Ark Royal? That 's what comes of writing a post in a hurry last thing at night. If PoW was accepted with a known fault shared with QE then it is a shambles.
My mind was on Ark Royal after watching an episode of 'Sailor' where the Captain, Wilf Graham, had to take her out of Devonport with one of the four shafts locked and the telegraph on another reversed so that ahead read astern in the engine room and vice versa. The ship had a programme to meet and the dockyard had not completed the refit on time.
I tried to slap on the brakes… that didn't work. I knew I was going off the ship': RAF pilot whose F-35 careered off the deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth and sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean tells how he cheated death
Pilot 'Hux' narrowly escaped a £100million F-35B fighter jet as it crashed in sea
The jet plunged as it left the runway of HMS Queen Elizabeth in November 2021
Hux described being propelled by his ejector seat moments before the crash
They look suspiciously like blacked up RN epaulettes to me, but it's nice to see the RAF getting the blame! Usual sub-editor bollocks.
I see he plunged! They never waffle, in a semi-stalled state into the briny. Never a graceful descent or precise arc down towards Davey Jones! Always a plunge.
Glad he lived to tell the awful tale.
My necessaries are embark'd: farewell. Adieu! I have too grieved a heart to take a tedious leave.
See he landed back on the carrier. Well Royal Air Force not Royal Navy so didn't want to get his feet wet. Seems that a ground crew chap was done for not removing the cover. Excuse me but yes FD2, what about pre-flight walk around by the driver?
'Yes, Madam, I am drunk, but in the morning I shall be sober and you will still be ugly.' Sir Winston Churchill.
The Daily Fail. The newspaper that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The poor reporting standards are equalled by the inane comments following it.
I don't know if the RN or MoD are trying to make light of it but I can't believe that a pre-flight walk round was not part of his responsibilities.
If it was something the ground crew should have done he should have checked with them verbally, actually sighted the damned things and I still would have stuck my head in to double check. Belt and braces maybe and there are so many things inside the fuselage you can't see/sight when it's on deck ready but those that you can...
Still, it's easy to be an armchair critic, but I expect he'll be watched closely in future.
Oh yes and don't bother reading the readers' comments if you want to retain any sense of calm and composure. Come to think of it most of the articles have some glaring nonsense in most of the national press too.
I would half-expect it to be the ground crew's job, given the scenario where the flight crew might be at a briefing while the aircraft are loaded/fueled and generally prepared for a mission. If they have a rush job to get airborne then ideally the crew just needs to go out, jump in and be ready for launch, a bit like the old Battle of Britain squadron scramble - they never did a walk round, they relied on the ground crew to have it ready for them. However, I would think it's a good idea that small, detachable parts should be held prominently by the ground crew where the pilot can see that they've been removed from the aircraft.
I'd agree when there's a heightened sense of urgency/enemy presence but it wasn't a war situation and the alert crews would be strapped in ready to go, as they were in the Falklands. As you say even a sighting might have averted the loss.
llondel wrote: If they have a rush job to get airborne then ideally the crew just needs to go out, jump in and be ready for launch, a bit like the old Battle of Britain squadron scramble - they never did a walk round
Not sure how it is now, particularly in the Navy, but going back a decade or 5, placing a Lighting on 'alert 10' involved signing for the jet and a thorough walk-round and 'prepping' the seat and cockpit for a rapid 'go', before retiring to the pilot area. Things like intake blanks along with arming pins for whatever weapons were carried, etc would be left in place for the groundcrew to remove while the pilot strapped in. I would imagine 'on board' blanks would be left in. Whether the failure was pilot or groundcrew in this case can only be determined by the nature of the mission ie scramble or pre-planned.
Simple things like tying together both intake blanks with a bit of string should have avoided what happened.
I am currently reading a fascinating account of the life and times of 1st Sea Lord John 'Jackie' Fisher, and it seems that mechanical breakdowns of new ships, and public and political opprobrium in such cases, are not a new thing in the Royal Navy.
The Navy was big news in those days. Everything about it was minutely reported, pictured and discussed, often very outspokenly, there being no Official Secrets Act to dictate discretion. New ships were glorified in purple prose, or summarily dismissed as a waste of taxpayers’ money. The appearance of a new kind of warship, a Warrior or an Inflexible, commanded long columns of reportage and editorial comment, often to be followed by weeks of correspondence from naval officers serving or retired. When the revolutionary battleship Devastation had engine trouble on her first cruise in 1869, a storm of mockery and contumely erupted in the papers; one week in 1906 the lead cartoon of Punch, by its celebrated cartoonist Bernard Partridge, concerned improvements in the Navy’s gunnery. The newspapers employed full-time naval correspondents, and essayists in the Kipling mode were frequently let loose upon naval exercises or launchings – Kipling himself sometimes (and he must have pleased Fisher when in 1898 he described a British battleship cleared for action as being ‘naked and grim, like a man swimming with a knife between his teeth …’).
Devastation's sister ship Thunderer had a boiler explode while undergoing sea trials.
Plus ca change it seems!
Edited to say that Jan Morris's point is well made but her facts are confusing as HMS Devastation was laid down in 1869 and was launched 1871. I suspect the hoo-hah in the press related to the boiler explosion onboard her sister ship
My necessaries are embark'd: farewell. Adieu! I have too grieved a heart to take a tedious leave.
Ark Royal? That 's what comes of writing a post in a hurry last thing at night. If PoW was accepted with a known fault shared with QE then it is a shambles. 
