Poor "old bird" :-) I've done my fair share of nursing broken aircraft home.
Once I didn't nurse so much as abuse it. The Tornado has "VIB" captions, one
for each engine, to warn that there is undue vibration in the engine. But we
had so many spurious warnings that once, when I was enjoying myself as the
"bounce" for a pair of Tornados (an adversary with which to train the others in
evasion. I had a VIB caption on one engine but decided to ignore it and
continue with the sortie.
When I got back to base, in Germany, I told the engineers before shutting down
and they asked me to do an engine run. At full power the engine gave me only
around 91% RPM; When I informed them of this the reply was, "that'll be 7 or 8
turbine blades gone then, sir . . ."
The turbine blades were cooled with compressor air, via small ducts up the
blades. But if a duct becomes blocked the blade almost instantly vapourises in
the heat of combustion. During the run-up to Gulf War 1 I think they changed
the blades to a different material, some sort of ceramic, which would resist
the abrasion of the desert air more robustly and the problem has decreased.
Sorry, long story :-)
Chris
On 10 Mar 2012, at 06:54, Jim Nichols wrote:
> I wasn't really thinking of them looking outside, as much as keeping an eye
> on the systems of the a/c. With an old bird like that, things can happen.
> I saw them checking some system for half an hour, one in the cockpit and one
> moving around the tail, with at least one nacelle opened up. This was all
> done on the ramp.
--
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