Canberra PR9 Navigator Interview | Ken Delve (In-Person Part 1)

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packer and so I guess I've been a little bit of an aviation influence in there from mum a bit which he was wartime only and then my brother so yeah just just decided I'd liked airplanes started making plastic models and it went from there so when did you actually join the RAF so I actually went for a scholarship so in the sex form you can go a scholarship to go to university so that time in the early 70s the Air Force wanted all Air crew to be graduates so a new program came in so I applied for a college from the sixth form got the scholarship then converted that into University degree in 1972. and going air crew they said study whatever you like so I went for ancient history and Archeology so uh you think not a great deal of use for a navigator but their view was if you're an engineer you need an engineering degree but aircrew it was more about three years of growth and development of thinking and actually we reference that archeology bit when we come to talk about the piano and operations later on so did you always want to be a nav perversely I did and actually when I went to the interviews at big and Hill which is where the officers and aircraft selection Center was and and of course the two-wing master race tend to be the people dominating the interviews and I remember the the wing Commander pilot said um I see you've applied to be a navigator uh uh Ken why is that all right well my understanding is actually it's a more interesting role you know all the clever stuff is done by the Navigator he kind of horrificed a bit of that and I thought you know Christ I've blown it now um and but the other guy with him was an Avenue was kind of giggling and I thought well maybe it'll be okay and so yes I applied as a now maybe influenced a bit more by my brother as well who was a nav and so I'd heard more about that and I didn't really necessarily want to go and fly at the fighter guest particularly I just wanted to go and fly airplanes yeah so did you have a type you wanted to go into at this point actually not really because I mean in in the what late 60s early 70s when I applied the Air Force was in a transition phase so a lot of the new airplanes coming in but I had no real desire to fly and pick a type I had a few I wanted to avoid one being the Vulcan having heard stories from from Howard about the Vulcan and having sat in them since then I'm glad I avoided it and the Shackleton there was another one to avoid but I had no great desire of particular plane to go to probably favoring more towards the Phantom and the buccaneer which are really the ones that were coming into into volition then really and certainly when I got to nav school that was very much the aim of most guys in nav school on the on the phase one the group one flying was to go buckle Phantom nice one so can you talk us through your nav training your basic nav training and before you went to the front line yeah so I having done the the officers uh training course at cramwell which is a 14-week course when I did it um you then go to to fillingly and an all Navigator students start with the same basic domini flying I was the first of the all jet courses 210 nav course was the first all jet course up to that point they'd flown the varsity as their multi-engine airplane but we were the first to do all domini so phase one was basically just medium and high level flying around just learning basic navigation techniques the shape of the Earth maps all that kind of basic stuff air plot still in those days as well at the end of that first bit you all then went to the phase one for the faster bit which was jet promised she all then did a bunch of flying around in the JP at low level and at the end of that you were then decided whether you would be best suited for the Louisville role the group one guys fast get roll or the kind of a Truckee Nimrod bomber type role for the for the group two guys and they would then go and do a different different course now that primarily came down to where the systems thought you were best suited now like all the way through your training you had the ability to say I would like to do X but the the Air Force are looking to say how many X do I need is this guy capable of being X can I get a round Peg and a round hole or do I actually need all square pegs this month so at the end of that you get streamed you get streamed either group one or group two group two was all domini flying and they went to hercs and in rods Falcons all those kind of roles and and group one was the fast air set but also the radar slots so Vulcan radar Victor radar shotgun radar all went through the group one course I did cameras Ricky cameras so you then went through a another bunch of jet Providence flying including Pairs and tactical formation stuff another bunch of domini flying but that was all low-level radar work and at the end of that assuming you you passed the course you then got a posting and you again you filled in what you wanted to go and do and I would say probably of my course we had 10 Group 1 navs probably eight of those wanted Phantom or buccaneer I