Classic British Flight Sim

I love the desert camo, but can anyone tell me why fighters or Bombers of that period never wore that scheme?

Good question Chris.

The short answer is 'I don't know', but around that time it was being said that Transport Command (and later Air Support Command - the 'ASC' is where the callsign 'ASCOT' came from, btw) was the only Command which was always operational, in the sense that they were already doing in peacetime much of what they would do in wartime.

While most of the aircraft of the other operational home Commands (Bomber, Fighter, Coastal) were committed to NATO CFE, the transports generally ranged much further afield (eg Beverlies on the 'slip' to Singapore, down to Libya (El Adem), Nairobi, Aden, etc) and it's possible that someone in authority in Transport Command took the not-unreasonable decision that if we were going to fight a war it might well be somewhere hot and desert-like.

It's worth remembering too that in '66-'67 we were heavily-engaged in up-country ops in Aden and that might well have had an influence.

Also, transports may well land in unfriendly territory, or near the front lines, so needing all the ground camouflage help they can get, while combat aircraft generally don't - in the types of wars we fought in the Middle East, enemy 'counter-air' strikes were pretty unlikely.

The black undersides were pretty uncontroversial - it was SOP that any deep-penetration mission would take place at night - but comment was made at the time that the camouflage experts had now gone 180 deg away from their wartime choice of dead-matt black to avoid showing up in searchlights, and had now chosen high-gloss for the same purpose. As Garry says, they later changed it again.

Another thought is that the NEAF Vulcans based in Cyprus were not only committed to NATO (wartime targets in USSR) but were also on centralised servicing, which would have made it difficult to rotate aircraft between UK & Akrotiri if a complete repaint was necessary.

However, as I said, all these are just my deductions based on observation: if anyone really knows why, please sing out!

Cheers,

Kevin

Cheers for the info there Kevin, very interesting. Now that I think about it, I remember seeing some pics of 84 Squadron's Beverleys in that scheme: http://www.raf.mod.uk/squadrons/h_image ... rleyc1.gif

so I should have realised the theatre with my Grandad having served with them. Speaking of 84 Squadron, does anyone know of a decent freeware Bristol Brigand model out there? I wouldn't mind having a crack at repainting a few of them.

And on the note of the grey/black bomber command scheme, can anyone tell me the year it was phased out? I'm guessing early 50s, say '52-'54 but would be interested to know. Cheers,

Steve

Steve,

Re the Brigand, found a CFS2 model claiming to be an FS9 conversion at
http://www.combatfs.com. The FS9 model is claimed to be done by "Ted Cook"

Further searching has revealed his website http://www.tedcook.btinternet.co.uk/

and

b164bv01.zip
b164tv01.zip

at all nodes busy.

Try them and see

Also found a Piston provost by him.

Ian

PS your sig still says you're about to paint Seahawks - I thought you'd abandoned that :roll:

Thanks for the links Ian, and I have duly updated my sig for accuracy, although read 'working' very tentatively!

Speaking of which, I cannot get the Beaufort models I have to display their original textures in FS Repaint, even though they show up fine in FS9 - anyone know why this might be? I believe they are CFS2 models, so do you think this is the FS Repaint issue? Anyway to fully convert CFS2 models to FS9 format?

Cheers also to Hobby for the Brigand zip - that's next in the queue despite the limited schemes for it.

Steve

Steve

I have his Wellington in my Hangar and its not a bad bit of kit -
so hopefully you'll find the Brigand serviceable


Leif