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78to be told that Steve had been posted to be an ADC somewhere and that the new first pilot would be our Canadian Exchange officer Mike Black.Chapter 9As usual the Nimrod course started with a lot of ground school and for the pilots an instrument trainer. The flight instrument set up was very different from the Shackleton and you had to know how to set it up for various states of flight. What made it difficult was that the instrument trainer had no feel and was hard to fly. In fact, we were encouraged to fly it through the autopilot which was OK but the autopilot was not cleared for flight at that time. The flight simulator was much better. That flew like an aircraft and moved on three axis in a way that felt like flying. We practiced flying approaches and all sorts of emergencies in it. It had a visual system that had a huge model of land, roughly like Cornwall with an airfield on it. It also had a large piece of sea that you could fly over. The visual came from a little camera that you were manoeuvring around as you flew, although the external operators could put you anywhere they wanted to. All went well unless you decided to fly under an oil rig for example when the camera would hit it. In fact,unless you were going very fast the camera retracted and so no damage was done. The operators could set the cloud base to whatever they wanted for training purposes. Much later, on the Squadron one of the pilots lost control while handling an emergency and the aircraft dived straight into the ground. The operators were laughing at the crew arguing about what to do and did not freeze the camera. Suddenly the aircraft came out of cloud at low level and went straight into the ground. It happened too fast for the camera to retract and it made a hole in the model which took a few days to repair.Eventually we arrived at the aircraft itself and started flying that. Because there was no rear crew trainer at that point all the rear crew came whenever the pilots were flying. And so while we were learning to han-