think I probably actually put Buccaneers I don't go to air defense so I think I put Buccaneer down and then when those postings came out mine came out as Reiki camera which I didn't really know a huge amount at that time but a bunch of guys said are you you're really okay that's great and so that was how I got posted to Wrecking cameras wow awesome so what were your first thoughts of the camera well I I knew a bit about the airplane um the history wise but not a lot my brother had flown cameras early on on 115 score it wasn't but then he went on to the Vulcan course after that so I didn't near know a lot about cameras from him and I was posted initially to 13 squadron at Malta on the pr7 and then because my wife was heavily pregnant they wouldn't let us go and so I was transferred and said to 39 Squadron that wouldn't um and so I didn't know much about the camera until that point then I started doing a bit more research on the airplane I was that stage a great Aviation historian the Asian history bit really came after I arrived on the Squadron and was made the Squadron historian because I had a degree in ancient history I almost called historian and from that point on I started talking to all the old boys and girls and got really interested in the history of the Air Force and then the history of the Canberra which is a phenomenal history it is there's so many marks of the camera but can you briefly share with our viewers some of the marks and because obviously we stood there with the pr9 but there's so many can you just yeah and the piano the one behind us here looks very different to all the others just looking at the canopy above there's only two RF cameras that have that view of canopy the bi-8 which was a bomber interdictor and the pr9 but pr9 was unique in its its canopy Arrangement which we'll talk about a bit later on so I mean the camera was designed in 1944 foreign and ended up leaving Royal Air Force service in 2006 and NASA and the state still fly through they're very very different to this one but they are still essentially a you know a camera so for normal history and the Royal Air Force had nearly 70 squadrons of cameras so obviously it started in Italy in the bomber roles it was designed to be basically the replacement for the Lancaster Lincoln the jet bombers of mosquito so it's designed to go higher and faster albeit with a smaller bomb load originally designed to have a radar bomb site to overcome the problems of accuracy and that didn't work so it ended up being a visual bomber with a glass nose just like a Lancaster or a Lincoln dropping exactly the same thyroid pound and thousand pound bombs but the primary role was to introduce bomber command to the jet age bomber command didn't want the airplane it was an interim step because it's a small airplane not enough people in on the bombs before the proper bombers the v-bombers came in to play but it converted bomber command from Lincolns and mosquitoes to the jet age and flying at 50 000 feet instead of 25 000 feet and flying at Mach point eight versus you know two-thirds of that so that was the primary role of the camera when it first came in but the airframe was so adaptable it very quickly got turned into a reconnaissance airplane initially as the Canberra AR3 and then later on there's a pr7 then eventually the pr9 so multiple variants and marks of the camera have been used and it performed such a wide range of roles from straight bomber to interdictor Grand attack reconnaissance Target Towing electronic warfare it's done almost everything it's an incredible aircraft but could you tell our viewers what the role of a pr9 nav was yeah so the the all of The Navigators in the pr Force and and the early PR Canberra squadrons had three Navigators on board later on Two And of course in the piano and there's an early seats for two so the role of the of the Navigator in any of the pr airplanes is primarily navigation getting from A to B and finding the right place and then managing the cameras so all the camera controls in terms of setting the cameras up to do what you want picking the right camera is all in the front the pilot has a switch to actually fire the camera but that's about all he can do everything else is in the front so if I select the wrong camera or I set the wrong settings on the camera he can press a button it'll work but it won't get the result you actually want and then the latter days of the pr9 then of course you're doing self-defense the airplane as well so the self-defense Suite is also embedded in the front of the airplane so let's talk about some of your ground training in the pr9 what was that like for you so the regret the ground training oh it's actually quite humorous I did the initial Canberra ocu for when I did it was at marum two three I know she was a marum and all aircrew goes through the ocu for the camera and it was it was primitive in the extreme we're now used to looking at computers and everything else but the simulator for example for the camera which is which is B2 simulation at that time was a little wooden box with a few instruments on the front of it and if you wanted to do a radar effect say of the takan it didn't work you actually passed