Ah yes, the SMCS vanes. Those are fun, especially if you test them when
someone’s standing on the ground by the nose and isn’t expecting it.
CLACKCLACKCLACK…scares the shit out of them.
Getting doinked by one if they do it while you’re working on it is less fun.
Another fun bit of trivia: B-1Bs have HF radio capability. Usually, that
requires trailing a long-assed wire. But Rockwell came up with a neat
workaround. There’s an HF coupler at the base of the vertical stab on the front
side, that turns the frame and skin into an antenna. Tunes the entire plane.
Pretty slick. But, that requires rather a lot of electricity to do that. So, if
there was a crew chief who’d been being a dick to the specialists and they were
straddling the HF Coupler panel to do some other work, (kind of common) and you
had to do some other tests on the plane and you were also a dick, and decided
to, sans warning, set the Defensive stations communications station to HF and
key the mic….
ZAP!
“AAAAAGH”
I mean, they wore safety harnesses, so they’d just dangle there like a dead
spider. If dead spiders could simultaneously cuss and cry.
Have I mentioned that aircraft maintainers are mean fucks? Because we are.
From: <mmr-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Julian Koh
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: "mmr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <mmr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sunday, June 21, 2020 at 9:08 PM
To: "mmr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <mmr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [mmr] Re: An clean, concise synopsis of the CF-105 Arrow
On Jun 21, 2020, at 14:42, John Welch
<jwelch@xxxxxxxxxx<mailto:jwelch@xxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
One of them landed at the Forks once. It was wild to see a Lancaster next to a
B-1B, almost able to fit under one wing of the BONE.
Awesome picture, thanks John!!
That comment about the relative wingspans reminded me of a book I read back in
the 80’s about the real Top Gun school, and they had a picture showing that the
F-5 wingspan was shorter than the tail fin span on the F-14.
I’ve also been reading a few stories recently about the B-1B’s since there have
been some news about some of them being decommissioned and how their airframes
have taken a bunch more abuse than intended, and I learned that the “whiskers”
on the nose are actual active elements that help dampen out oscillations in
flight. I never knew that detail.
--
Julian Y. Koh
kohster@xxxxxxx<mailto:kohster@xxxxxxx>
