Page 59 - Demo

55ten. And so, nearly 2 years after finishing at Cranwell I was posted to 206 Sqn up in Scotland at RAF Kinloss. Chapter 7I was posted to 206 Sqn on 6 May 1969 but probably took some leave before arriving. When I got there, I was told that I was not really required as the co-pilot that I was replacing, Martin Coales, was not going for a bit. Thus, there was no rush to convert me to the Mk 3 Shackleton. This was a bit different from the Mk 2 we had trained on. The obvious differences were that it had a nose wheel and so was much easier to manoeuvre on the ground and it also had 6 engines. What had happened was the fact that we carried a nuclear depth charge. As we did not fly very fast, if we ever dropped one in anger it was likely that the rear fuselage would have been damaged. So, they beefed that up and at the same time changed the wing, it was actually the same wing as the Argosy, and fitted tip tanks to allow more fuel to be carried. They then found that the centre of gravity was too far back and so stripped all the sound proofing from behind the radar position. It was also too heavy at 108,000lbs rather that 96000lbs of the Mk 2 and so they fitted a viper jet engine, as used in the Jet Provost, behind each outboard Griffin engine. We used these for take-off and had them at idle for landing in case we had to overshoot. We also lit one early in any sortie if we were operating below 1000ft. To begin with these jets were just off, idle, 97% or full power and were handled by the flight engineer. By the time Iarrived they could be set at any RPM and we had an RPM gauge in the cockpit so could tell the engineer what to set. There had been instances when the engineer made his own decisions about what power was required which made flying the aircraft somewhat difficult. Normally jet engines use a fuel similar to paraffin but rather than have separate fuel tanks we just used the petrol that supplied the Griffins. This meant that the jet engines only had a full power life of 25 hours and their running