It happens in the best regulated circles.........

[Mirelle]

OK, this is pure schadenfreude.....

Trinity House's flagship, the PATRICIA, found herself well and truly aground off Yarmouth and has had to be towed off by the Felixstowe tug BENTLEY.

Rear-Admiral de Halpert and the other Elder Brethren of Trinity House will have no concept of just how much better they have made me, and doubtless a few others, feel!

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[MainlySteam]

It certainly does.

A few years ago an associate of mine was doing the build supervision for a small hydrographic vessel (about 80 foot or so) to operate in the Persian Gulf. It was shipped to the owning state and he flew over for the trials after unloading - they ran it onto a reef on the first run out to sea. Fortunately they did not lose it.

As my friend said, here they were cruising along with him doing various checks and thinking that the crew must know where they were going, and suddenly a great big grinding stillstop and many red faces.

John

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[Twister_Ken]

Re: It happens in the best regulated circles......

Oh joy!

<hr width=100% size=1><A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.writeforweb.com/twister1>Let's Twist Again</A>

 

[bob_tyler]

Re: It happens in the best regulated circles......

There are two new MOD hydrographic ships at present in Falmouth docks.

Both were launched from Appledore (now in receivership from last night) in November 2002.

HMS Echo (commissioned) has had her drive pods (like underwater outboards) removed and returned to the makers in Finland so is completely immobile.

The MOD, in their wisdom and at Taxpayers expense, are putting HMS Enterprise (not yet commissioned) in dry dock here and transferring her pods to Echo.

They are probably 2 the most advanced hydrographic survey vessels in the world. Both useless!!!

Another MOD cock-up at Taxpayers' expense

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[ParaHandy]

Re: It happens in the best regulated circles......

aaahhh ... they have such a wealth of experience over many years ...

during the initial proving trial of the nimrod early warning radar, the plane's track was up the north-east coast. it had taken off from Weatherby. the radar began to pick up hundreds of targets. the GEC computers in the back didn't have enough capacity to time slice each target so the system just degraded and died. The contacts were cars on the A19. note, the system was supposed to be a maritime ew system. GEC stuffed more computer hardware in but lost an operator. up it went again with much the same result. more hardware went in and another squaddie got kicked off but this time, the plane was too heavy for the weatherby runway so it had to move to leuchars .... they cancelled it in favour of the american awacs but not before billions had been spent.

the problem was that the radar specification was far too fine for the software.

the chap who made the radar horns was "given" the hornby dublo die cast moulds for Mallard and Flying Scotsman and he die-casted them on the same gear that these immensely sophisticated radar horns were made ....

and then, going back a bit, there was TSR2. a superb plane but one whose radar systems (ground terrain following) could fly the plane 50' off the ground if only the pilot could move the controls fast enough ... that was scrapped "too advanced etc" and i think cranfield still has one of the prototypes ...

the mod has a long and illustrious history of flushing vast amounts of money away ....



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[Mirelle]

Re: It happens in the best regulated circles......

There's a TSR2 on display at Duxford, positioned, not accidentally I suspect, next to a Tornado.

My favourite story of this type, which illustrates why we British have learned nothing and forgotten nothing in seventy years, was told by Lindeman, Churchill's Scientific Adviser in WW2.

The RAF, unlike the Luftwaffe, entered WW2 with no self sealing fuel tanks.

The reason for this was that the RAF had a spec. for self sealing fuel tanks which required the tank to survive being thrown off a ten storey building. Very reasonable, given that the main cause of loss of aircraft in the peacetime RAF was contact with the ground due to pilot error. No-one could meet the spec., so no self sealing fuel tanks were fitted....

The Luftwaffe, reasoning that the main cause of aircraft loss in wartime is enemy bullets, developed and adopted a simple self sealing system using uncured latex rubber which cured instantly on contact with petrol if a bullet passed through the tank....

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[chas]

Re: It happens in the best regulated circles......

Apparantly the NIMWACS (the airborne early warning version that did not make it), the radar was cooled with fuel. If they wanted to use the radar, they had to keep a minimum fuel level which severely affected how long they could stay up using the radar.

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[Mudplugger]

But havn't they kept it very, very quiet........

<hr width=100% size=1>Tony W.