Speeding...again
 

Two traffic patrol officers from North Berwick were involved in an unusual incident while checking for speeding motorists on the A1 Great North Road. One of the officers used a hand-held radar device to check the speed of a vehicle approaching over the crest of a hill, and was surprised when the speed was recorded at over 300 mph. Their radar suddenly stopped working and the officers were not able to reset it.

Just then a deafening roar over the treetops revealed that the radar had in fact latched on to a NATO Tornado fighter jet which was engaged in a low-flying exercise over the Border district, approaching from the North Sea.

Back at police headquarters the chief constable fired off a stiff complaint to the RAF Liaison office.

Back came the reply in true laconic RAF style:

"Thank you for your message, which allows us to complete the file on this incident. You may be interested to know that the tactical computer in the Tornado had detected the presence of, and subsequently locked onto, your hostile radar equipment and automatically sent a jamming signal back to it. Furthermore, an air-to-ground missile aboard the fully-armed aircraft had also automatically locked onto your equipment. Fortunately the pilot flying the Tornado recognized the situation for what it was, quickly responded to the missile systems alert status, and was able to override the automated defence system before the missile was launched and your hostile radar installation was destroyed.

Good Day..."

Thanks Paul, needed a good laugh just now. :) :bowdown:

I think we need more RAF planes in the Sky and to launch from now on. :D

Spoilsport ;)

Sowwy! ;)

Be good if it was true!

on the subject of planes, was walking the dog tonight about 6PM.

a Typhoon coasted overhead, went past, then turned round and coasted over again, giving it a bit of welly back to warton, with the clouds lighting up with the afterburners, as he got over the Irish Sea, he ascended vertically on full afterburner, it looked like the shuttle ascending. depite working around planes all day, and taking them for granted, it was a beautiful sight, and I feel proud to be a part of it. :)

Where abouts do you live Black Olive?

Brilliant :D

Unfortunately Paul that is not a true story.

The systems in the Tornado are not able to behave like that
With 256K of Ram for the WPU to run on and most of that relates to the wings stores configuration they aren't that bright!

Even chaf is normally a manual release except in combat situations and even then they don't carry enough to waste.

Tales like that have been doing the rounds for years
I have personally had my hand on just about every single WPU (Weapons Programming Unit) in every flying Tornado out there, never did I ever find one that had become self aware ;)

I also tested or fault found most of the CSAS (Command Stabilty and Augmentation System) and the all important terrain following AFDS (Automatic Flight Director System) Computers

Although I would imagine by now most of what I worked on may have been retrofitted with more modern kit the service life of such system are often considerably longer than electronics in the domestic market so may well still be in use

See Post 2 our Keith. :D

Ooops


Twas only intended as a spoof Keith ;)

If you think about what I lecture in at the Defence College...

Carl, near preston, I have the dubious privilege of working at Wrton.
Keith, I used to calibrate the STTE ( special to type test equipment) for tornado, and can confirm those boxes are still very much operational.
Dont know how they calibrate and repair them nowadays, items such as punched paper tape readers for the STTE were in short supply when I became a pen pusher over 10 years ago !!

Cool !!

I grew up near preston - in Longton wich is about 4 miles sout of Preston on the old A59 Road :D

Paper tape! eeeeeee when I were a lad..........

The program on the stores (memory) card in the WPU was tested using a paper tape, I used to have great fun making things up in crazy patterns to fit to the spools on the tape reader to add a bit of colour to the day

I tested and fault found so many that eventually I knew visually from where the tape stopped on the reel roughly which chip on the board may have a fault!

The sortie time for a Tornado is not great which is handy
the WPU used a mutichannel voter system to ensure it had not developed a fault typically it would be happy for about 90 minutes before something failed safe rendering the stores on that particular failing PDU (Pylon Decoder Unit) unavailable.

PS original test set for the AFDS was a thing called a Compaq Apha, huge it was, about 8' high and 10' wide and we had a very early version of text based space invaders on it for weekends iirc!

them were the days !!
i did love the calibration job, and particularly working on the tornadoes.

Sadly it was in the news today we lost a BAE Systems navigator at marham, the plane went into an inverted roll, and he banged out/was banged out, found dead in a field- not good