a piece of paper under a slot in the in the the cubicle to the instructor who's the other side saying I'd like a fix from this Beacon at this time he'd then make up a number and pass that back at the appropriate time and that would be your radar that would be your fictional attackout system and then you'd make that actually apply to your the map you were going to go and do so to say it was primitive was was a bit of an understatement and then when you arrive on the uh on the ocu for the pr9 we had our own conversion flights and that's primarily to convert cruise to the airplane because the ocu at marham did no reconnaissance training no camera training it was simply primarily teaching the pilot to fly what is a quite a dangerous asymmetric airplane and so that was the primary focus you as a navigator are really just sitting there as as ballast and learning a bit about the airplane at the the ocu on the conversion flight you are now starting to learn all about reconnaissance and all about identifying targets as well because obviously you're not only taking a photograph of the target you've got to also do a visual description of the target again a bit more later on so in the early Sims were you in Clause like you see behind us or was it all open or was it like no it's literally a box it's literally like you walked into a box that's about you know six foot square and you sit at the sit by a desk with a few Insurance friend of you and you sit there and you look forward and that's it from the other side of the Box other side of the wall is the instructor you can't see you but you're just passing Bits of Paper back and forth it's quite amazing but even when I was an instructor filling later on the the simulator of fillingly which is probably the building was maybe 20 times the size of this room here that was computerized but all the banks of computers there were 32k combined so again the phone you're holding your hand now you know is a million times more powerful than the entire Navigator simulator offendingly that's absolutely crazy so can you talk us through your first flight and some of their flying training you did yeah so so obviously the other big difference for for you when you're sitting this one is it is as you've seen me up in the nose a minute a bit of a black hole or Calcutta um and people when they look and they come visit the airplane here at West Raynham they often say is it claustrophobic and how did you do that and two things that firstly is at this time frame 1960s 70s most Navigators sat in black holes and certainly when this was designed all no they gave us out in black holes whether it's a Vulcan a Victor shackle you're in a black hole so this was no different to those until the things that the Phantom of the buccaneer came in for Navigators excluding night Fighters like meteors you always sat in the dark normally facing backwards so at least here you're sitting in the dark facing forward so there's one advantage um so so yes people say it's a bit of a black hole but the other thing is you're very busy so you're busy all the time other navigate gating or running the cameras writing visual reports doing in-flight reporting on the radio you don't really have time to think about the fact that you're stuck in a black hole so we now have the nose open so can you tell us what it was like on your first flight sitting in right there to us I can't remember a huge amount about the first flight particularly but it's it's a bit strange when you first sit in there and then when the nose closes it closes with a big clang a bit like a cell door not that I've been in a Cell so I'm not you know I've seen films that sell doors closing but you can't think and it goes dark and the little window you can see on the left-hand side there are known as day night indicators I'll talk about what they're asking for but later on but you know essentially it's pretty much like that there's not a lot of light in there once you close that door and then the table sits on your knees and your nav bag sitting down the side of the seat you are a bit constrained and unlike all the other Cambridge you can't get up and walk around and you can't go and you know have a chat to the pile and tap them on the shoulder because he climbs up his ladder sits in his place I sit in the nose and that's it you don't see each other again until you get out it's a unique arrangement for the for the pr camera for the pr9 and the reason why the canopy is offset when you look up now at the canopy it's only offset to the left-hand side because it was minimum change from all the other cameras and in all the cameras you climb through a door on the right and you then as a pilot move across to the left-hand side and sit under the left-hand side of the canopy well once you decide you're not going to use that door anymore and you move the canopy across to the left and of course it looks offset people always think it was done for clever tactical reasons done for it keep it as cheap as possible reasons so when shorts designed this in Northern Ireland they were told a minimum change to be made to the airplane so we're gonna have a detailed look later on but can you tell us some about some of