Thanks dgrev ! Fantastic to hear to yours and your fathers experiences. Must have been wonderful at that age to have the opportunity to fly around in a Harvard. Surprising to hear of the damage to the airframe and rudder. Any pictures from that time of 1061 would be most welcome. Thanks for joining the forum!
Damon and Baz - I have some pics somewhere of when 1061 arrived in Broken Hill and removing the ferry tank. It ended up on a sheep station somewhere doing service
as a water tank on a 4x4 for stock. Will go looking for photos hopefully this week. I had hair then.....
Flying in the Harvard was an adventure. I never rode the front seat as I only had a trainee licence and Piper Cherokees were my forte at that point. I did however do a couple
of take offs and landings from the rear seat, all wheeled not 3 point as on a paved runway. The most disconcerting thing was on the take off roll pushing forward on the stick, that took a lot of will power as the sensation was that you were trying to stand the thing on its nose rather than going to level. In the back seat you are roughly 4' or more from the centre of balance so the pivoting movement was quite pronounced.
Likewise any rudder movement was quite exaggerated in the rear seat, mostly so on take off and I can recall bracing with my elbows so as not to grab any controls when moving around back there.
Being that I was also fire guard for engine start, seeing that belch of flame come out the stub exhaust was never regarded as boring, you always were hoping that the carby had behaved itself and had not flooded.....
Another anecdote - the hickory rear stick was stolen by a known person when 1061 was at Ardmore, so we had to buy a later model curved alloy rear stick from a US supplier,
I suspect this was from a G model. During run up, when Dad was holding the front stick fully aft it would clash with the buckle on my seat belts and release them. I am by no means fat, so would imagine that anyone portly would actually interfere with full control movement in the back seat. The Hickory stick was straight, which must have meant a less comfortable position for the rear seat occupant when using it, but no issues with full control movement.
Dad was always concerned that he would accidentally grab the gear handle when retracting the flaps at landing. As the Harvard did not have a squat switch, it was my duty to
place my hand on top of the gear handle and force it down should he accidentally select up. There is a big difference in the shape and method of actuation of the 2 handles in the
front seat, so it was an unlikely event. The rear seat handles were much similar. The system is rather curious, you pull a "power" handle, this gives you 15 seconds (IIRC - or was it 20 secs?) of "power" to operate the gear or flaps (don't recall whether that was one or the other or both).
Also, there was a very impressive horn wired into the throttle, if you pulled power past a certain point, it was assumed you were landing and it was there to remind you to drop the gear. I seem to recall the horn stopped once the gear was selected down, so assume there was a micro switch on the gear lever not the gear uplocks. The horn was very loud even through the ear plugs and headsets.
When at cruise, IIRC we would be on 1850rpm and you could almost hear the cylinders firing it sounded so slow, roughly 15 firings per second. The noise was thunderous, so I always wore ear plugs underneath our Telex headsets.
According to the military, anything dropped inside a Harvard immediately renders it unairworthy in case that item finds its way out into the wings or into any control systems. It was not safe to unbuckle in flight in the rear seat and retrieve wayward biros and such that worked their way down from the front cockpit, so another task for me was to
keep an eye on anything that did. Usually such objects collected in a corner to the right rear of the rear seat. As long as it wasn't turbulent and no aerobatics, they would stay
there and get collected on shut down. So keeping a counting of what went in agreed with what came out of the cockpit was a good idea.
I searched without success for an Air Ministry Mk2 L gunsight to complete the forward cockpit. The advantage of the British sight was that it mounted very low
down in front of the stick and had a small reflector plate on the coaming, unlike those huge standard sights which hung down from the coaming and obscured primary
flying instruments. IIRC the Mk2 L mount was in the plane when we received it.
Dad was very unsettled to receive a phone call from DCA one day grounding our Harvard. During routine maintenance on (IIRC) 1056 (or 1085) they had found cracks in the tail
spar. These were due to the tail spare mount not be arassed at manufacture and the sharp edges and all that vibration from the radial combining over decades to induce cracks. I think it was out of the air for about 2 months whilst a repair was engineered, reviewed and authorised by DCA. Dad had to pay for an engineer to fly up from Melbourne and do
the
repair after 1056 plus a fee to the designing engineer. He was told at that time, that this issue had not occurred in any other Harvards world wide due to the NZ ones being the
highest time airframes still in use.
Don't quote me, but the hours were around 10,000 typically. However a couple of decades could have muddled that number in my memory.
Starting: There are 3 ways to do it -
1) Direct crank, not very friendly to the battery or starter.
2) Inertia start off battery, the preferred way. You energise the starter and listen to the impressive sounds that come out of the front end till you hear the whine peak out. IIRC this is at 30,000rpm, you then trip the engage switch. Holding down the energise switch any longer is pointless as you will only damage something.
3) Hand crank - first off, pull out the slide out foot stand so you don't fall off the wing. If the brushes on the starter are not in the lifted position, you are on a hiding to no where. With the brushes lifted you wind the thing up till you hear that whine peak, then either pull the ring on a cord in the recess just near the crank handle to engage or the pilot does it using the cockpit engage switch. You will typically get 3 useful revolutions of the engine in which to obtain a successful start. If not, then time to crank your guts out again.
If successful, you then retrieve the crank, stow the foot stand and retreat from your position disturbingly close to 9' of propeller and all the air blast. Then go around to the other side without losing sunglasses to air blast, open the cargo lid, hold onto it with a good grasp so as the air blast does not rip it out of your hand, stow the crank in the clips in the
cargo bin, lock down and check the lid is definitely locked and scramble in. Then rug up without fouling controls as you are by now sweating but need to have layers on due to how cold it gets in the back cockpit. Dad would typically fly bare armed or in shirt sleeves in the front as the heater up there was quite capable.
What we did not realise when we first got the Harvard (and before we got our hands on a manual) and found out about the brush lift, was that the position of the throttle to obtain a successful start was critical. I did crank my guts out a lot to no avail as Dad had the throttle about 1/4" too far forward. When the manual arrived from the US and we set the brushes back down and set the throttle correctly, starts were ok, just the usual radial hesitancy to fire up.
Dad was a carpenter by trade. He died from Mesophelioma - asbestos cancer, as much of his trade work involved Fibro cladding.
Although selling the Harvard was a very painful experience for him, he did have the knowledge that the bloke who purchased it was a very capable pilot and a genuine person
and that it was going to a good home. Once I received a phone call to say that he was on the way through, would be refueling here and that if I was at the airport at X time, I
could have a ride. Very gracious of him and very much appreciated. He has done similar for my sister on I think 2 occasions at air shows. Few are the pilots who will offer a joy
ride to someone just after they have refuelled on a cross country trip.
Some of you will be familiar with the book "Sigh for a Merlin"? With a radial, especially that big 9 cylinder Pratt, the whimsy would be more along the lines of "Nostalgia for the Thunder". There are very few things in life that I would have missed it for.
Please remember when reading the details in my posts, I was 19 at the time, it was decades ago and I was not the pilot, so specifics may be wrong.
Regards
Doug
RNZAF's Harvard by Errol Cavit, on Flickr
... looks like 1033 & 1038 on Railway Wagons heading to Woodbourne ... also 1098 outside ARS - 1958 apparently ...gotta like the steam train in the first one...
