Javelin TalesA few stories gathered from people who have worked in and around the Javelin.
Chris Wood (Javelin Pilot)
"[...] seeing the mention of the Leeming Javelin reminded me of an event which took place at Leeming in 1960. [...] What happened was that the O.C. Flying was giving a check ride at night to a nav/rad who was not doing too well on the course, (228 Night-Fighter Operational Conversion Course) On return to the airfield the undercarriage warning lights showed a red which suggested the undercarriage was not fully locked down.
The tower ordered a low flypast to enable them to visually check the uc leg using a lamp. The flypast should have been at about 200 feet but the aircraft nearly took the top off the control tower and then hit a pine tree on the edge of the airfield. The pilot managed to retain control and landed the aircraft with a six foot section of pine tree wedged in the wing. The red light turned out to be a false warning!
The subsequent inquiry found that the pilot had incorrectly set his altimeter to read height above sea level (QNH) instead of height above airfield (QFE). Since it was a dark night and the aircraft was not lined up with the runway the pilot failed to notice that he was low.
It says something for the strength of the Javelin that it could survive this impact. Nevertheless the main spar was out of true and other damage put the aircraft out of commission. It should be possible to identify whether XA643 is the aircraft as a large patch was riveted to the port wing to cover the damage."
Roger Phipps (Civilian Radar Tech)
"Read the Tech Notes section with interest and thought you might like to have the following recollections of my time at Moreton Valence.
Mk 8 aircraft of 41 Squadron and one single T3 (trainer) version were fitted with the Sperry Mk 12 autopilot and automatic approach coupler.
As Flight Trials Manager for Sperry at the time (1961 - 1963) I spent many happy hours in back seats of these Mk 8 aircraft as they were rotated back from Germany for retro-fit of the system.
The Mk 12 autopilot was a more advanced derivative of the Sperry Mk 11 fitted to Gannet aircraft. By modern standards its main drawback was that, to save money, it had no auto-trim facility so the pilot had to monitor the trim meter at all times and re-trim manually as often as necessary!
Auto-approach trials usually took us either to RAE Bedford or A&EE at Boscombe Down. My recollections are that the Javelin was one of the first aircraft to have this degree of sophisticated auto-approach capability.
I have two major memories of my time on this project:
...The first was going through the hedge at Moreton Valence when a very small piece of locking wire was subsequently discovered under a mushroom headed hydraulic valve in the brake system - the unit had been previously modified with a fibre glass cover to prevent ingress of such debris ... but unfortunately nobody had looked to see if any debris was present before fitting the cover!
Unfortunately this incident did not have a happy ending as my pilot, Geoff Worrall (chief test Pilot) was quite badly injured in the ensuing impact with a deep ditch as we came to a halt!
... My 2nd memory was of problems with the autopilot height lock, aircraft after aircraft developed divergent oscillations causing the autopilot to trip out.
The Site Manager at MV, Fred Turton got very cross (quite rightly) at this messed up his a/c turnround figures and wanted the whole retro-fit programme suspended until answers were found.
A splendid Gloster instrument man named Alex stayed up all night and re-certified as OK dozens of the Sperry height lock control units to prove they were OK - this frustrated Fred's ambitions! The fault was eventually found to be an incorrect potentiometer setting on another Sperry unit.
Only one T3 (I think only 3 were ever built) was fitted with the autopilot because HMG cancelled the programme on that version.
After my assignment to Gloster Aircraft came to an end I joined BEA (later British Airways) as Principal Development Engineer and headed the BEA engineering team developing the Trident autoland system. Happily this brought me back to Smiths Industries at Bishops Cleeve on many occasions."
Roger continues:
"I could tell you how, when flying under the direction of "the Ministry" on some low-level noise measurement flights relating to Concorde just before Christmas (1961 or 62 forget which), we inadvertently slaughtered about 5,000 turkeys in a turkey farm - they lost their cool because of the noise of a low-flying Mk8 (now't to do with autopilot project I'm glad to say!) and all panicked.
All claims for damages referred to the Ministry & hardly a "technical" matter!
