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Aviation History
1962
1962 - 0245.PDF
FLIGHT International 15 February 1962 247 THE SIXTH SEAT RIDING ON A VICTOR TRAINING SORTIE By Humphrey Wynn "Flight International" photographs by Ian Macdonald "We had taken off at 1235hr, climbing up almost immediately through a 3,000ft-thick layer of stratus IT was a dual-purpose operation: inside the Victor, occupying a pos ition between the two pilots that the crew called "the sixth seat," was the writer, experiencing a training sortie with 57 Sqn; outside the Victor, with a Hunter T.7 wrapped round him, was Ian Mac donald, taking air-to-air photographs of the V-bomber for Flight International. The Hunter, which had flown up from Chivenor to Honington for this sortie, was not visible from the sixth seat, a position affording excellent forward but limited sideways visibility; nor was it possible to hear the exchanges between the captain of the Victor, Sqn Ldr Ian Leinster, and the Hunter pilot, Fit Lt R. V. A. Munro of 228 OCU, as the sixth seat (normally occupied by the crew chief on ranger flights) does not have an R/T selector box like the other crew positions, so can only receive intercom. But from a backdrop of faint VHF, occasional intercom exchanges and manoeuvrings by the Victor, it was possible to get a reasonable impression of what was happening as the V-bomber posed in dif ferent attitudes: clean, everything down-and-out, climbing and contrailing. We had taken off at 1235hr, climbing up almost immediately through a 3,000ft-thick layer of stratus, with the Hunter tailing us. Once through the climb-out pattern for the RAF/USAF "Laken- heath complex"—Lakenheath, Mildenhall and Honington—we increased climbing speed to 300kt and headed north-eastwards, then turned port onto a southerly heading which brought us back over the Honington area at 20,000ft. There, under the far-seeing eye of Sopley radar and with a flat, desert-like plain of stratus stretching out below as far as the eye could see, we completed the photographic part of the operation, within an area of 50 miles around base, finally sending the Hunter back when we were over head Honington. For the Victor and its crew, however, there lay another three hours' work ahead: an ILS approach and overshoot, attacks on radar bomb sites, then three more ILS approaches, off the last of which we landed at 1705hr, the Honington runway lights shining yellow in the winter dusk, the cockpit lights glowing a warm red. The sixth seat in a Victor, as my colleague Mark Lambert dis covered when he flew with XV Sqn two years ago (Flight, April 8, 1960), offers a good view of all that the pilots are doing but none at all of the other three crew members, who face rearwards, shrouded by a black curtain. The only time I saw one of them, the air elec tronics officer, Fg Off George Drew (or at least a part of him), during our four-and-a-half hours of flight, was when he handed round the lunch boxes. The navigators, Fit Lts Ray Ford (radar operator) and Brian Mace (plotter), remained disembodied voices, answering such questions as "position please, Brian" when en route to a target or "what's the betting on that, Ray? Under 200yd?" as we awaited our first "score" from an RBS. Unlike Lambert's sortie, which took him over Holland, mine was confined (if one can use such a word to apply to a Bomber Com mand Victor travelling at around 500 m.p.h.) to targets in the United Kingdom—one on the Northumberland coast, another in Lancashire and a third in Norfolk. But they might have been in Colorado or China for all one could see, as the whole country was blanketed by stratus. Pre-target procedure followed much the same pattern on each occasion: a VHF call to the RBS, saying Mike November Whisky Mike Kilo was on the way, and passing an approximate ETA (target times are allocated by blocks to V-force squadrons); heading and range passed from back to front of the Victor; radar operator taking over automatic pilot control for the run-in; bomb doors open and an aerodynamic protest from the Victor at the temporary gap in its underside; a quietly spoken "bomb gone"; then a heading announced for the next target. The Continued on page 250, after double-page photograph
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