the systems for the nav and the cameras that were um on the pr9 and your time so in my period I arrived on the squad in 1977 this particular airplane here xh135 I flew that 15 times on the Squadron um amongst my thousand hours of PR Canberra flying and and so really we're talking about that late 70s early 80s period of fit for the airplane when it went through one of its first transitions of Kit in it essentially in in the front you've got the front set of instruments are navigation the left-hand side is all the camera controls and the right hand side is all the communications in essence in breaking it down and so for you your primary role obviously was to maintain the navigation system as accurate as you could and then obviously with your map on your on your table navigate from from A to B you're then using the cameras appropriate to the sorties so when I was on the squad in the late 70s we had two primary roles we had a tactical low-level role and we had three cine cameras for that f95 cine cameras one in the port one starboard and one in the nose and there's a little round window you can see we'll look at that in a moment and you run those at either four or eight frames a second and that basically we've used those at 100 feet 200 feet that sort of height and so if you're flying past a tank or a group of Tanks or troops that's what you use you're flying past a bridge or anything else there's a tactical Target that's what you use for the for the photograph we tended to put those Targets on the left hand side of the airplane only because the pilot has a better view down the left so we tend to use the port f95 more than any of the other two because it gave him a better view as you pass the target if we got the Target in the right position for the camera and you ideally want the target so it's a bridge so you know a lateral Bridge you want that bridge one third of the way up the frame in the film if you get it one third of the way up the frame then I will see it in my window so as we flash past the target I look at the Target heaters to the Target and I write down a visual report on what I've seen then I ask him what he saw right so when we're task for that Target would be told if there are any key elements of information so against the bridge they might say we really want to know what the structure of the bridge is so we need to weapon to Target matching so if you want the weapon to go bang effectively and includes the right weapon you need to know the structure of the target so they might say the primary purpose here is structure they might say we want to know if any alternate Crossings so if we drop this bridge can they get across the river in some other way within a mile or two so depending on what the key tactical data requirement it is will be what we'll actually write down and you have to learn what things look like so you know Electronics is another thing so you go flashing past a mast what kind of antenna on there what direction do they face are they weather covered how many are there and you're doing all this in in five ten seconds you flash past the Target and write it down and you do lots of training on the on the ground Ricky squadron's had a very intensive ground training system so you'll learn how to identify these things very very quickly so you could write it down and you tended to fly with the same pilot all the time which meant you could share the information more readily you understood how the other person worked constantly the cruise was still the case on tornado for me as well in my day so probably 80 of my trips in in this were flown with the same constituted pilot in that period I changed Pilots three times in my five years but same same pilot so if we go past a uh a bridge then we will agree that he will look at certain parts of it and I will look at other parts of it that way we shouldn't miss anything a guy called Mike Rondo who's a well-known Aviation artist was one of our pilots and I threw a Mike and Mike would actually draw a picture of the target as well so when you landed at the end of the saw team you know you normally did five or six of these Targets in a trip when you landed the film was taken away and and I'll show you a camera magazine in a moment the film is taken away and developed you then go to talk with the pis the photo interpreters and before you can look at the Target they ask you for your visual report form so they can compare what you said about it to what the film actually shows so every time you fly you're being evaluated Mike would hand in a drawing of the target as well being being an artist his drawing was normally brilliant and so one thing I really liked about the recce role was it wasn't pretending you drop bombs on something you actually came back with the result or not so it's continually proving you can actually do the role and that's the Tactical of course flashing around that a couple of graffiti is actually quite good fun as well so what are the strengths and weaknesses of the pr9 the strength of the airplane and it's where it came in to start with was he the height the airplane was designed to operate above 50 000 feet and when it first came in there was nothing else up there and