ELECTRICIANS (Part 1)

As each day passed the electrical and electronic controls to the power plant became more and more complex and added more and more weight to the growing total. Several firms had submitted proposals for the many electronic boxes and one or two had fallen by the wayside. Eric the One had taken a bold decision in the face of the more complex intake control laws needed to adopt the emerging new technology of digital computation in order to give the required degrees of flexibility. If it had not been for this controversial decision the flight test investigations would have been protracted to an unacceptable extent.

By now there were two intake control boxes per engine containing control laws which were three times as complex as those in the pair of boxes controlling each engine, to which must be added the additional box for the reheat and the other for the secondary nozzle.

 The last two were only there from political pressure to ensure that the French engine firm had a contribution. The whole lot, including wiring, weighed three quarters of a ton. The many changes required as the programme advanced could be judged from the identification letters for each new set of the intake laws which advanced initially from AA, through AB and eventually to beyond TT’.  Thus any discussion in these areas had to start with a check that all participants were up to date on the current definition. They became quite animated as the aerodynamicists pressed for yet more changes almost aggressively as the electricians tried to slow the process down in order to meet their drawing and production targets. One of the job’s responsibilities, being an ex aerodynamicist, was to arbitrate at such times and defend the draughtsmen against the aerodynamicists.  However, thoughts went back to service in the Royal Air Force, where previous experience of the bonhomie of father’s coalmine electricians had been severely tarnished by the gung-ho attitude of those conscripts of an electrical persuasion.

Whilst still at grammar school towards the end of the war I volunteered for the RAF College at Cranwell, hoping to become a pilot, but something had gone wrong with the exemption from conscription. Somehow Hitler’s spies had already got early warning of this intent which made him decide to throw in the towel, presumably in a pre- emptive strike to reserve a poolside sun bed in Valhalla. This scotched any attempt to become a pilot for, although all the examinations for an officer pilot’s course at Cranwell were later passed, the war had now finished. In consequence they (we always referred to the king as ‘they’, as the king always referred to himself as ‘we’) had forty thousand pilots that were not now wanted. A year later a firm request from His Majesty King George VI to join him in the Royal Air Force (albeit at a somewhat lower rank) could not be ignored.  After about twenty weeks training as an engine mechanic and another twenty as an engine fitter the prospective geologists, mathematicians, grocers and general layabouts which formed the intelligencia of the 26th September ‘46 entry was allowed to play with engines and to sit in the cockpits of Hurricanes, Spitfires, Tempests, Vampires, Meteors, Lancasters, Ansons and Tiger Moths. We were paid seven shillings and sixpence per day for the sheer pleasure of listening to the crackle, bang and pop of these magnificent beasts whilst inhaling the bracing aroma of 110 octane petrol.

A group who had tried to volunteer for the Glider Regiment (most of us, being ex Air Training Corps Glider pilots had been allowed to fly primary gliders in a straight line and argued that the turns would come naturally) were refused by a clever commissioned paper pusher who pointed out that the Regiment’s gliders did not have engines. He had no answer to the claim, apart from a short “Bugger Off!” that we would save manpower by being able to service the glider tug’s engines and then jump into the glider and fly it.  Gloster Meteors and their jet engines had been introduced towards the end of the war and were still being developed. Like all new and current Air Force aircraft they were over-inspected, particularly the engines. On the Meteor the main fear was that the turbine blades would grow under the heat and centrifugal forces and cut their way out. These blades had to receive regular inspections.

Being compact, and therefore not a waste of prime building material like some of my more substantial colleagues, it was possible to wriggle up the jet pipe of a Meteor clutching a short length of broom handle to turn the engine and a thirty thou. feeler to test the turbine tip clearances. This led to an increase in popularity as it avoided the necessity of removing the back end of the engine nacelle and disconnecting the thermocouple leads and the jet pipe itself. Getting past the thermocouples was a tricky business, made more difficult by the fact that the arms had to be held above the head, wooden handle in one hand and feeler in the other.  In this incident things were going reasonably well and the turbine was turning gently, albeit there was some discomfort from the point of the exhaust tail cone sticking into one’s forehead as attempts were made to get a better view of where the end of the long feeler was located.  Elsewhere on the aircraft there was a lot of activity by the other tradesmen carrying out their particular inspections, so the noise of an electrician climbing into the cockpit and removing the “Don’t Touch!” notice was masked.

All at once there was a familiar clunk, but somewhat magnified by these cramped surroundings. The piece of broom handle became redundant. The turbine had started to go round on its own.

To the awe of the riggers working on the ailerons on the rear of the wing at the side of the jet pipe a body came out, feet first and face up, at escape velocity in a straight line to land flat on its back behind them on the tarmac.. This happened well before they heard the thunk of the second relay which took the shaft up to engine ignition speed. Although the piece of wood and the feeler were still in hand, there was an addition of two thermocouples, one caught in the belt at the back of the overalls and the other forced through the bottom of one of the breast pockets. The fact that the engine igniter plugs had been removed as a precaution only pene- trated the mind after a hard horizontal landing on the tarmac.  However, on mature reflection it was still a risk not worth taking.

