Jump John Jump - Jump Jump Sir
Does anyone remember the training video for the Chipmunk- fantastic bit of 70's instruction film.

Chippies were fantastic, was asked if i wanted to do aerobatics -after the 6th loop the loop nearly lost my lunch bah brings back good memories!
(Lamby, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 17:08, Reply)

mmmm chippy's
I was in the ATC n all, doing aerobatics in a chipmunk when suddenly all rattling hell breaks loose at the business end of a stall turn. Cue much "err think we should land soon" from the pilot and me sitting there thinking this is ace. Was only when we touched down and had a brew was i told the plane wasnt quite as safe as thought and had been grounded.
still nice view of blackpool tower......

ninja edit : 'pop' 'obvious length girth gag' etc etc :)
(JayB is Singing his love down the well...., Wed 29 Mar 2006, 16:54, Reply)

weirdly, Yachtmaster reminds me....
My grandfather "came of age" in time to enlist for WWI and be prepped for killing (Turks at that time too, sorry). Even in his early years he suffered notoriously bad eyesight, but they'd basically take anyone then. After the first few days they decided he could not be trusted not to do some serious damage to his comrades with a rifle, so they stopped letting him use one. Comes a day near the end of basic, when the recruiters for the "specials" are around so everyone has to be tip-top, out on the firing range. Bullseye. Bullseye. and so on, which is how he got to be selected as a sharpshooter, thus getting an extra two weeks training, catching a later ship to the war, the whole human cargo of which came down with dysentery and spent weeks recovering in Egypt immediately after which the war ended. I have his medals somewhere.
(dadadali has hybrid vigour, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 16:47, Reply)

Chipmunk
You sit behind the pilot in a chipmunk for reasons that I don't remember. And I did aerobatics in both a glider and a chipmunk - somehow the chipmunk 'batics were scarier....
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 15:51, Reply)

Chipmunk Cockpits
No - this isn't a pr0no reference.

The Chippie is based on the Tiger Moth in which the instructor always traditionally sat up front and the student behind.

Not much of an explanation but given that the first aircraft I ever soloed :D was a Chipmunk that was the explanation I was given at the time!
(Seismologist Have patience. In time even grass becomes milk., Wed 29 Mar 2006, 15:47, Reply)

Elephant Fresh
(sorry for the chate)

Fair enough - I only did one training flight, and in civvy street in a tandem aircraft (a glider) - for that they made you sit up front.

Just seems to make sense - so the trainee can see what position the horizon is and so on in relativity to the aircraft, and also so the instructor see you fucking with anything you shouldn't do, dependant again on the front seat/rear instrumentation panel.

I am sure there is a good reason why its different in Chipmunks - anyone know?
(Waynster James Joyce is fucking my sister!, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 15:19, Reply)

I did aerobatics
in a Bulldog.




Then I got arrested by the RSPCA.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 15:17, Reply)

Waynster
Sorry but you are wrong on that one! Well, at least with Chipmunks as I've flown in them many times i.e. sat behind the pilot

I didn't know if it was "one of those tales" they just told us, i.e. they never actually did it

Just reminded me, anyone ever did aerobatics in a Chipmunk? Flew upside down once - that was enough!

.
(MichaelLinge (ywc), Wed 29 Mar 2006, 15:12, Reply)

Flattered Baps
I had something similar on the "rusks" as we called them. Bunged me up for a week and by god what a monster of a dump afterwards - I thought it most satisfying but my colleagues were not so appreciative of the stench!
(Waynster James Joyce is fucking my sister!, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 15:07, Reply)

Just been reminded by Waynster's shit story
Again, to do with the daily ration-packs ("ratpacks").

Within these packs, one gets: loo roll, mints, Kendall Mint Cake, chocolate, dried milk, tea bags, powdered milk, water purifying tablets, boil-in-the-bag meals (soss+beans, spotted dick etc...sticks to your ribs type of food). And biscuits. Two types: "biscuit browns", and "biscuit fruits".