no Fighters could get up there no missiles could get up there and so when the airplane came into service in 1958-59 the pr9 it was safe at that height then of course in the early 1960s we had the shoot down of the U2 and so people said well maybe it's not quite so safe after all having said that there were not many people that could get up there and even in the latter days in the early 80s if you rang a Fighter Squadron up and said would you like a high level practice Target and they'd go yeah that's great forty thousand feet no 60. and they weren't that happy and they would be they would be somewhat busy wouldn't come and want to play so the airplane had the ability to fly phenomenally High I've been to 62 000 feet in one of these you can't turn there's no air up there and so you're kind of being very gentle with it one of my colleagues claims to have been to 68 000 feet in a pr9 which is pretty good going routinely we'd fly at 50 55 000 feet as a matter of course nice stuff so what was your first Frontline Squadron with the piano 39 so 39 was the only pr9 Squadron so that was it they were based at Winton so having arrived on the Squadron uh it was it was great you know it was a very well established Squadron I was a first tourist and uh I guess probably three people on the Squadron were first tourists they didn't tend to send first tourists to PR squadrons pr9s and certainly there were no there's only one for us tourist pilot in my time on the Squadron because of the nature of the of the job and the responsibilities with it as well and we were a global Squadron and we unlike tornadoes where you take everyone to the same place every day we'd have an airplane in Hong Kong one in Belize you know a couple in Kenya doing survey a couple of no end attachment we'd only be together twice a year for our tactical wartime deployments in Norway that's it the rest of the time that's going to be split up all over the place either flying in the UK just doing what they call Trip of the day practice practice fine or doing survey flying or doing some other kind of flying and we met we mentioned there the um the Tactical cameras but the strength of the airplane really was more about the rest of the airspace you've got from a thousand feet to 60 or thousand feet and so the array of cameras we had in the airplane then was was impressive and so you'd have a whole bunch of cameras called the f96 and they might have up to a 48 inch focal length camera and you have you know fans of four split pairs all sorts of variations on the camera depending on what the role you were going to go and do and then if you're going to go do night work initially we had the f97 for night flashing but I didn't do much night flashing because in the late 70s we brought in an infrared line scan pod and so we did most of our night work with ir and again talk more about that in a moment and then we had a thing called the f49 mark IV it's a survey camera and so if you look at a 50 000 Scale map in the UK all of that is based on photographs taken by PR cameras wow because we could fly 50 000 scale so here's a photograph it is exactly 50 000 scale if you want a 25 000 scale we would either change the lens or change the flying height to give you 25 000 scale and so although we've only got these two day night indicators in the airplane these windows what we have is a periscope we have a viewfinder so the orange thing we'll look at in a minute in there actually looks through a prism under the nose and whilst you can use that at low level the primary purpose is medium level and high level because when you've pretty vertically there are two tram lines down the center so you navigate the airplane very accurately by keeping your line on the map down the center of those tram lines so you're working very closely with the pilot who's got some indicators in the in the top end there the term of pre-exposure light I the camera's about to fire the exposure light and you can only move the airplane after the exposure light has gone because if he moves the airplane when it's about to expose of course you'll throw the the photograph out what we're trying to do is get what they call stereoscopic images so you want a six percent four and aft overlap because then when you look at those two meters together with a stereo viewer it's 3D well that's tactical camera or high level camera you get 3D view so you're trying to make sure there are no holes in the Imaging and to make sure that you've got that good stereo overlap for the guys as well and I have to ask who's in charge of the heating and air conditioning yeah well there's one of the great points for this so one of the one of the the things with this is you can imagine now that I'm sitting in what is essentially is a freezer and at 50 000 feet it's minus 54 centigrade Boy Wonder is sitting in what essentially is a greenhouse that is 50 000 feet closer to the Sun wow so here's it is warm and I am cold and he has the heater now I do have I can wear an air ventilator suit which I can blow cold or hot air on me but we didn't tend to wear that very much unless you're in the Mediterranean or in a hot climate where you wanted the cold air component to it in the earlier