Thanks to the electrician it was now necessary to remove not only the back of the nacelle and the jet pipe, but also to replace the thermocouple wiring. This worthy complained bitterly when he was given the job “as it wasn’t him who removed the damn things!”  Some weeks after that encounter with a sparks, the job of installing a Gipsy engine into a Tiger Moth came out of the bag. Jobs were nothing if not varied at Boscombe Down in that era. One of the few bits of streamlining on the Moth was a small pointed cone at the root of the propeller and this was held in place by a small castellated nut on a spike sticking out from the hub. It was necessary to tighten the nut and to line up a pair of castellations on the nut with the hole in the spike in order to insert a split pin through the two and lock the nut in place. That done, it was the end of the job, and it was possible to look forward to an engine run, if someone could be persuaded to swing the prop.

In order to fix the nut it was necessary to re-check that the magneto switches were off, thereby ensuring that the engine would not start. Standing on a box it was possible to grasp the prop in one hand and put a spanner on the nut with the other. By holding the spanner firmly and pulling on the propeller, one could look at the nut through one open eye to gauge the alignment of the hole with the castellations. At this precise minute an electrician had arrived on the scene, with the objective of testing the only piece of electrical wiring on the aircraft - from the magneto switches to the magnetos themselves. Regardless of the man in front moving the prop around, he switched them on. The last man in the cockpit had been a rigger getting in and out quite frequently whilst fiddling with adjustment of the flying controls and who had been warned to keep his hands off the switches. Thus, by concentrating on the castellations, the newly arrived electrician’s activity had not been noticed.  As an aid to getting a fat spark when swinging the propeller for starting the engine, the makers, De Havilland, had one of the two magnetos fitted with an impulse starter - a short spring which wound up as the engine was turned through a small arc. It then flicked the magneto over sufficiently quickly to discharge a healthy spark to the appropriate cylinder.

The switches were now on and the magnetos were alive. The prop was continuing to be rotated slowly. The impulse starter flicked over and the engine coughed weakly. Even a weak cough from this type of engine was sufficient to jerk the prop into such motion that it connected with vital areas, sufficiently to ensure being lifted bodily off the box and dumped backwards on the concrete floor.  A startled white-faced electrician looked out of the cockpit. An agonised red faced fitter lay doubled up on the floor and glared back. Then the dam broke. Since leaving the cloistered surrounds of the grammar school at Ashby de la Zouch and joining the Air Force the vocabulary had ex-panded with a lot of new words and phrases. The shock of realisation of what-might-have-been brought them all out in a controlled stream of forceful invective.

“What’s all this f******g swearing about?”

The Chiefie who had witnessed the last act of the incident as he walked across the hangar floor was never backward in choosing an appropriate expression. More shaken and bruised than incapacitated it was explained what had been going on and that it was O.K. now.  ”You had better go to the sick bay for a check up anyway - King’s regulations say that anyone hit by a propeller must see a Medical Officer - so no argument! We don’t want any loose balls dropping on the hangar floor! They might hazard aircraft safety!”  After interrogating the electrician and putting him on a charge he stamped of to his office. Deciding that I may as well have an hour or so off as instructed the walking wounded walked the quarter of a mile to the sick bay where the limp-handed clerk told me to sit down even before I had time to speak.

“There’s a panic on!” he said and shot out of the door with no more explanation.  A short time later an ambulance drew up at the door. The driver and medic came through the door quickly followed by the clerk.

“Well?” said the clerk.

“Can’t understand it.” said the driver, “No sign of him anywhere!”

“Oh, my God!” the clerk shrieked

“All that blood! It must have been awful!”

“There wasn’t any blood! Just no one - nothing!”

I put two and two together and got the wrong answer.

“What’s crashed?”

At that time aircraft crashes at this research base were all too frequent. Earlier that month a recent crop of disasters had stood outside R & I (Heavy) on a fleet of Queen Mary trailers. Two contained the remains of a Linconia - a streamlined version of a Lincoln bomber which was flying round the poles doing magnetic field research. Another pair contained a Miles Marathon, a new medium passenger aircraft which suffered from inadequate fire precaution design. When one engine caught fire it spread along the wing to the rest. On the next lay an Air Observation Post (AOP) slow flying Auster which had demonstrated its slow speed approach over the hedge on its delivery (and last) flight and had unfortunately stopped dead in the boggy bit alongside before nosing over onto its back. From the footprints through the canvas of the bottom side of the wing and the drops of blood between them they concluded that, as the aircraft lay on it’s back  the dazed pilot had righted himself and bent between the Vee struts to walk the length of the wing nursing a bleeding nose. Next was a pile of rubble which was all that was left of a prototype single engined jet that had done too tight a turn at too low a level with a full belly tank. The three Vampires which had managed to take off, but not to land in a very straight line due to bottoming bolts on the under carriage fittings were just being recovered.

“Nothing to do with you!” snapped the clerk, “We had a call - mischievous as usual, no doubt - about an erk being hit by a prop!”

“Ah! Perhaps this erk can help you there!”

The Chiefie, unbeknownst to me, had obviously gone to the office to telephone and then walked around looking for the injured party, thereby missing the ambulance crew.  After having had a kit inspection by a very amused Medical officer who let his imagination run riot in suggesting that there would not be many to join such an elite club of survivors, dismay was added to agony when, after limping back to the hangar there was another fitter sitting in the Tiger Moth running the engine. The Chiefie said that he  “didn’t think that you could raise your leg that far and would not care to swing the prop!”

“I didn’t intend to. Electricians have no experience of swinging a prop and I was hoping to get that particular one on the other end of it!” was the response.

Ted Talbot

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