Panavia Tornado F3 Special | with Roy Macintyre *PART 1*

welcome to aircrew interview I'm making your Horst and this is our tornado f3 special with Roy McIntyre Roy is the highest our deaf three pilot with an astonishing 4,000 hours plus and in this interview he chats about was training a cockpit wing sweep flying on large exercises and lots more remember you can help the channel to continue putting out regular quality content by becoming a patron via patreon comm four slash air current view or you will see four different tiers each having its own benefits well don't forget to click the subscribe button so you don't miss any future videos one two that the sponsor of this video Dirty Bird arrow who designed technical clothing made from aircraft parts their latest Mac two pilots polo shirts are made from the highest quality cotton and the sunglasses clip and buttons have been made from salvaged aluminium taken from the tail fin of tornado f3 zg 797 make sure you head over to their website to check them out at www.thekingofrandom.com when did you first become interested in aviation from airlie LEDs when I was in primary school certainly by the age of 10 I knew that I wanted to be an RAF pilot and more than that because I came from Stirling I focused on 43 squadron because they were formed in Stirling so she'd asked me when I was 10 years old I knew exactly what I wanted to go and that would be a pilot on 43 squadron and at that time flying phantoms simple so can you tell us about your initial training and some of the aircraft to trained on ok I'm after IOT I had to go to swindle bait to fly the chipmunk on the flying selection squadron because I hadn't done any University of squadron flying prior to that I having done 14 hours on the chipmunk I was then sent to this place here 7 ft s at Church Fenton in 1983 and did my jp3 basic flying training here and then the lead-in to Valley on the jet Provost mark 5 and got to Valley in 1985 what was the Jaypee like to flying the jet Provost mark 3 was generally referred to as a pig quite quite advisedly there was a basically constant thrust variable noise it was difficult it was simple it didn't go very fast the mark 5 was a step up Thor pressurized cockpit an electric canopy which was definitely a plus on the flight line instead of having a crank it shut and obviously could go higher very forgiving and did the job exactly what it needed to do as a basic trainer and how long do you spend on the Jaypee well we started growing school in the autumn of 83 I did my first solo in January 84 and we were out of here about January 85 I think seem to remember some some of that order and after your training did you know what aircraft you wanted to go on - oh yeah phantom as simple as that and more than that as I said when it was 10 and now I'm 20 odd in the Air Force it was quite straightforward I was going to 43 squadron to fly phantoms and it was like a presidential campaign through all my training that's what I was going and did you get I did there were a few 90-degree turns on the way I must be honest but my first tour was on 43 scored and flying phantom supposed to be enemies is perfect something about your f4 training was it difficult coming from the GOP I mean it's a complete yeah well the the the Hawk was a reasonable step up but the phantom wasn't an easy aircraft to fly it was a classic I wanted it in my logbook I definitely wanted to fly but it's one of those aircraft you really did have to grab by the scruff of the neck particular in the circuit and I'll be honest I had a shaky convex on too - EW see you at Coningsby I was finding it difficult and the lay the amber lights were starting to show in terms of my progress but stuck with it and once we got onto applied flying and things got a lot better but I really really enjoyed flying it because you had to fly it I said when we got on to the Phantom on the squadron quite quickly the opportunity for me to come up and transfer to the tonita where 3 came up and I didn't refuse it because that was the future but like a classic car enthusiast at least that had the phantom in my logbook just as somebody would have said yeah I've earned the d-type jag can't hold a candle to the latest Italian supercars but I've had an e-type jag which really counts I'm you saw a flaw in the phantom so I really enjoyed it so tell us what it was like to handle I mean that there was apparently a powerful yeah it was all drag against thrust and you had to respect it and because it would Beit if you tried to do too much so it did talk to you but you really did have to work at it Oh Phantom's the RAF ones were the most powerful ever built but there were also the slowest because of the spear engines were fatter than the j79 so we had fatter intakes we had the fat back-end which increased drag so actually it was all just a political soap to a British industry we ended up with the slowest Phantoms so to that Ian you were using a lot of thrust all the time whether it was in the circuit when the rear up at height in combat or manoeuvring you had to work hard at it which didn't really