cameras you had electric socks we didn't have electric socks in this one but they were quite good to keep your feet warm with electric sock wow so what was crew coordination like here was it just uh Essentials and you do your job or were you constantly communicate again one of the advantage of constantly the crew and the same was true of any airplane would cost it a cruise is the amount of chatter between the cockpits goes down massively if you're flying with the same person all the time because you you know what that person is likely to do you're not trying to do their their job you have confidence that they're going to do their job so you talk only at the times you need to talk you'll also have a bit of banter saying you know there's a nice car slow over there or whatever else but essentially you talk when you talk with it's not a great deal of chatter if you needed to um and obviously in the Target run there's a lot more because on the target run then you've got to make absolutely Courier in the right place you've got the right camera selected and then when you go past the target then you know I'll initially do my writing down to what I saw then as soon as they're clear of the target area I'll say to him okay what did you see and then normally within two or three minutes of the target you're meant to pass back the key elements of information right so the bits that the task has asked you for Target number tot and and then the the three or four key data points uh meant to be passed back as quick as possible on the grounds that you might not get back now we had no real-time relay in in my day on the on the airplane the latter part of the pr9 they have real-time data link so here you had to bring the film back but if you didn't come back at least those keywords you sent back might be of some use to the boys and girls on the ground so Ken did you have any emergencies in the pr9 actually in my town mother Squadron I was I was quite lucky we didn't have you know really anything go wrong uh we had I think a couple of engine failures but they're not that that bad in fact with engine failure the camera has a very bad rep for asymmetric because of the widely spread engines then it means that if you lose an engine there's a Endeavor by the airplane to roll and if that was a low level of course you're going to crash unless you can correct it very quickly and so as Navigators you're normally fact I'm unhappy assuming that the pilot you know can do this quite easily the mistake you make as an app is flying in the front of the T4 and I flew my pilot John Clements was the purifier the qualified flying instructor and so I would open the T4 with him in the right hand seat and he said oh have a go at asymmetric it's only at that point you realize how difficult it actually is up to that point I was fat dumb and happy to think it was easy now I decided it's not maybe a safe thing to go and do so other than that no real universities in the in the in the Pier 9 a few burst reaction things and all birds smell of fried chicken when they get on the engine every bird smells the same um but no significant key damage for that tornado different had a few instant tornado but not in this so was the pr9 the right aircraft for the job at the time when you were flying it oh absolutely absolutely I mean it was a phenomenal airplane we had two of the airplanes had a thing called system three which was a basically a U2 camera for long-range oblique photography only only two carried it and uh and so the idea with that being you could then take photographs a long way away so we had a photograph in the squad and crew of Big Ben the clock tower in London and we'd stand visitors and say what look you can read the time what a great photo and they go so what you can read the time yes it was taken from the Isle of Wight you know 55 000 feet of the Isle of white and and that's how good the Imaging was and so there are a number of standard places around the world where we did Regular you know uh looking sideways shall we say how did the RAF see that like from other types see the camera yeah that's an interesting one because I mean I remember when I left the Squadron in 1982 so they were taking the Squadron down to half size and they decided that they didn't need this many canberra's uh the camera is going to go out of service in five years time we applied in 1980 for self-defense systems the boss pod because it's got the hard points on the wings which we never had um on most of the cameras but this one kept the hard points from the bi-8 and so we can actually put bospods on the wings we had a radar warning receiver fitted in the late 70s but that was it and we're told nope there's no money it's an old airplane it's going out of service by 1980 85 86 forget it so I end up on tornadoes I ended up going then in the early 90s with a recce tornadoes from two school night to the gulf and of course we had the tour system which was optimized for very very low level night and bad weather and we're still going to debrief one day and uh we have F14 tarp Symmetry and we have our inventory and our M3 was a handheld camcorder because we had to fly at 10 20 000 feet so our OC wreck had gone down