Firstline Servicing ....Venoms
Firstline Servicing....Venoms
My first assignment was on first line servicing on Venom fighters. Our first day at work was in the hut where ammunition was prepared for the aircraft. The rounds were fed into the belt feed mechanism which would be attached to the cannon when it was re- armed then other belts were made up with the number of rounds being fired on each sortie and, if they were firing air-to-air at a drogue being dragged behind another aircraft, the tips of the rounds were dipped in various coloured paints so that each pilot’s hits could be identified. It was a very warm day and we were working with our uniform on as we hadn’t been issued with overalls. The NAAFI van came round and everybody was buying cold orange juice which they collected in their own mugs. But we didn’t have a mug with us and nobody offered us the use of theirs. So we had to work on totally parched. We soon learned all the tricks of the trade.

The armourers’ duties were divided into various sections. Some were on first line functions and they were engaged on the aircraft which were flying that day, either Venoms, Meteors or Hunters. They armed the planes with either shells, bombs or rockets before each flight and rearmed them on subsequent flights. The Venom flights were usually the busiest flights and two armourers usually worked together on the planes, about ten armourers in total. Venoms were uncomfortable to work on as the armourer had to lie under the plane to release the panels to allow him to work on the guns, not nice on a very wet day. If, for some reason one or more of the guns had jammed, the armourer had to insert a safety device into the gun to ensure it didn’t go off before the ammunition was removed. When the planes were firing practice rockets, the electrical circuit had to be tested before arming. One armourer would go into the cockpit and another would afix test bulbs to the connecting cables. The armourer in the cockpit would callout “Number 1” and the bulb on the outside of the two on the port wing should light up. If OK the other armourer would shout Ok and the cockpit armourer would click through number two and fire port number three and that should light the inner bulb. Then they would move to the starboard side and repeat the procedure. When the testing was complete, the main connection in each wheel well would be disconnected. Then they would load the rockets on to the slides and connect them up. When the pilot was ready to take off, an armourer would cycle down to the end of the runway and, when the plane arrived, he would direct the plane to a safe direction(for some peculiar reason, the safe direction was towards Arram village) then signal to the pilot to remove his hands from the controls and place them on the top of the cockpit where he could see them. Sometimes this could be a standoff when a particular pilot would not show his hands and ignore the order. When this happened to me, I would just lean on the wing and wait until he did so. There could only be one winner at this game. He had to eventually to give in and I would crawl under the wheel well and connect the socket then the other one and signal to him that he could take off. If, for any reason, he didn’t fire the rockets, the plugs had to be disconnected before he returned to the re- arming point . If everything was done by the book nothing could go wrong. But I will now relate how things could go wrong. 

For some reason, three men went to arm the plane with rockets. The rest of the armourers were lying in the grass on a lovely summers day when suddenly a rocket flew about four feet over our heads. The rocket flew across the airfield and embedded itself in the railway embankment on the Beverley to Driffield railway line. There was consternation everywhere and officers and NCO’s came pouring onto the airfield. The airfield was shut down and all flights stopped until the reason for this rogue rocket was discovered. Eventually,the official opinion was that a charge of static electricity from the fuel tanker which was refuelling the aircraft had caused the rocket to ignite and the airfield went operational again. The only damage suffered was a small tear on one of the armourer’s overalls as the fin on the rocket had torn it when it took off. So all was well again...........but the armourers knew the whole truth. This is what went wrong. The three armourers decided that three was quicker than two and they would get back to sunbathing again. First mistake, they unloaded the rockets from the trailer and placed them on the ground beneath each wing. Then one armourer got into the cockpit and he others got under each wing and fixed test bulbs to the sockets. As per the usual procedure, the man in the cockpit checked the port wing rocket circuits first. He called out “One” and when the bulb lit up, his partner called “OK”. Then he clicked through two on to three and repeated the signals. His partner called “OK”. Then he tested the starboard wing circuit. He pressed the firing button on two and that partner called out “OK”. But unbeknown to him, his partner under the port wing ahd connected up the rocket to number three circuit. So he clicked the firing button and the number three rocket ignited and took off. They were lucky nobody was killed and no action was taken against the three airmen. But the others who knew what had happened soon let them know how stupid they were. And a few quiet words was said to an NCO and he quietly arranged for them to be transferred to second line servicing, away from live ammunition. The fact that we were dealing each day with live ammunition did not seem to bother most of us although some were happier on second line duties. But there was even a few idiots in the workshops where the cannons, etc. were serviced. There was always someone looking for a memento of their time in the RAF and a popular keepsake was a 20mm or 30mm round complete with shell and cartridge but without the propellent. Now it was easy to get hold of a cartridge as some cannons were tested on a firing range before going back onto aircraft but it was not so easy to get an undamaged shell as they were deformed after they were fired into the sand. I went into a workshop one day and this armourer had a 30mm round in a vice and was hacksawing through the cartridge to remove it from the shell. He seemed to be unaware that he was causing heat to build up on the cartridge which was still full of gunpowder. I quickly warned him about the dangers then made a quick exit. When on first line duties, each trade had to sign the log book that the plane was ready to fly and we had done all the pre-flight checks including checking the ejector seat which was part of the armourer’s domain as it contained three cartridges to impel it out of the cockpit if the pilot got into trouble. So we signed this many times a day without worrying too much about what would happen if anything happened to the plane. Perhaps if we had been a bit older, we might have got stressed out but we were all in our late teens and early twenties so possibly this was a reason for our confidence.
Share by: