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Anyone remember this ? I was there.

Was that the day Cyril Smith MP was being shown round?

So what happened Stuart. When your No 2 said rotate you pulled back on the stick.

Had something similar happen on a Vulcan at Finningley. Lowering it down off jacks and the undercarriages weren't locked. The lower the jacks descended the lower the aeroplane kept going. Quite embarrassing really. Not for me, I was just a jack "operative". When the jacks reached the lowest point of their travel still with the full weight of the Vulcan on them, they had to stop and think about it. For some reason I don't think they could just reverse the direction of the jacks easily.

Alison

VC10 XR806 suffered the same demise and was scrapped. The spanner brigade drained all the fuel out of the main and wing tanks but left fuel in the fin tank. That was one of the frames that was used for Royal and VVIP.

This also reminded me of how we got the Andover into the hangar in Oslo (can't spell the airfield). The fin was to high to clear the entrance. Some bright spark came up with the idea of a ramp for the nose wheel which positioned correctly would dip the tail just at the right point to clear the doorway.

There was a VC10 incident at Filton, wasn't involved but know the bloke who carried the can, free fall the gear with the jack disconnected, the resulting thud fractured the wing main spar, classic lack of human factors management led to the incident from what I was told.

Ex A, used that ramp trick to position the F27 into a hangar, very high fin, similar to this photo, bit nerve racking in high wind, rain, at night.

[quote]There was a VC10 incident at Filton, wasn't involved but know the bloke who carried the can,[/quote

I remember that om the foreman who was from Wotton under edge got the sack, only a young kiddy.

I fly over Filton (as it is now) fairly often and apart from the hobbled runway, which is nonsensical to me, the sight of a Concorde left rotting at the side of the runway, gets me right there.

The jacking up the nose to put the fin or in this case fins, was used on Beverley's at Disforth.

To complicate the job, they did it sideways!

The a/c was jacked up to put some sort of 'skids' under the main wheels, then a jack on casters was put under the nose to lower the fins and the whole caboodle was shunted into the hanger and carefully moved about until the fins were between the hanger roof girders. Then it was let down. By putting them in the hanger pointing in opposite directions, we could fit 2 Beverley's into each hanger.

We had 'centalised' 1st line servicing at Dishforth and I was NCO i/c of one of the Radio shifts. One night shift we were detailed to pre-flight a certain a/c. We had to change the 'Crystal Fit' of the VHF depending on the destination, and I sent out a wireless and radar guy with the Xtal's to do the job.

They came back and claimed that I must have given them the wrong a/c number as it wasn't on the strip.

It eventually was found in one of the hangers, the day shift had gone to a great deal of trouble to put the wrong a/c into the hanger.

Then the call went out "Hangar Doors", followed by the cry of "Two Six", and lots of grunting and groaning was heard from the assembled masses.

Alison

the sight of a Concorde left rotting at the side of the runway

I stood in the rain at Dyrham Park on my birthday (26/11/2003) to watch Concorde fly over head and watched it land for the last time at Filton, I didn't ever work or fly in Concorde, but it was the end of era.
A couple of years before that I had attended an A300 type course at Filton, where they kindly gave us a couple of hours on the Concorde sim, so I can claim to have taxied and carried out a take off in the sim!