The Dirty Secrets of Your TradeSo, Television is a hot bed of lies, deceit and made up competitions. We can't say that we are that surprised... every job is full of this stuff. It's not like the newspapers currently kicking TV whilst it is down are all that innocent.
We'd like you to even things out a bit. Spill the beans on your own trade. Tell us the dirty secrets that the public need to know.
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chthonic, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 10:31)
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My uncleused to be in the RAF, and my family used to go and visit from time to time. This was the mid 1980s, and this particular RAF base was flying Lightnings. (If you're at all interested in this subject, you can probably work out where it was).
Anyway, my uncle took me round the base for a look, and while going through the hangars, I noticed that under almost all of the aircraft was a large metal tray with liquid in it.
Drip trays to catch leaking fuel, as it happens. I enquired of my uncle why this was the case.
He replied that they all leaked, but by the time you got them up in the air, it evaporated quickly enough so as not to cause any problems. Fair comment, but I wouldn't like to be flying something which is basically a big fuel tank, two huge jet engines, and two little stubby wings, which had a fuel leak. At Mach 2.
He said that if a Tornado had a leak, it would be fixed, but on something like a Lightning, the conversation between the ground crew would be something like:
A - "That one's leaking fuel".
B - "Is it leaking badly?"
A - "No".
B - "OK, that's fine. Stick a drip tray under it".
To be fair, it wasn't long before the Lightnings were retired, but they were dropping out of the sky at a fair rate at that point, funnily enough.
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K2k6 has a proper job these days, Mon 1 Oct 2007, 10:39,
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