The Americans were never too clever on directions, on a more serious note wow what a sight & sound especially in Manchester.
One or two yes. The most notable being a lightning strike in 1999. 11 mins into the flight and $3.5 million worth of damage. Struck the main rotor head and damaged all four main rotor blades, burning golf ball size holes through at least two of them, then tracked through the main gearbox, carbonizing most of the bearings, travelled along the tail rotor drive shaft and one of the horizontal stabilizers, then ended up dissipating through the tail rotor blades, which looked as if they had been toasted. Internally it sent a huge voltage spike through the main instrumentation panel, frying our weather radar, which was spewing out black acrid smoke into the cockpit. The three passengers on board at the time, were unsurprisingly "quite alarmed". Just glad we managed to get it back on the ground. There's been a few other emergencies and system failures on the way, some more complex than others to deal with, but that's what you train for.
i don't think it will soon! - i can think of a tragic story involving an aeroplane that happened to me, but it still doesn't rate that highly against the above.
if it wasn't for this thread i wouldn't have stumbled on the incredible story of Les Streete. https://peninsulaessence.com.au/the-spitfire-pilot-shot-down-at-stawell/
FltLt X (front right) “somewhere in England” early 1960’s. One way mission to Sevastopol (if it came to it).
Don’t think there’s any back story. Obviously posed publicity shot showing how well ‘we’ (Britain) were equipped to stand up to the USSR… My dad told me much later in his life that one of his targets if he had to go for real was Sevastopol (Crimea). He said he was looking in a National Geographic mag in the crew ‘ready room’ and saw some pictures of local people in Sevastopol in national costume and thought ‘I might have to drop a thermonuclear bomb on them’. I think this made him question what it was all about.
Only pilots got the eye patch so they could still see after the blinding flash of the bomb. FltLtX was navigator/bomb aimer so he wasn't issued with such high tech equipment.
