Tony Blackman Test Pilot by Tony Blackman

Author:Tony Blackman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grub Street Publishing
Published: 2013-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

The three V Bombers.

Of course I was still flying the Valiant on the Blue Steel programme from the other side of the airfield so it was interesting to be able to compare all three V Bombers. The Valiant was very pedestrian but very easy to fly, though the artificial control forces from the air filled dustbins that provided the feel were very high.

That autumn I felt that I was not being sufficiently stretched mentally or doing enough flying to be kept busy. My wife, who was teaching all day, and I signed on for an external economics degree course at Manchester University. For me it was very different from the precise sciences I was used to and I liked the fact that there could be a difference of opinions on a subject. Sadly my school, which taught me mathematics superbly, had had no time to teach me the humanities. Unfortunately, I was only able to do one year before pressure of work took over again but the thing I remember best from the course was not the economics, but the philosophy that our tutor Stephen Baddeley propounded with enormous enthusiasm. Not that the other tutors did not do a good job teaching economics, it was just that economics did not lift the spirit in the same way as philosophy. I think the reason I liked philosophy so much was that the approach was so different from test flying; the output was to the mind and not to the market. It reminded me that I had always wanted to be a mathematician but lost my way into the sciences. Apparently when Baddeley heard that I was giving up he remarked that I had a good brain going to waste.

The reason why I did not finish the course and had to give up economics was because Avros had decided to re-enter the civil marketplace and manufacture an airliner again, which as far as I was concerned was good news. It was to be called the Avro 748. All Avros’ designs, whether they ever saw the light of day and left the final assembly sheds or not, were given a design number. The project numbering system started in the year 1911 with the Avro Type E two-seat biplane with 60hp ENV engine being called the Avro 500 and continued without a break. The Vulcan was 698, the 707s were just that, the supersonic bomber was allotted 730 and the models 731, and so the new airliner was given the number 748, by chance just one more than the Boeing 747, and so we weren’t trying to upstage Boeing by calling our airliner the 748.

However, unlike the 747 this aircraft was to be a small, twin-engined turboprop aircraft using two Rolls-Royce Dart engines and carrying 48 passengers. The marketing concept justifying the decision was that there were still thousands of old twin piston engined Douglas DC3s, Dakotas, flying around the world into appalling airfields, without the ability to fly on one engine in the event of failure.

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