leave me much time for understanding what was going on in the rear that was the guy in the back job to be honest so how did the Phantom fare against the types of the time I joined it when it was just starting to come off the top of the hill because the Phantom was one of the first to have a what they called a loop down chute down capability the radar could see low-level targets which was a big advance over the pure pulse radars of what particularly the lightning as far as the RAF was concerned so it became top of the hill had a few increases and capability boost in the weapons its rwr and things like that so it really was certainly late seventies early eighties top of the heap but with coming into the f15 f-16 there were new kids on the block and it was just starting to show its age and it relied more and more on the the wild way leanness and the skill of the air crew yeah I would see dusty tricks and to keep up with the new kids on the block so how long do you spend on the phantom got onto the squadron in June 86 and our last trip was in December 87 so it's really just that a year and a half as I see when the opportunity came up to transfer across to the f3 I said yes please because that was obviously the future or via the fence of the Air Force so obviously here to talk about the f what were your first thoughts of the f3 a lot easier to fly it was a lot cleaner slightly larger cockpit slightly more roomy more comfortable everything a little bit more and more as you'd expect and indeed about six months after starting on the f3 in fact just after 11 squadron went out to Cyprus having declared two to EEOC you had left the Phantom behind in the hangar so it was only six months since I last fluid but we were sewer ex phantoms went into the hangar to have a look-see and when I went up the steps and looked inside I thought my goodness the black hole of Calcutta did I actually work in that and so in terms of an environment it was a home or better yeah easier to fly yet there was a little bit more there was more performance don't see that more thrust was more performance for it but it obviously had a major weak point at that stage and most of that was in the back cop and I don't mean the personnel I mean the equipment available to the man in the back and that's where it got most of us bad bad publicity in the early eighties early nineties so what squadron were you base with for your training right well I was on two to nine OCU which was at college B and went through one of the first court and conversion courses and I was posted to 11 squadron or the new 11 squadron standing up at leaming and in July of 1980s I was one of the original crews of the original 11 at leeming and we moved into the hangar that's now being used by 100 squadron as the first of the three tornado s three squadrons that moved into leaming let's talk about a bit about your ground training how different was it coming from the Phantom I mean how long did it take it was about the same and actually because we're be stick colleagues me a lot of the ground school instructors were the ones I saw for the Phantom they had transferred across the training aids had improved obviously as the technology improved etc and yes it was a little bit more complicated in terms of what we had to take onboard but in general terms about the same length of time and in terms of difficulty is about the same really yeah at this point in time do you think this was the future for their Royal Air Force yes yes I mean obviously every aircrafts got a finite life but I knew this one was going to have quite a significant period of time as being that the primary a defence weapon and at that stage I didn't really think I would ever have a chance of being around when the typhoon comes in at our stage so that's why I wanted to get onto it and hopefully stay there so in your initial training we have to talk about the wing suite was it difficult to get used to or like how hard was that coming from the Phantom yeah it was to begin with there was a lot of numbers that you had to remember in your head because it's basically speed limits speeds above which you cannot go in particular wing sweeps and speeds that you don't want to be below because it's very much like getting in the wrong gear in a car now of course the aircraft had automatic wing sweep and automatic maneuver devices from the factory and I had the opportunity of picking up on two occasions brand new aircraft from Wharton to bring them over to Collings me at that point the automatic wing sweep is enabled as is the automatic maneuver devices when they arrived and into the tender mercies of the RAF edge years it was disabled why is it disabled well at the time they didn't really have a proper fatigue monitoring monitoring program and so the easy way is to say well let's not do that let's just disable it until we can work it out in the end and I think it came from the UE you they said do you know what we don't really need it so it never came back but the point is I have had an opportunity to use the automatic wing sweep and it is very similar to being in a car with