Planes (again)

Love the rough take off and over wing missiles. 8)

I had a kit painted (horribly) like this so it was pretty cool to see it at Cosford.

Ah, the inexplicably named raspberry ripple paint job!

They used to say it was so underpowered that a heavy one would only get airborne due to the curvature of the earth!

Big soft spot for this one:

The circuit denial weapon!

if you think Jaguars off roads are cool
Check out the Fins with F-18s

No Lysander fans then? My Dad’s favourite plane.

Great bit of kit. Very much the right tool for the job!

That’s cheating though, the Finns have bits of road designed to double as runways.

Something just very right about the Lysander isn’t there

there may be faster, there maybe two that could fly as long
but none could fly as fast and low for the length of time this lady could achieve.
600kts at 50ft and below for 1000nm….

is the Lysander at Old Warden?

Hah, I remember standing on the walls at castle urquart looking down on a buccaneer as it flew past underneath, you could have knocked it down with a well thrown rock. Think that must have been ’85 as I remember one was lost just a couple of weeks later.

Why were Buccaneers so good at low level?

Get over to YouTube and check out the Aircrew Interview channel, some great stuff, the AirFrance Concorde crash one is an eye opener, much more to it than generally thought. And the Buccaneers at Red Flag is just mental!

The bucc reputedly flew on a cushion of air in ground effect, like a helicopter. Apparently, if you were possessed of a sufficiently large pair, you could push the stick at low level and you wouldn’t stood in ……

I believe they were succumbing to fatigue at the end of their life, must have been one of the last jets designed by pencil rather than computer. There were a few lost by the “spectacles” failing and the wings folding up

Classic Jets at Cape Town used to offer rides in either a two seat Lightning or a Buccaneer. Naturally, the Lightning ride was a journey more or less straight up, with very limited endurance. I’ve read that the Buccaneer ride involved bouncing around Table Mountain at extreme low level and very high speed and was the definitive experience.

As someone has already mentioned, the Bucc was supposed to be extremely good at harnessing ground effect, it was designed to attack Soviet missile cruisers by flying just above the waves. Early examples had breathless Sapphire engines, but they were quickly replaced with Spey engines which could cope with a wide variety of altitudes, indeed the Spey has been installed in RAF Phantoms and civilian Boeing 737s. The RAF weren’t keen on taking Navy hand me downs, especially after losing out on both the TSR2 and F-111 but the Bucc was very highly regarded by pilots.

I’ve found an image of Bruntingthorpe’s Jag, resplendent in metallic green with Jaguar logos stuck on. I think that it looks rather dapper like this.

I think we had the Speys put in Navy ‘tooms because of their low-level performance, to get them off the deck! Plus probably a sweetener for RR. The RAF weren’t happy as the Speys weren’t as good at higher levels; “You can’t Spey a Phantom!” Later RAF jets had the original (GE?) engines.

We bought a small number of ex-USN F4J jets for the purpose of filling the gap left by the deployment of jets to cover the Falklands, by that time the production of Spey Phantoms had long since ceased. I’m pretty sure I’ve read that the RAF preferred the non-Spey versions too.

Yup the Buccs were quickly withdrawn due to fatigue issues.

You wouldn’t be in ground effect even at 50′ with something with such short wings and at 600 Knots, however.

The Speys were forced upon the Phantom as a sweetener to offset the fact that we’d just cancelled the TSR2-a tragic decision for the UK aerospace industry. They (Speys) were heavy and underpowered by all accounts.

Intruder alert…

The Jaguar gate guardian outside Bruntingthorpe is a very fetching shade of metallic green. It looks like a giant Matchbox toy.

😀
Glad someone has a photo of it, I’m in and out of Bruntingthorpe fairly regularly, but I’ve not had an opportunity to take a photo of the gate Jag.
I did have a happy hour or so to wait which I put to good used wandering round all the other aircraft last year, taking loads of photos, some of which are here, the Lightnings earlier being an example.
Also pleased to see the Lysander, always been a favourite, along with its spydery German equivalent the Storch.
The mentions of the Buccaneers reminds me of a little cartoon that was in the show guide for the Farnborough show I went to, which had a Buccaneer with a conning tower and periscope mounted on the back…
I wish I could track down the Red Flag footage the BBC showed of the two Buccaneers being filmed with gun cameras, hopping over the tops of sand dunes then disappearing again, only to pop up again even closer, banking so low their wingtips were raising little dust-devils off the sand!
The American crews manning the gun positions were getting hyper excited and abandoning their positions to go outside to watch!
Never seen it since.

Is this the vid?

Incredible for the authentic account of low flying and incidental 70s prog rock.

The RR powered Phantoms had better low level performance due to the more powerful Spey’s, but the GE powered aircraft were better at high altitude, swings and roundabouts. Part of these deals are about the RAF having independent technical and engineering authority. In time of war you don’t want to be relying on other nations for the supply of parts and design capability. The RAF has it’s own design capability and airworthiness authority so is able to carry out it’s own repairs and modifications on aircraft within its fleet, but airframes are easier than engines so having engines supplied by a domestic supplier is a big strategic advantage.

