadhorse, Alaska to Lafayette, Louisana.....150 feet AGL to 6000 feet AGL in less than one second....without trading off airspeed! Still get shaky knees when I think of it!

BGA,

And I bet Fr Faul was still complaining that you were disturbing those 'angelic' schoolchildren beneath!;)

AA

Oh my god what have i started!!, Talk about boy racers. But i love it. Keep em coming boys. My eyes are turning green. If i remember! didn`t the brilliant Roland B. leave a lightning standing in the TSR with only one burner alight? or is that just a pigment of my imagination.:rolleyes:

670 in an F4. Only 500 in an F3, but I know of a friend's excursion to well above 600. He says the AOC's carpet is deep and soft.

altitude
 

51500' sustained in Hunter F9 en route Sharjah to Bahrain.

490 in a V, and chuffin cold at 150 in a Wessex.

An Av Med Doc once commented that the amount of O2 in the V force rear crew parachute pack wasn't enough to ward off hypoxia, to which my Staneval nav immediately replied "if I've just jumped out at FL490 I want to be hypoxic!":D

Not the highest, I'm sure, but memorable for me.

57,000 in Hunter F2 over Martlesham Heath. Knife edge stuff with no noticeable damping.

37,000 in Meteor 7 between Teheran and Sharjah (unpessurised) but force of circumstances... Landed with 40/40 in a sandstorm Oddly don't remember any bends but did experience them some years later at lower altitudes when older and heavier.

22,000 in Olympia glider in CuB on oxygen over Lincolnshire. Effing cold and full of ice that stayed for the 20 mins it took to get back to ground level.

Onlly 14,000 in Huey over the Rockies but the lack of damping and narrowing flight envelope made the whole experience very eerie and concentrated the mind.

My max in a Chippie was only 14,000 but 18,000 was on the cards. It was the Service Ceiling, I recall.

Lovely memories from a log book with so many entries just saying the same old things.

Max B - Surprises a lot of folk doesn't it that those heights were possible in an F-4.

Got a K to 710. Makes we wince now but I was a first tourist. Were your donks still going at 670?

Your 600 F3 mate wasn't the now Mr S was it?

Mad Dog made about F725 whilst shooting for 740 in an F4J. I have sustained F590 in an SR2 Triangle over the Pacific.

Nothing matters very much, most things don't matter at all.

Ok - it's only FL430 and M0.925 - but that was hand flying a VC10 in shirt sleeves and able to drink my cup of tea at the same time (plus the option to walk back to the bog or galley).

Take note FJ jocks - you don't need all those straps and rudder gear to get it right up there!