an automatic gearbox or a manual gearbox for the average driver you can get quite a lot out of the car manual gear bottom attic gearbox but to get the best out of it usually want to have a manual gearbox and this aircraft I believe was the same you work the wing sweep much like you change gears on the car and the automatic maneuvers while the maneuvering devices not automatic were on my thumb on my left hand and it was just down to the skill of the pilot to get the aircraft configured as it needed to be for wherever you air and that was quite a challenge but it was very satisfying but it did take some of my capacity away and that's the reason why you would see well automatic wingsuit surely would release more capacity for the pilot yes but it didn't quite react as quickly as the pilot can so therefore for absolute pure performance you would what I would see you'd want the manual wingsuit so I quite enjoyed it so do you think the pilots were better fitted on the frontline from the automatic wing sweep in general or do you think everyone was different if the average pilot would probably have done better other air forces that use that did have automatic wing sweep and they benefited from it but I believe that a pilot that knows the airframe will get more out of it using manual wing sweep and manual maneuver devices but it can get your own and the first F 3 that we lost and tragically the pilot was killed was because he was in the wrong wing suite I have heard that the wings we was actually infinite so you could put it anywhere but to make it easy because we had to remember numbers there were really for those 25 wing which is fully forward effectively we used 35 occasionally and then 45 57 at 667 as well yeah no that came in when you had tanks on because I saw that was 63 yeah artificially my memory no 63 II Qin the big tanks were on etc yeah I know why I got 57 because those five 70 knots is one of them was the limit we had two figures you've got the AB you indicated here speed or the Mach number yeah whichever came into play Oh point seven three three fifty knots I think was a limiting speed 425 and then was like 4/5 oh you really aren't it I'll just see that it's ten years since the last touch the thing and then came back to sixth ft6 think it was a six seventy can't remember when it was fully back with but of course they had limiting speeds with tanks or was it clean as well so obviously when there's new tanks on your speed was way up and in the under wing tanks have 1.2 mike limit whereas that was the 22 fifties the fifteen hundred's went supersonic but they had a higher g limit and there was all sorts of bits and pieces so the wing sweep like you were sayin earlier did they become like second nature just like absolutely yeah it's just like driving a car and you just got that feeling I'm in the wrong gear or I need to change gear it's correct it was critical to get maximum performance whether you're trying to accelerate or indeed when you need to start turning because if you're trying to turn hard and your wings are too far back it's like being too slow into higher gear the aircraft's losing energy it's getting the other stall and you're not winning so it's very important that you have the wings in the right place on the right and more than that the automatic maneuver was so the maneuvering devices that should have been automatic the leading edge slats and the flaps just came down ever so slightly if you didn't need them down that's drag which you could afford yeah because we never had enough power or enough thrust enough energy in the f3 so you were trying to see that all the time yeah oh yes where there's a quite a comprehensive simulator program they also had what they call a see pit you know cockpit procedures trainer which was basically static all the lights came on switches could work and the instructor could meet captions come on to simulate any obviously so you could practice drills but then we had the mission simulator didn't have motion didn't have vision to begin with but that basically was fairly full functional front and rear cockpit so we could in fact fly a mission gives the Navigator a chance to fly some intercepts and then introduce some emergency success about to be so all the displays were giving us real world type information and it was quite a comprehensive program on the workup towards first trip on the you see you shelf so we're going to talk about your first trip can you remember it and can you describe this part yes it's Paul Burnside Squadron Leader Paul Burnside qfi with me I can't really remember too much about it other than remember who's saying because he then joined us on 11 squadron as the squadron qfi but the acceleration down the runway was more than the phantom Wars getting airborne just completely but much closer to the hawk in its style almost felt a little bit later controls much more balanced and easier to fly than the Phantom so I would imagine those who followed me coming through the hawk to the tornado s3 would see quite easy step so how do they have three handle like a what was his strengths and