The food all serves a purpose: stops you being hungry, the mint cake and chocolate are good for immediate energy rushes etc. And the biscuits...? Browns clog you up, and Fruits relieve the ensuing constipation. So if one had to do a couple of days really hard slog, they'd eat the browns, and therefore not have to waste precious time defecating. They'd then eat the Fruits when they had time to spare for shitting.

Except we weren't told this. To us, biscuit browns were just part of the food. The Ratpacks were all out of date surplus, so the food was pretty nasty anyway; most of us lived off pot noodles, cheap vodka and cigarettes. However, there was one boy, who loved the biscuit browns. Couldn't get enough of them. Loved them so much he ate all of ours as well.

Two weeks later, he took his first dump after eating the bisuits. His screams could be heard all around his boarding house.

So let that be a warning to you: if you eat all the brown, balance it out and eat all the fruits as well.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 14:54, Reply)

Ok I was going to make a movie file of this to demonstrate
But in case I don't have time, one of the bestest things I ever learned in the Army was how to wipe your arse. This tip may be damn good for b3ta as well as there are a lot of students on a budget and with this method, you can clean your bum with just one sheet!

(Whilst this may be a windup, a Bombardier did teach us this when I was on my basics, but make of it what you will)

Ok in a standard daily Ration Pack you get 8 sheets of square toilet paper. And it does make sense that if you get the trots you want to maybe economise on their use so you are instructed to do the following:

1. Take the square sheet of toilet paper and fold it in half.
2. Now take the folded piece of paper and fold it in half again.
3. At the double folded corner, tear away a small part of the corner, importantly retaining the offcut.
4. Open out the toilet paper and you should have a small hole in the middle.
5. Defecate
6. Insert your middle finger through the centre hole and insert up arse.
7. Retract finger, and using surrounding toilet paper, gather up tightly arounded soiled finger and wipe away effluence
8. Finally, using the retained corner piece, use this to dig out any remaining effluence from under the fingernail.

It might be nice as a top tip - like I said if I get time I will make an animation of how to do it, but as preposterous as it sounds, it does make sense.

Oh and when in barracks, the supplied toilet paper is produced (ot at least it was) by Her Majesty's Stationary Office - True fact!
(Waynster James Joyce is fucking my sister!, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 14:36, Reply)

ElephantFresh
I might be wrong, allthough I am pretty sure I am not, but normally in a tandem aircraft the student sits at the front with the instructor at the rear. This is so they get a better idea of the aircrafts aspect to it's surrounding in training.
(Waynster James Joyce is fucking my sister!, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 14:21, Reply)

I'm a lover...

...not a fighter.
(Minty Hit, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 13:41, Reply)

Rolph
Don't know if this is a sort of Urban Myth but I did hear it from a pilot: When I was in the CCF (only good bit about school) in early 70's we got to go flying Chipmunks (RAF Trainer Plane) at RAF Church Fenton.

As the trainee, you sat behind the pilot but couldn't see him for all the clocks & dials. You were told that whilst flying, if you felt sick then there was a brown sick-bag to use. If you used one, as you were taxi-ing after landing you had to pass said bag over the dash to the pilot.

Pilot's favourite trick was to have a sick-bag with him pre-filled with Minestrone soup. As the plane stopped, the pilot handed the bag to the ground crew who all produced spoons out of their pockets and proceeded to help themselves. He said the look on the young kids face was a picture! To be hoped he never got the bags mixed up.

Niiice.
(MichaelLinge (ywc), Wed 29 Mar 2006, 13:33, Reply)

In the Navy
I travelled 20 miles to Birmingham to visit the Navy Recruiting office and to join up for the rest of my life only to find it closed. I couldn't be arsed after that!
(Jimmy Splash, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 12:28, Reply)

Yachtmaster...
If the guy lived in turkey,

why did he go fishing in the Atlantic every night?
Thats silly.
(GoldenNinjaWarrior doesn't want to, but the voices made him...., Wed 29 Mar 2006, 11:25, Reply)

CCF was compulsory at my school...
...only for one year though. After that one could branch out into the dizzying heights of "Community Service". Feeling that I'd rather be covered in good honest mud crawling through the woods, rather than horrible old person pee, I did RAF for 4 years.