to the local market and bought a couple of camcorders and so we're kind of leaning over the side like well for one taking fix on a camcorder and this General comes and he says you know this is where Russ Marshall came he said this is crazy how come the f14s can do this and we can't and I said to the guy look if you want proper imagery bring a pr9 out right and he went we can't bring that an old airport it'd be embarrassing this is 1991. by 2006 the Americans in particular couldn't get enough of this airplane this particular one 135 was the last camera over Afghanistan first ever Afghanistan on the last the mission marks aren't on it anymore but the gulf two Mission marks still on the jet so the imagery was phenomenal by that stage it's not the imagery I had with my f96 and things now you're into very Advanced sensors and a real-time data link to the ground and a bunch of self-defense systems so all the things we'd asked for back in the early 80s and were told you couldn't have the Jets too old by the early 2000s they were there when they dropped the Squadron in 2006 there are a lot of people saying you know you can't replace this and there is stuff the Air Force had nothing after it gone because the platform's solid obviously so so like all airplanes it's all about the platform if you can keep updating the platform's capability which sensors and weapons it continues to be valid so with tornado you know when I first started flying tornado in in 1982 on nine Squadron it was pretty much a an electric Vulcan we're dropping dumb thousand pound bombs with a slightly smarter system and some ability to defend yourself by the time the airplane went I went out left in 1994 we had lgbs and the tile pod by the time that the aircraft 107 2019 it was 10 times more capable gets the same the engine is the same airframe's the same it's the sense and weapons that have given you that massive changing capability absolutely and did you ever interact with the U2 Crews we did we didn't talk a lot about it but we did because something actually what we did we would interact with the guys at alconbury and in Cyprus so can you share a few memorable stories from your time on piano I'm sure you've got blindness I mean that's one thing about all the Canberra bit is just full of stories and to say we had an event here yesterday with about 40 odd guys granco and acre along and so the stories were flowing all over the place ground crew and air crew uh alike so I mean I I always say when I when I give people talks on this airplane that one of the headlines that could have been in 1980 uh around the world was Iris by plane shot down over Vietnam hey what yeah because we I've been in Hong Kong on Detachment with with the aircraft on my pilot we're coming out of Hong Kong and as you leave Hong Kong you make one turn to parallel the coast of Vietnam and so we've made that turn and about half an hour later I wake up and I go hey John I've been asleep all I can hear is from the from the back we've both been asleep so if if we'd fallen asleep before the turn we'd have gone over a Vietnam at 45 000 feet probably been shot down and of course it wouldn't have been two idiots fell asleep in the airplane it was Arya spying on Vietnam a headline that never was but could have been any more stories you can share yeah I mean there are lots of lots of stories that come around with this this airplane in in general you know because the camera had so many good stories you can see behind us that where the nose opens that you then have to step out of the airplane down onto the ground we had one flight command or the Squadron who thought we weren't doing it in in a in a good way he thought we could be better in the way we stepped out of the airplane it wasn't it didn't look neat so one of the guys actually uh put a dinner jacket on under his flying suit and when they came back after the sortie he'd arranged for the ground crew to wear white overalls and you wear white overalls to meet VIPs and to come up with a small set of steps and would also arrange for this flight Commander to be near that aircraft at the time so he's in his staff in his car sitting by that and he sees these guys walking out with the white ovals on a pair of steps then and the guy in the nose it wasn't me it was somebody else that actually taken his fine suit off and as they put the steps down open the nose he walked down the steps with his ear gland he went is that better but the best one of all I think is that the pr9 was the only RF camera to have an autopilot yeah and because you have the the hole down the right hand side where the entrance way normally was the pilot can put in the autopilot push the fuel tray to one side and climb down the hole so when you're flying over France on your flight plan you put a workhood embellic and embellished means come get me you know I'm open to be intercepted so you're flying at 50 000 feet over France and the French will always come and overgo you so when you know the Friendship guy is coming up after you the Mirage is coming after you here plus you want to play you know straps climbs down the hole so when the Mirage appears on the wing the airplane is empty it's a marry Celeste Canberra