weakness yeah the when it first came out there was obviously a spin statement that came from a moody down to the senior officers that said you are to see this aircraft is a delight to fly I have to admit it was it was a delight to fly if you were just thinking about flying it around the circuit flying it through the sky it did exactly that and it was a delight to fly as a reasonable cop we still had to thicken cockpit canopy arch in front of me but it was better than the Phantom in terms of visibility and general comfort it was just a nice office to be in but in terms as extented already at that stage it's not there just to fly around the ear it's there to do a job and that's where the problems we're at that stage is very crudely it's not on your display I mean the guys who displayed it through the seasons have put on tremendous displays but they have to work hard the aircraft has to be light in terms of fuel load and there's enough allot arehe which of course the crowds like but you needed for the performance it is not an f-16 it is not a typhoon it's not an f15 etc etcetera in terms of its butt or any of the Russian stuff you have to work out to make it there but here displayed and it's LEDs it had limited operational capability which caused quite a rupture within the f3 force between those who had been on the phantom before coming off a very mature operational platform to perhaps the younger guys who were seen this is the first tour and seeing their platform not operating as well as issued but also healing all the time from those who had been on phantom or when I was on the phantom it used to do and and it caused a lot of friction to begin with so yeah we weren't actually with it have a lot of credibility to be honest of course yeah but that grew in time but let's talk about the cockpit how different was it coming from the Phantom because the Phantom I've been in the Phantom cockpit it seems very cramped yet which is everywhere it seems a bit more yeah absolutely right and that's what you'd expect from a more modern design literally more arm room the light grey colour of the cockpit helped tremendously as a push to the black of the phantom as I say the look inside the Phantom and you think oh it's a black hole of Calcutta whereas this is a bit more eerie I could see the backseater quite easily by tunneling Road it was just generally more usable all round and the switches were nicely laid out we eventually got a new stick top the first one was a little bit crude there wasn't much hot ass as you call it no a little bit but that came later but in terms of of operating and it was a very comfortable environment mm-hmm and was it mainly analogue wasn't it yeah I had one obviously got a head-up display which was good but I had one the in front and then there was two in the back and I could select this picture source of either BBC One or BBC two depending on what the Nath was doing to look at that on the on a head down display I had in front laterally there was another independent display but that's much further down the road again I've sat near phantom cockpit and also the 22 a3 cockpit and the throttle the scene was like a leap forward even the way it feels the fear feels yeah yes and the other thing was we had a fundamental opposite motion in the throttles between the f4 and the phantom and the tornado and it caught a few people out in as much as to select reheat in the Phantom you had to rock them forward Rock them outboard yeah and then forward through a gate you did that on the f3 you put the flushed versus oh wow so you go forward and then to go in to reheat it's just through the detail and just continue pushing them forward you rock them outboard the buckets come out and you slow down quite quickly of course as we on wheel switches that stop it happening in the supposed to stop it happening in there but on the runway I didn't witness it myself but I did hear of people getting a little bit confused at the moment kriti and instead of team go up there suddenly slowing down really quickly yeah so obviously the thrust reversers are quite unique to an aircraft yes I am did you deploy them every time you landed yes normally assuming that they hadn't filled or you had a some sort of indication of a problem it was the normal way to to stop the brakes were better than the phantom the Phantom wheel brakes were rubbish because of course the Phantom was designed to land on the carrier and you don't need brakes on the wheel brakes on the carrier so they had a hook and or the board meanly the chute the wheel brakes had very good anti-skid system on them so it was possible to land with your feet hard on the brakes you can pre arm the thrust reverser so that when the weight on wheels switches are activated by the mean you're touching the runway the thrust reversers could come out the danger is of the nose would then come down quite hard but if you then put the throttle up you could stop quite quickly the idea being if the runway was damaged bomb craters etc typically I think the best one would be about 1,500 feet to stop in but the brakes smoking and