COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

CHAPTER THIRTEEN FRONTIERS OF WHAT?
It was dark as we moved outside to toast them both. But the clouds
offshore were already touched with the gold of another dawn and a
cool refreshing shower splashed down around us as we raised our
glasses. We were short of sleep again, for the second time in as many
days, but it seemed like a good omen for young Ros.
Throughout the following week we pressed on to the west.
Dallas/Love Field then Los Angeles and San Francisco. There was a
certain amount of difficulty in putting over the Elliott record. Security
imposed its own constraints, and most of our audiences, even those
with a military background, had never even heard of Lightning, Blue
Steel or Buccaneer. But we persevered.
When it came to the VC 10 and BAG One-eleven the emphasis had
to be just right - stressing the value of the relationship with Bendix
and making it absolutely clear that all the monitoring and failure
survival was Elliott. Pinkie did a great job on the two civil systems,
talking with full BLEU 8 authority, reinforced by his unique low
minima test flying experience and Derek provided the engineering and
technical back up.
As Ron Howard put it in a lecture some years later:
To BLEU goes overwhelmingly the credit for bringing to fruition
the basic system for making accurate landings on runways, the concept
which is now in everday use in both military and civil transport
aircraft..... Automatic 'flareout' was first demonstrated in 1947..... In
October 1958 BLEU announced that they had completed over 2000 fully
automatic landings on several different aircraft.
And Pinkie had been in the thick of it - flying and monitoring the
behaviour of automatic systems on a variety of piston and jet engined
aircraft in all sorts of weather.
Once at Thurleigh, in a Vulcan, with the Superintendent in the
right hand seat, a bank of fog started to drift across the airfield as they
joined the circuit. They touched down but could not see the runway
and there was no ground guidance. So Pinkie overshot called for a
quick GCA9 from the opposite direction and made a fully automatic
landing - downwind - rolling out into the clear where he could steer
manually. The fog kept moving, and caught up with them before they
could taxy in, reducing the visibility to about ten yards. Jack Shayler
was highly twitched by the whole performance, and Pinkie told him
that he should have more faith in the trials for which he was
responsible.
In the last great London smog, four days in December 1962, all
227