I quite liked it; we got weekends away on the local army base (which coincided with TA training weekends...watching the semi-pros in all their serious action was rather amusing), were allowed to run through the market town where my school was based in camo gear, looking (as we thought at the time) very impressive and intimidating. We learnt how to fly, had lessons in how the planes worked, and were commended on being less gay than the Navy people and less stupid than the Army. And we got to crawl through shit.

Oh yes.
Shit.
Human excrement.

One day, we were doing our usual crawl through the woods around our school; it had been raining, so the paths had been mushed into a thick mud, of a porridge-like consistency. 100 yards in, someone remarked that it smelt a bit funny. 150 yards in, we all could smell it. 200 yards in, we realised where the smell was coming from: the broken drain. The "mud" was not pure! It was a foul mixture of wet earth, leaves, piss and faeces. And our NCOs just laughed, and made us crawl the next 200 yards to freedom and fresh air.

The worst thing was, our Matron refused to help us clean our uniforms. It was an exeat that weekend, and (my parents working overseas) I was staying with a friend in London. We had to take our shitty camo-gear from school (Northants) to Hampstead, on a crowded train and even more crowded tube, to get them cleaned by my friends mother.

At least we got seats to ourselves.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 10:54, Reply)

Joys of the armed forces
My grandfather on my fathers side was one of the lucky ones who survived numerous trips to and from Malta as a gunner, and never wore a helmet. His ship mates painted 'Aim Here' above his gunnery station, which the kind germans did, puncturing a hole with cannon fire through the ships superstructure an inch above his head.

My grandfather on my mothers side spent the last years of the war in the indonesian jungle fighting the japanese with the natives as part of an SOE team, escaped capture twice, and was awarded so many medals on his return he couldn't pin them all on his chest. There's lots of highly amusing photos of him standing around in the jungle, but the best ones are those he sent home at the time where the censor has blacked out everything apart fom his head.
( The Beast can't help looking at womens breasts on the tube, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 10:27, Reply)

Unpleasant Discharge
After leaving school in the early 70's my dad signed up, and following basic training he was posted to Northern Ireland. He never finished his tour after being discharged due to injury.

One afternoon he was driving along a country lane in a Land Rover, having just dropped his Commanding Officer off. He'd been warned of potential ambushes so had his foot down and was on the lookout for anything suspicious.

Shortly after turning a corner he woke up in a hospital bed, suffering concussion. He remembered nothing of what happened apart from turning the corner.

Fortunately he made a full recovery following his injuries. Unfortunately the same couldn't be said for the cow.

Another senseless casualty of the troubles.
(William Shatners Pants, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 9:08, Reply)

Wisconsin
Well, my stepdad's from London, and I've somehow inherited this strange British humo(u)r from him. B3ta is the perfect thing.
And I hate my government just as much as you all do...probably more.
(tenley, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 7:44, Reply)

10 minus 1 fingers
This one is quite famous back home (Turkey). It smells a bit like an urban legend to me, you be the judge.

