Page 107 - Demo

103it was a bit of a farce. You could hear Harriers overhead and there were some explosions but obviously it just showed that we couldn%u2019t do much in the weather. We were told not to say to any senior officer%u201d You should have been here Monday, it was great%u201d. On the Tuesday I went for a walk and remember being surprised at the lovely countryside as I hadn%u2019t really spent any time in England for a couple of years. I also found a pub that served a lovely cask ale so much better than the Scottish keg beer that was all we could get in Scotland. A couple of weeks later we had to give an airborne demonstration to General Lucertini who was the head of the Italian Airforce. I am not sure why we were picked for this but suspect that other crews were quicker at dodging it.Although the MAD boom was fitted, the actual MAD equipment was not fitted at first in the Nimrod. The MAD was a very sensitive magnetic detector that could detect variations in the earth%u2019s magnetic field caused by the presence of a submarine or any large iron artefact for thatmatter. It was mounted in the tail boom to keep it away from the magnetic interference of the aircraft and it had to be calibrated. To do this we carried out a MAD compensation sortie. Once airborne we flew on a cardinal heading and then yawed the aircraft back and forth through several degrees while the operator did something down the back. You then repeated it rolling a few degrees left and right before pitching the aircraft up and down a few degrees. I think that this was then repeated on the other cardinal headings. The sorties lasted about 3 hours and the rear crew hated this as the motion made them all sick. It wasn%u2019t so bad for the pilots as we could see out the front what was happening and we were concentrating on the flying. I think we had to call out the motions as well, calling out %u201cup%u2026down%u201d etc but often ended out of synchronisation. It was quite normal to have the flight engineer sitting behind us being sick into his own bag while it was going on. We quickly learnt that the rear crew did not respond well to calls for drinks and snacks up the front.