My old Dad with a Venom? probably Changi in the 1950’s.

airframes are easier than engines so having engines supplied by a domestic supplier is a big strategic advantage

Didn’t quite pan out on the F35 though 🙁

@pjm1974 – I remember the video being talked about, the Buccanneers looked like they were prairie dogs popping up at random locations. It’s not the one you’ve linked, it was filmed from a fixed position ground camera presumably mounted on a “gun” as the commentary from the operator was getting increasingly exasperated trying to track the planes.

Get over to YouTube and check out the Aircrew Interview channel, some great stuff, the AirFrance Concorde crash one is an eye opener, much more to it than generally thought. And the Buccaneers at Red Flag is just mental!

Proper brilliant stuff – thanks for that. Need a lot of time to watch them, but they’re so understated! Like the Red Flag Buccs not being able to fly as low as they could because the dust trails made them easy to spot, so they had to fly at 20ft. And inverted over ridgelines pulling 4-5g…

Edit about 42mins in.

Mitsubishi A6M Zero

To extend its range they didn’t fit any armoured protection for the engine, the fuel tanks or the pilot.

I’m building one at the moment that will soon be on the Airfix Thread.

Lots of reference to the Buccaneer video, Red Flag and other exploits here including an alleged incident where two Buccaneers hid under a Vulcan to evade detection 😮

http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-48541.html

Seems that the footage you’re referencing was originally shown on BBC Nationwide but has subsequently disappeared. Plenty of people have looked for it though.

One for Northwind and others on the Buccaneer; I remember as a youngster many times watching them working along Loch Ness at low enough level that the wingtip vortices were lifting water from the loch. You gotta be quite a bit under 50 feet for that and quite scary when you’re in a small sailing dinghy and it’s coming straight at you…. Pilots would run between the two towers of the Abbey School and brush the treetops just beyond, blowing twigs and leaves onto the front pitches.

Not my pic, but just came across it while looking at something else, RAF Jurby (IOM)

I remember being at RAF Coltishall when I was in the CCF Cadets and Jags doing low-level runs along the runway there. We watched a video about their role in the first Gulf War and one of the pilots reckoned that “low-level” in Iraq meant 30ft. There was apparently quite a game on between the Jags and the rest of the airforce but the Yanks refused to even consider anything that low. 🙂

Buccs on the floor;

Found it, I popped a photo up a while back of US planes of the 50s, but wanted an equivalent for the Brits, this will do for now, though it’s not super sharp:

How many can you name, without cheating?

This (the Granger Archaeoptryx) was built by two of my granddad’s brothers in the early 1930s:

I really don’t know much about it, other than it’s currently being restored by one of the sons. I really should find out more…

midlifecrashes

Best guesses, from front left….

B29, Valliant, Meteor, Anson and an Auster maybe in front? Harvard, Vickers Valletta ( maybe, although looks a bit like a 2 engined precursor to the Britannia…). Canberra, Shackleton, early mark with tailwheel. Down the taxiway in front are Venom/Vampire, F-86 Sabre, Supermarine Swift, (or maybe Scimitar, I think one was straight wing and one swept) and a Javelin in front. Bristol Brigand, Mosquito and maybe a T-33 to finish.

Fantastic pic, thanks for sharing.

And now I’m trying to work out where it might have been taken…

Well I didn’t credit the photo before so as should have:

http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?105912-RAF-Horsham-St-Faith-Norwich-Airport

There are a couple of listings of what’s what in the thread, I’ll not cut and paste them in case of spoilers for anyone still scratching their heads. I’ll just say 1957 is a bit late for a B29.

KB-29?

The US Air Force had tanker variants of the B-29 based in the UK, circa 1957.

The one at the front is a Hillman Imp.

Source:http://www.jitterbuzz.com/manreal/boeing_B50_20.jpg

That’s definitely a B-50 to the left, an aircraft that I didn’t even know existed until now! Zooming in you can clearly see the intakes underneath the engine nacelles, and to outboard drop-tanks. Amazing photo, that!

Lots of reference to the Buccaneer video, Red Flag and other exploits here including an alleged incident where two Buccaneers hid under a Vulcan to evade detection

http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-48541.html
I’ve read about the Buccaneers hiding underneath the Vulcan, sound plausible, and just the sort of thing they’d be likely to do just for the shits’n’giggles

@pjm1974 – I remember the video being talked about, the Buccanneers looked like they were prairie dogs popping up at random locations. It’s not the one you’ve linked, it was filmed from a fixed position ground camera presumably mounted on a “gun” as the commentary from the operator was getting increasingly exasperated trying to track the planes.
Seems that the footage you’re referencing was originally shown on BBC Nationwide but has subsequently disappeared. Plenty of people have looked for it though.

That’s exactly the film I was talking about, BBC Nationwide sounds right, too; I’ll bet the Beeb wiped the tape and reused it to save money, like they did with so many classic programmes, Dr Who being just one example.