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The Comet did go on in a military role as the Nimrod - I once saw an AEW Nimrod parked at the edge of RAF Kinloss - a staggeringly ugly beast: https://en.wikip

The Comet did go on in a military role as the Nimrod - I once saw an AEW Nimrod parked at the edge of RAF Kinloss - a staggeringly ugly beast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley_Nimrod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley_Nimrod

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Yeah but Nimrod was bloated, and positively covered with warts and radomes. I'd claim they spoilt the lines a tad. :)
- arethuza 8y ago
  The normal Nimrod's were quite handsome beasts - used to see them a lot when I was a kid as I grew up near Kinloss.
  - detritus 8y ago
    My school was right next to a runway (as in a couple of hundred metres at most) — whenever a Nimrod was taking off, class had to stop and wait for it to do its thing as there was simply no competing with it on volume. Loud buggers! As with a lot of British war jets from the post War decades, there was something quite beautiful — almost organic — in their lines.
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      Concorde is still the most beautiful aircraft ever, IMO.
      - howard941 8y ago
        The SR-71 would like a word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird
        NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        As would the Spitfire. :)
        C1sc0cat 8y ago
        And the TSR2 :-) could walk away from a lighting on a single engine.
      - billfruit 8y ago
        To my eye IL62 is a beautiful airliner.
    - arethuza 8y ago
      I remember seeing a Vulcan bomber doing aerobatics over our wee Scottish village - quite a site and the noise was incredible.
      - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        Some time in my teens I was at an air show with very relaxed views on where a crowd line should be compared to today. A Vulcan, howling away at full throttle, pulling into a max climb at what seemed just above our heads will never be forgotten, or unfelt. That display was definitely the highlight of the show. Ridiculously agile for the age and size. No one had car alarms back then or they'd all have surely joined in. :)
      - teh_klev 8y ago
        Back in the 70's, or perhaps early 80's when I was a kid, my family were on our usual yearly summer camping holiday on the west coast of Scotland. One day whilst out for a drive around Skye a Vulcan came up from behind us and flew very low over our family car (you could almost count the rivets) and then did a nose up into the sky. It was quite bloody amazing, it was loud and there was a thick black plume of exhaust as it powered up and away from us. Tremendous machines.
      - detritus 8y ago
        As a youngster I was at an airshow "with very relaxed views on where a crowd line should be"* on the aforementioned very-close runway, watching a Harrier work its hovering magic less than a 100 metres away. The noise was such that I now thoroughly believe the Brown Note might well exist, and back then was stunned to be able to imagine I could discern individual organs resonating inside of me. I've never felt such a level of bass since, not even in my later clubbing years, hugging bass bins in sweaty clubs, listening to dub techno or whatever it was that took my fancy twenty years ago... . SUCH noise. It becomes so loud it's not even noise any more, just pressure waves and complete sensory discombobulation. * love that, NeedMoreTea!
    - m-i-l 8y ago
      They used to do low level flying training in my parts. On at least on occasion I was walking in the hills and got to look down on a stream of jet planes tearing through the valley below, which was quite something to behold (especially as a youngster). Seems like they publish the timetables now[0], so it may be possible to plan a walk to co-incide. [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/operational-low-flying-training-timetable https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/operational-low-f...
pjc50 8y ago
They were an amazing example of a legacy system being maintained far beyond any reasonable expectation of life at gradually increasing cost, to a great extent because nobody could agree on a replacement and the one-off cost of a replacement was always a bit more than the endless "maintenance" and "refurbishment". If I remember rightly the refurbishment project hit the problem that, because the original planes were hand-built to 1950s tolerances, building new parts off the original plans simply wouldn't fit. The only viable approach was measure the specific plane you wanted to fit, and build a custom part for it. Eventually one simply caught fire in the air: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528109/Fire-was-reported-on-doomed-Nimrod-just-after-mid-air-refuelling.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528109/Fire-was-reported-o... The destruction of the airframes was controversial: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12292390 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12292390 but I see it as a symbolic driving of a stake through the heart of a project that should have been honorably retired a couple of decades previously but instead took on a vampiric, undead, and ultimately fatal life.
- KineticLensman 8y ago
  > Eventually one simply caught fire in the air Full details in the Haddon Cave report [0], the official investigation into the crash of Nimrod MR2 aircraft XV230 in Afghanistan in 2006. The 'simply' here (as in 'simply' caught fire) was in fact a catalogue of known problems and missed opportunities. The Nimrod variant involved was originally intended to perform long-duration maritime surveillance and was designed to allow the crew to intentionally switch off one of the engines when the plane arrived on station (to save fuel while loitering for hours). To restart the engine there was a pipe routed through the fuselage that carried hot gases from the running engine to kick start the cold one. A separate modification of the complicated tanks and plumbing that supported in-air refuelling led to a (leaky) fuel pipe that was routed right past the (very hot) engine cross-coupling pipe. Very minor leaks somewhere in the system were routine. In this case there was a fuel leak near the engine cross-coupling pipe. The unfortunate crew of 14 had six minutes from initial fire warning to the eventual and unavoidable explosion that killed them all. [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-nimrod-review https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-nimrod-review
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