the tires won't last very long yeah they used to do that for the year display in the early days we wouldn't routinely do that there's no point and indeed there were certain limitations on us pre arming the thrust of air normally it would be bland Lewis wheeled down everything under control right now bring the thrust of our site and then perversely get well just like LA knows you bring the throttle up to slow down which took a little bit to get used to so was it literally min reheat and in a yeah points in between it was take off was always full reheat there was a stage beyond that called combat and we're effectively you were over temperature during the engines but just getting a little bit of thrust it's that harks back to the Battle of Britain in the Meadowlands with those loose buttons etc we've got a load ten minutes in the hour with the combat it gave us that a little bit extra we didn't routinely use that unless we were heavy and by heavy but the big tanks fully armed northern qre or qre was a combat takeoff or where it got hot and of course we did go places when it got hard later on but normally it was full reheat for takeoff but we wouldn't just slam it in we'd sit at the end of the run we run the engines up and towards about halfway through it slice the engineers discovered that we recorded certain figures they could predict engine failure so it took us about 30 seconds at the end of the runway well I read out some temperatures and rpms to the nav note them down give them to the engineers they would plot it and something kind of deviated the would go oh we better just have a look at that engine but that would do that and then when were happy in 2 min we just make sure the burner is light I can see the indications and side and temperatures and the nozzle movement and then up to full reheat and would go at that point so why have you torn either one here I've never seen a tornado take off without reheat is it possible if the runways long enough you know and curvature of the earth and all that no generally if you one of the burners depending on when it happens you would normally reject the tickle and my background it would have to be quite a long run we get to get away the dry thrust is not enough no no yeah so let's talk about the radar obviously it was had a blue circle and quartz there yes it was a radar good by the time you came on to it it was getting the iron I would see it wasn't as good you know with a capable operator 1988 it still wasn't as good as the Phantom and that was seeing something because that's a reed are that pretty much dated from early 70s but very quickly and I know you throughout its entire life was one of its main project was improving the radar now it's never going to get medium PRF which without going to the technicalities there is an a weak area physical weakening of the aircraft that the radar wouldn't be able to see targets in but Luke the RF high PRF and the soft wheel that was driving it was constantly been upgraded and very quickly I would see within about three or four years given choice which year frame would I take the war if I had to go to war very quickly became the f3 really yeah there were some other things to come into play not least of which was this rhw our radar homing and warning receiver which was excellent from the start and only got better yeah through its adaptability and its accuracy and I'm not all fee with what the typhoon has but the s3 at the end this rh WR was one of his best yes I mean still had a didn't have medium PRF it had the same weapon system that the typhoon had capable of supporting the am ram through mid-course guidance a data link the jteds link 16 and I see the rhw are the displays was still monochromatic green there was talk of getting color displays it was a question of cost versus the utility and I don't think the air crew on which I would have to count myself has been ones guilty really made enough of a case to the bean counters to see it was worthwhile I kind of said yeah and looked at it went well they're not really shouting about it enough we had symbology changes etc etc which enabled us to get a lot more information but it was still looking at agreement an old green screen etc but we had a lot of information we had secured it we had anti-jam radios we had secure comms through datalink we were in a good place with Lisa Ring gyros very accurate so our kid from the start was a little bit at variance with reality and towards the end we were we had high confidence in knowing where we were and of course where that nvg capability which was very good as well [Music]

Channel: Aircrew Interview

Views: 52,500

Keywords: tornado f3, panavia tornado f3, tornado gr1, tornado gr4, tornado f3 display, pilot interview, aircrew interview, tornado f3 mach loop, raf tornado, raf tornado airshow display, f-14 tomcat heat blur, f-14 tomcat dcs, tornado dcs, fighter pilot interview, tornado gr4 takeoff, tornado gr4 display, riat airshow, raf 100, tornado flypast, tornado farewell

Id: _ScfoqwzfHw

Length: 28min 34sec (1714 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2019