so he goes across to the other wing and looks again it's empty and I can see him I'm looking at the window the the sky so I say the pilot about now so he leans up from the hole waves and then goes back down the hole again yeah and of course there are Legions and Legions of stories that go on with that with the pr9 yeah absolutely I've heard some great stories maybe you can share a few where Lightnings have tried to turn with the camera and it just out turns them yeah I mean what because it's a big Wing so so for us and two things the engine is big as well so the normal camera engine was six and a half thousand pounds for us seven and a half thousand for some of the others this is 11 250. it's a lightning engine without reheat it's an even 206. so you've got a lot of power we only have a takeoff with 90 power never 100 power and that's partly with safety with asymmetric loss and things so you've got a lot of power there and the big Wing if you get slower down to 240 knots will out turn almost anything so again if we went and did some some play time with lightning said then yes you would be able to slow down now turn the lighting when he worked it out he'd still get you eventually but he wouldn't get you easily so Ken how would you sum up that pr9 I think there's just a fantastic British designed airplane that did a phenomenal role for such a long period of time this particular airplane here 135 entered service in 1959 and served on all three pr9 squadrons 58 13 and 39 and one pru which is really 39 By Any Other Name from from 1959 through to 2006. so the queen certainly got her money's worth out of this airplane we're currently trying to record all the sorties the airplane flew and we're going to get that but going back to to perhaps that fluid and getting their logbook records we're currently up to about 1200 sorties but there's probably 9 000 salties for it and when you start looking through that looking at the range of things it did whether it's often Belize doing something with The Grotto you know looking over across the board of the Guatemalans it's been involved in most every aircraft accident has had this thing going around photographing that accident when you had the the Moors murderers the pr9s were up there taking photographs to help the police car to find potentially buried places when the irls came in we were often caught up by the police to look for missing persons so you're looking for a hot spot so a body when it decomposes gets hotter and hotter so if you fly over that suspected area then potentially then you'll find you know the remains of that now we always said to the police don't send us a cheap Fields because there's too many hot bits in a heat field you know but so all sorts of things the Iran Embassy seed we're on standby to fly over the embassy in London during the Iranian Embassy Siege in the end the SS didn't call it in the reason for that was this airplane is totally silent from the front so the massive noise would only occur once you've got over the building and we are clear to fly at 50 feet over London which was great did a bit of practice on that it's quite good fun yeah did People wrap up actually how many uh feeders is the pr9 served in everywhere there's no way the piano has not been it was I say used by the three squadrons primarily 13 and 39 and eventually all the pr9s that went to 39 and 13 rear equipped with the pr7 so the pr7 and the pr9 in particular have been used across the Air Force in all theaters only based in the UK and in the Middle East not based in the Far East but involved in all theaters so things like Vietnamese boat people pr9s go out to watch that things like the the al-shabab taking all the schoolgirls we send a pr9 out to start helping look at in the area so the ability of the airplane to cover large areas of ground is what you need with it and many countries then use it for map making surveys so you'll go and spend through Us in Kenya or two weeks in Denmark or wherever you know doing vertical photographs for maps so you must add some great debts oh yeah yeah and that they are I mean that was part of the thing with this we said that people say when about claustrophobia you went nice places and you did interesting things every day was was different one day you'd be at 100 feet flying around fields in Norway the next week you'd be in Kenya doing you know map making then you'd be up to Hong Kong then you might get a Belize so the range of things it was clouding for the wives because you're away a lot and you weigh quite often at short notice with Priority One tasking and things but for you and certainly it's a first tourist and actually it didn't help me when I got to tornado because I got so used to that that independent bit of two caps taking an airplane away for it for three weeks the that when you get to know you can't get to the bathroom without the rest of the Squadron it came as a bit of a challenge so how many hours did you get on the aircraft just about just under a thousand [Music]

Channel: Aircrew Interview

Views: 9,491

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Id: uQ-u7qDkv4s

Length: 38min 20sec (2300 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023