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Aviation History
1975
1975 - 0088.PDF
FLIGHT International, 9 January 1975 (J) Straight and Level Q CKUisiNG along in a small, single-engined Spamcan the other day my foolish hand pulled back the mix ture instead of the propeller r.p.m. Cough, splutter. "Good Lord," said a colleague to whom I later mentioned the incident, and who has more hours than I have had free lunches, "I've done that." "So have I," said another colleague. "So' have I," said another. Within a few moments we discovered that practically every pilot on Flight has nearly done it at one time: or another. The levers in my case were identical in shape: and colour, and were positioned close together on the power quadrant. Pilot error, of course. Right, Murphy? • You'd be surprised, says Mr Chuck Miller, what comes out of the wood whenever there is am accident. Accord ing to the former director of air safety, US National Transportation Safety Board, he will buy anyone a beer who can think of an accident for Still not getting it right . which he can't think of a precedent incident. I wonder how many 747 pilots and engineers now remember a day they nearly took off with their leading-edge flaps retracted? I believe that seven 747s actually did so before the Nairobi crash. And yet, when I asked a 747 captain of one of the world's leading 747 airlines whether he or his colleagues could remember having nearly done it, he just said: "We were all abso- Right: Ah, there you are Minister. Would you be so kind in this stressful combat situation as to pass me a Swingfire? No, on second thoughts, make it a Milan or a Tow or a Hot or a Dragon or indeed any of the 20 com pletely different types of infantry-operated wire-guided anti-tank missile which are now in the Nato inventor-or-or-orghy RUMBLE SPLAT ZAP AAACH. Left, from the Nassau "Tribune", December 2, 1974 lutely amazed. Not only have none of us nearly done it—we couldn't really reproduce it when we tried." Moral: don't ever look for the cause of an accident. • RAF doctor at US flight safety seminar: "Definition of psychology^ study of the id by the odd." • Gen J. van Elsen, chairman of the North Atlantic Defence Group, and a member of the Netherlands upper legislative chamber, says that the French should not "invoke European unity in one breath, when commercial interests are at stake, and then con veniently forget its existence in other fields," He asks: why France is proceeding with her own Avion de Combat Futur, now known as the Super Mirage, "instead of joining the MRCA pro gramme?" A fair question. Come to think of it, what's wrong with MRCA as an F-104 replacement for the Netherlands —and for Belgium, Norway, and Den mark? It will have the same price and' delivery date as the YF-16 or YF-17 by the time they have been converted from experimental techno* logy demonstrators to "MRCAs." • One other point about MRCA, chaps. It is being made BY EUROPE FOR EUROPE IN EUROPE. And it is a Mach 2 intercepter, if that's what you want, and it is a street-fighting tank killer if that's what you want. Then why, Uncle Roger, didn't your Defence Minister Mr Mason mention it ini his address to the Eurogroup the other day? He didn't mention Jaguar either. I don't know what they say in Barnsley, the constituency of the Rt Hon Member, to miners who go round knocking down pit props, but it must be summat like "Be lad, tha's reet daft." Left, Z-37 Cmelak, from the Czech journal "Letectvi 4 Kosmonautika". Right, the repair department of de Havilland Propellers Ltd during the Battle of Britain ("Flight" photograph, July 1940) i » ,%
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