Bristol Britannia from me...

[alan cottrill]

Hi Sammach.
The brit sqd at briz,was my first sqd posting straight from my training camp at RAF newton,I enjoyed 5 years from 1970/1975 up till the gov of the day decided to scrap them.
My first encounter with them,was being told to go over to a brit doing gen`y balance eng runs,when i told the corp in charge that i was new,he said right then we are about to start the engs,just hold the prop,well you can imagine my reply to that,but he was not joking,once you got to know the aircraft,you held the prop a bit longer than needed,just to scare the pax,the ones at the front of the aircraft thought you where going to get chopped up,the ones sitting at the wing root area,thought the eng had blown up,as the back pressure built up,the ones at the back thought the aircraft was on fire has you could get a good 12 to 20 foot flame shoot out the exhaust.
Regards alan.
P.S. i have downloaded the fs9 version,not yet put it in the sim,as i have been haveing probs with a slow internet connection all day,i look fwd to seeing how this one compares to mike stones,which was very basic,but functional.

[DaveB]

Fortuantely.. no such tomfoolery was observed at Luqa for my one flight in a Brit.. Malta to Brize in Feb/Mar '74 It's the only airliner I've ever been dripped on in the pax cabin while in descent :roll: Definately a Marmite aircraft.. you either love em or hate em and I fall into the later group I'm afraid

ATB

DaveB :tab:

[alan cottrill]

Hi Dave.
The holding of the prop on start up,is quite a normal thing with the brit,reason for this,is it being a free turbine,only the hot gases turn the props,via a gear box,the proceedure,for those not in the know,is as follows.
4 men hold a prop each,the headset man waits for capt to say prop brakes released,the headset man gives the propbrake release signal to the 4 men,they then spin the props 1 full cycle,and give a thumbs up,the headset man then tells the capt that the props are free to rotate,the capt then tells the headset man which eng he is going to start,and the headset man gives the eng start signal to the man holding that prop,he gives a thumbs up to let the headset man know that he is ready to move away once the prop starts to move on its own.
Reason for the above proceedure was to prevent any wind blowing the props the wrong way during startup,as this could damage the gearbox.
We just held the prop back a little bit longer than norm to get the packs worried,but there was no danger,as you where well away from the cone of suction,before the props got any real speed.
regards alan.
P.S. these startup antics of ours was nothing compared to the pilot who made a young army officer so ill,he spent 2 weeks in medical,by convincing him he was flying the aircraft with 2 bits of string,i was the one who marshalled the aircraft to stand,and spoke to the capt,so i got the story first hand.

[DaveB]

Hi Alan

Tks for that mate. ;-) We've been having trouble with our starters on the Vanguard (there IS a crossover.. honest!) so we set about trying to think which aircraft used Tynes and the CL44 sprang immediately to mind. However.. the starters on the Tynes fitted to CL44's are not the same type as those fitted to Vanguards (or so we've learned) :-( Our starters are fully electric and the ones fitted to the CL44 Tynes are pneumatic.. drat! :@
As it happens.. we've often seen flames come out of N0.1 engines jetpipes (not a standard feature your honour!) so the demise of it's starter is probably a good thing. It ran b1oody hot (too hot) on low beta which necessitated switching it to high ground beta in short order to get sufficient airflow into it. It may well be that the dodgy starter just wasn't turning the engine fast enough in the first place and without the benefit of a GPU, they're all started off the batteries.. not an ideal situation.

Anyway.. sri for taking the thread off course a bit and thanks again for imparting that bit of very interesting info Always nice to hear how the other half lived

ATB

DaveB :tab:

[Tomb]

my first ever flight was on an RAF Brittania, i was a forces brat on his way home to his parents aged about 8, eyes all agog and on the plane i jumped, right next to a window seat..this was way cool. anyway the flight is on the way and the stewdesses have this funny clock like clicker thing and they kept going up and down the isle looking puzzeld..

yup you guessed they had one extra passenger....me

i was 8 years old...never occured to me the plane i got on might not be going where i was supposed to..they were like busses right...you got off at your stop... i knew that i had been on busses before...never a plane though.

well lot of adult folks made lots of assumptions and i ended up getting on this plane.

the nice man with the four bars took me up front showed me around and being a very nice man, dropped me off in the right country, though not quite the right airport...

see i knew they worked a bit like busses...well they did for small boys back then...

the RAF put me up and took good care of me till the parents turned up...

funny how life turns out, 10 years later i was in the RAF...

[Techy111]

As a Stewardess....???

:fart:

Tony

[DispatchDragon]

Ahhh.... a Britannia wet start........such a wonderful sight on a cold wet night at Luton -- Monarch seemed to do it routinely -- Britannia's 102s also did it but not as frequently -- funny thing is when I rode them for IAS in 4 years of
loadmastering I never saw a wet start -- unless it was done intentionally The bloody great gout of orange flame
was quite spectacular especially when seen right at twilight as it tended to illuminate the entire side of the aircraft.

Leif

[emfrat]

I will Jens

Jens - I'm working on a sort of a Proteus sound file as well if you are interested....

Leif

Hi Leif -
I was just trying Fraser's FS2002 Proteus soundset, which I got from flightsim. It might not sound the greatest in FS9.1, but at least it doesn't produce that refined drone of the default King Air...
Cheers
MikeW

[DispatchDragon]

Yes I know Mike

Fraser did that one when he originally did the Brit panel I believe

It sounds more like a 44 than a Brit -- although as someone asked me elsewhere "Would you use it in place of the default turbine sounds?' === Answer - Hell yes -- I'm sorry I know there are folks around who have no love of the
Brit or her status as "whispering giant" But I grew up with Britannia's 100s in my back yard, then Monarch's 300s
then finally working onboard IAS's 300s so I have a large soft spot for the Brit....It helped pay my pocket money
when I was 11 -15 and then kept me in fairly good style from 1973 to 1977. Her song has long passed and to the
best of my knowledge the only running Proteus in an airframe is at Kemble - I would hazard a guess that less than
10% of the flight sim community have any idea what she sounded like - so to them anything sounds passable - I heard
someone suggest using the C130 Allison sounds <shudder> or even (give me strength) Sound files for a Starliner

I think I will shut up before I annoy people and get flamed

Leif

[emfrat]

Cheers, Leif -
I haven't knowingly heard a 44 or a Britannia, although there was one of the latter at an RAF Leuchars B of B Day I attended in the mid-1960s. Didn't hear it running though. Best memory from that time was the disruption to Mr Murphy's French class as two (was it three???) Mosquitos came over our school in Dundee, on descent for the Leuchars circuit. Half a dozen of us recognised the sound, and I fear some lesser mortals got trampled in the rush to the high back windows of the classroom, for a look at what was making it.

There is a nice Douglas DC6 soundset which was built up from an A-26 sound file. Would a similar operation be possible using Fraser's sounds as a base?

MikeW