There was a young man in the big city who fished for a living. Not the industrial scale, Atlantic Ocean, 5 tons a catch kind of fishing though. With a 20 foot boat, a medium sized net and plenty of heavy physical labour. He was an exceptionally big lad to begin with but the daily lifting and rowing involved in his job had turned him into a proper giant by his late teens. This didn't go unnoticed with the local mobster, who made him a job offer, which our guy accepted. So, now some nights he fished, some nights he broke legs, smashed jaws and enforced his employer's authority in a range of other methods.
A few years later the military somehow found records of him and served him with his draft papers. Being of the reclusive kind, who hated human contact, let alone being ordered around, he predicted he would put a fellow soldier or worse yet a superior officer in a coma and be courtmarshalled within a week of his arrival. He spoke to his boss, who pulled some strings, spoke to some big shots but failed at getting him out of his 18 month compulsory, military service. (the expression "death and taxes" becomes "death and army" in Turkey)
He decided to do something to render himself unfit for service. His best friend suggested him to stick a buttplug up his ass for 24 hours before his medical and then pretend to be gay. He opted out of that one. The same guy mentioned that he would be exempt from service if he was missing his "trigger finger". His index finger. He liked that one more. He didn't shoot much anyway, since his boss didn't consider him bright enough to handle firearms.
A few days later him and his buddy went to the docks at night. He dropped a couple of hospice-grade pain killers and washed them down with a lot of booze. Once he decided he was numb and buzzed enough, he took out his knife and got rid of his index finger with one chop. They crushed the chopped bit between two rocks so he could tell the doctor it was an accident.
They arrived at the emergency room. The doc looked at his finger and told him it's damaged to badly to be reattached. He stopped the bleeding and dressed the wound. Our guy asked the doctor wether he could get a report declaring his ineligibility as a soldier at that hospital. The doctor looked at his hand and said, "You'll still serve, the finger was on your LEFT hand".
The story goes that he was drafted, shipped to a commando division in the eastern provinces and became the best sharp shooter of the division's history. His officers would say that god had given the strength of two fingers to one.
(Yachtmaster, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 4:06, Reply)

Crazy friend's mum
I had a friend when I was about eight, she was my best friend, I loved her a lot, etc. Except, she moved like a zillion times, because her mum was in the army.
The thing was, every time I went over, her mum would bitch about how awful the army was, and she'd say "Don't ever join the army, promis me, you'll hate it" and sometimes she was drunk, and I was afraid.
So, I am now scarred towards the armed forces, and I will never join, ever. No matter what.
(Chasicle, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 3:34, Reply)

tenley
Wisconsin? Odd finding other people from Wisconsin on a UK site.
(24601, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 2:23, Reply)

During the war
one night it was that cold the flame on my lighter froze
(Uncle Albert, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 2:07, Reply)

Serving our country.
I got set up on a blind date last summer with a Marine (Chad) who had just gotten back from Iraq. I have absolutely no idea WHY my friend thought I would be a choice candidate for this guy, but I went ahead, feeling sorry for him and his months away from his homeland. (Isn't that how most blind dates start, anyways? Pity?)

We meet, and I find out that Chad had lied about his height (he was actually 4 inches shorter than me). So, first strike.

I look at the menu, and ask the waiter if the soup is vegetarian friendly. Chad stares at me, and asks me why I decide not to eat animals. I explain, and he immediately orders the veal. Strike two.

When asked about my heritage, I respond, "Norwegian and German". He looks pleased and relaxes. When I ask him about HIS ethnic background, he replies, "Oh, I'm Aryan," and continues to talk about how he hates homosexuality. Holy. Shit.

At this point, I realize that I'm on a date with a white supremicist (there are many in this area of Wisconsin), and I'm looking desperately for an exit. The waiter is blocking the door, and I'm sweating nervously in my seat. He's gnawing a filet of heinously butchered baby cow in front of me, and I'm hoping that he doesn't take me back home to start burning crosses.

When things couldn't possibly get any more awkward, he asks me if I'd like to go shooting. "I've got some semi-automatics at home, y'know."

At this point, I'd rather gouge my eyes out with the salad forks than spend anymore time with him.

"Uh. I'm a democrat, and I think that we've just met. Bad idea."
"Oh. Well, I guess I'll talk to you later?"
"Yeah, I guess you will."

He later calls me to ask me out on a second date, telling me that he really liked the first, and that I'm a "real special lady."