Yeah but Nimrod was bloated, and positively covered with warts and radomes. I'd claim they spoilt the lines a tad. :)

arethuza 8y ago
The normal Nimrod's were quite handsome beasts - used to see them a lot when I was a kid as I grew up near Kinloss.
- detritus 8y ago
  My school was right next to a runway (as in a couple of hundred metres at most) — whenever a Nimrod was taking off, class had to stop and wait for it to do its thing as there was simply no competing with it on volume. Loud buggers! As with a lot of British war jets from the post War decades, there was something quite beautiful — almost organic — in their lines.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    Concorde is still the most beautiful aircraft ever, IMO.
    - howard941 8y ago
      The SR-71 would like a word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird
      - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        As would the Spitfire. :)
        C1sc0cat 8y ago
        And the TSR2 :-) could walk away from a lighting on a single engine.
    - billfruit 8y ago
      To my eye IL62 is a beautiful airliner.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    I remember seeing a Vulcan bomber doing aerobatics over our wee Scottish village - quite a site and the noise was incredible.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      Some time in my teens I was at an air show with very relaxed views on where a crowd line should be compared to today. A Vulcan, howling away at full throttle, pulling into a max climb at what seemed just above our heads will never be forgotten, or unfelt. That display was definitely the highlight of the show. Ridiculously agile for the age and size. No one had car alarms back then or they'd all have surely joined in. :)
    - teh_klev 8y ago
      Back in the 70's, or perhaps early 80's when I was a kid, my family were on our usual yearly summer camping holiday on the west coast of Scotland. One day whilst out for a drive around Skye a Vulcan came up from behind us and flew very low over our family car (you could almost count the rivets) and then did a nose up into the sky. It was quite bloody amazing, it was loud and there was a thick black plume of exhaust as it powered up and away from us. Tremendous machines.
    - detritus 8y ago
      As a youngster I was at an airshow "with very relaxed views on where a crowd line should be"* on the aforementioned very-close runway, watching a Harrier work its hovering magic less than a 100 metres away. The noise was such that I now thoroughly believe the Brown Note might well exist, and back then was stunned to be able to imagine I could discern individual organs resonating inside of me. I've never felt such a level of bass since, not even in my later clubbing years, hugging bass bins in sweaty clubs, listening to dub techno or whatever it was that took my fancy twenty years ago... . SUCH noise. It becomes so loud it's not even noise any more, just pressure waves and complete sensory discombobulation. * love that, NeedMoreTea!
  - m-i-l 8y ago
    They used to do low level flying training in my parts. On at least on occasion I was walking in the hills and got to look down on a stream of jet planes tearing through the valley below, which was quite something to behold (especially as a youngster). Seems like they publish the timetables now[0], so it may be possible to plan a walk to co-incide. [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/operational-low-flying-training-timetable https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/operational-low-f...

pjc50 8y ago

They were an amazing example of a legacy system being maintained far beyond any reasonable expectation of life at gradually increasing cost, to a great extent because nobody could agree on a replacement and the one-off cost of a replacement was always a bit more than the endless "maintenance" and "refurbishment". If I remember rightly the refurbishment project hit the problem that, because the original planes were hand-built to 1950s tolerances, building new parts off the original plans simply wouldn't fit. The only viable approach was measure the specific plane you wanted to fit, and build a custom part for it. Eventually one simply caught fire in the air: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528109/Fire-was-reported-on-doomed-Nimrod-just-after-mid-air-refuelling.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528109/Fire-was-reported-o... The destruction of the airframes was controversial: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12292390 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12292390 but I see it as a symbolic driving of a stake through the heart of a project that should have been honorably retired a couple of decades previously but instead took on a vampiric, undead, and ultimately fatal life.

KineticLensman 8y ago
> Eventually one simply caught fire in the air Full details in the Haddon Cave report [0], the official investigation into the crash of Nimrod MR2 aircraft XV230 in Afghanistan in 2006. The 'simply' here (as in 'simply' caught fire) was in fact a catalogue of known problems and missed opportunities. The Nimrod variant involved was originally intended to perform long-duration maritime surveillance and was designed to allow the crew to intentionally switch off one of the engines when the plane arrived on station (to save fuel while loitering for hours). To restart the engine there was a pipe routed through the fuselage that carried hot gases from the running engine to kick start the cold one. A separate modification of the complicated tanks and plumbing that supported in-air refuelling led to a (leaky) fuel pipe that was routed right past the (very hot) engine cross-coupling pipe. Very minor leaks somewhere in the system were routine. In this case there was a fuel leak near the engine cross-coupling pipe. The unfortunate crew of 14 had six minutes from initial fire warning to the eventual and unavoidable explosion that killed them all. [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-nimrod-review https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-nimrod-review
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago