FLYING THE PHANTOM 100 YEARS OF THE ROYAL AIR FORCE
June 2018 FLYPAST 75Like the old valve television sets,
each radar seemed to be ‘hand
tuned’ so you never knew if you
would get a good one or bad one.
We even kept hand-written logs
in the line huts to at least give the
next crew some clue as to what they
might expect!
While the Lightning pilots had
the benefit of a cardboard cut-out
prompt to help them understand
radar intercept theory, the Phantom
guys fared slightly better with a
purpose-built air intercept (AI)
trainer. It was kept in a darkened
room filled with rows of IBM
computers that resembled the set of
Michael Caine’s Billion
Dollar Brain
movie. The
heat generated probably warmed
the entire station as banks of tapes
whirred and span around.
Sitting at a table were an
instructor, a student navigator
and a pilot. In front of the nav
was a copy of the back-seater’s
weapons panel and hand controller.
The instructor could set up the
intercept and the student pilot
had rudimentary controls to fly
the attack profile. After hours of
lectures on intercept theory and
technique the AI trainer put your
new-found knowledge to test.A VIEW TO A KILL
The aim on the OCU was to teach
the crew to carry out
an intercept, either to
engage and make a ‘kill’ or to
visually identify (VID) it. Intercept
theory is a very involved subject but
the goal is to put the fighter behind
the target so that that a VID can be
made – day or night. In an effort
to preserve valuable F-4 hours, the
target would often be a Canberra
from 100 Squadron which would be
briefed to fly at Mach 0.8 at 31,000ft
on a set heading.
Prior to the sortie, trainee crews
would pore over graphs known as‘nomograms’ that gave detailed
information on turning circles, so an
F-4 at 30,000ft pulling 2g in a 45°
banked turn might turn 180° and
take up 8 miles of airspace, while a
60° turn at 4g would use less.
‘Mind blowing’ does little justice
to the feeling I had looking at
what appeared to be one of Albert
Einstein’s scribbles after a few gins!
Trying to decipher a spider’s web of
curves and lines to understand turn
rate was like astro-physics. It would
be many months before students
could look at a graph and interpret an
aircraft’s performance.
Finding the target involves selecting
the appropriate range scale on the
radar. There’s no point setting a
40-mile scale because if he’s at 60
miles you won’t see him. A scan
of the sky is made using a hand
controller on your right-hand side.
There are elevation markers on the
radarscope, showing how high up or
down the radar is pointing. A target
at, say, 60 miles and 2,000ft above
will only need a small deflection
from level and it’s simply a matter
of adjusting the gain (power) and
sensitivity to try to locate your
objective.Bottom
FGR.2 XV488 of
228 OCU arriving at
Biggin Hill for the Air
Fair, May 1980. KEC“Trying to decipher a spider’s web of curves and lines to
understand turn rate was like astro-physics. It would be many“Trying to decipher a spider’s web of curves and lines to
understand turn rate was like astro-physics. It would be many“Trying to decipher a spider’s web of curves and lines to
months before students could look at a graph and interpret an
understand turn rate was like astro-physics. It would be many
months before students could look at a graph and interpret anunderstand turn rate was like astro-physics. It would be many
aircraft’s performance”
months before students could look at a graph and interpret an
aircraft’s performance”months before students could look at a graph and interpret an