This is a guy who is defending America. My country. I weep.
(tenley, Tue 28 Mar 2006, 23:27, Reply)

I've never been in the forces
Not do I EVER intend to be.
So here's what my grandad didi in the war

LOTS of it.
He rambles like Abe Simpson does my grandad.
( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Tue 28 Mar 2006, 21:55, Reply)

horseplay gets people hurt (Apparently)
before going into iraq in 2003 everyone was given NAPS tablets (prevents nerve agent poisioning), they give u the shits and stomach cramps. I just chucked mine in me respirator haversack and forgot about them!

Then one day a couple of months later we were in iraq on patrol an some jinglies came round the rover askin for sweets. Being in the caring sharing forces they got told to fuck off. 2 minutes later we were getting stoned by the wankers.

A couple of days later we saw them again and this time we handed out all our old NAPS tablets to the jinglies and giggled away to our selves as we disapeared off.
Bringa a tear my eye even now!
(no sinner, Tue 28 Mar 2006, 21:09, Reply)

12 months of my life completely wasted
... if it weren't for the laughs I had. I was a soldier in the German army shortly before the end of the cold war. Usual duty involved moving APCs from one barrack in town to the other - and back the other day. The shortcut we usually used passed a large primary school. We were told never to drive there because you couldn't really see that much when driving, and the school kids would certainly come in 2nd to a 10 ton APC. One day we were in a bit of a hurry and drove right into a speeding trap at that school, with some 40mph. I was the lucky person sitting in the "passenger" seat, so I could explain that the seargent who was the driver wouldn't take orders from a mere soldier like myself and it was all his fault. Paying the speeding ticket was his smallest problem....
( RedWine President of the S.C.U.M., Tue 28 Mar 2006, 21:08, Reply)

Not me but...
For not getting beaten up for stealing a good story reasons I won't mention any names but... (this was a while back)
Army cadet (english) trip to a base in Germany, for fun and pretending to shoot stuff from what I've gathered. Couple of days in they get this call, a load of tree stumps need clearing from this nearby field, so off they go. The instructors/guards/whatever had decided they'd use plastic explosives to clear these stumps - blow them out - so they give these cadets (16/17 maybe) some detenators and stuff and send them off. Cue them pooling the explosives and packing it under one stump. Retire to safe distance, watch in awe as decent sized tree stump is fired completely out of the ground well into the air.

Who said the youth of today are any different from the olden days (50's/60's), i mean i know thats what we (and by we i don't mean myself and my friends, of course) would do given the chance.
(Eldraduffin is not paranoid, they ARE all out to get him., Tue 28 Mar 2006, 20:57, Reply)

Another Two RAF Ones
Neither of these happened to me - both to people who were either acquaintances of mine or my fathers.

Are you sitting comfortably children? Then we'll begin.

First story ... 1970s. Bill Murphy ('twas his name) a flight engineer aboard Nimrods flying out of RAF Kinloss. This particular aircraft had just come out of major servicing and was on its first "real" trip out to the north Atlantic. Did his pre-flight checks everything seemed OK but something seemed wrong. Aircraft taxis, gets permission to take off, rolls down runway, reaches V1 (decision speed) and Bill lurches forward, grabs the throttles and pulls them right back to the stops saying "taxi back - I don't know what's up, but something's wrong".

Aircraft taxis back to dispersal everyone gets off. Bill jumps up on one wing - full of fuel. Jumps on to other wing - empty. Had they gotten up the aircraft would've immediately flipped over killing all 13 people on board.

Bil got the DFC for that.

Second story ... 1980s. Mr Lawrence (father of a school friend of mine) flying in Germany aboard an F4 Phantom with live weapons doing a simulated dog-fight with a Jaguar. Hits the wrong button on the control column and instead of taking a picture of the Jaguar, erm, lets off a Sidewinder that promptly shoots it down.

Oops. Mr L severely reprimanded by RAF court martial!
(Seismologist Have patience. In time even grass becomes milk., Tue 28 Mar 2006, 19:24, Reply)