PIREP Leg 20 VGSY Osmany International to VYKL Kalay.

[J G 927]

Well I had arrived at Osmani international at last. It had taken some getting to I can tell you. It doesn't look like I can ever go back to Iran until there is a regime change. Oh-hum their loss.

 

I will be forever grateful to Jasmine and Brian for getting me out of Tehran, I thought I was going to be Iran’s favorite cage fighter. Believe me some of my fellow inmates were a rough bunch, and I wasn’t looking forward to fighting over just who picks up the soap.

 

I had to lie low in the UAE for a while as SMEG agents were looking for me again. Fortunately a couple of old friends live in Dubai put me up until Mutley came to rescue me and smuggle me out to Muscat.  I could have caught an aircraft direct to Osmani from Abu Dhabi but that would have been so obvious that it would have been like rushing into SMEG’s arms.  The boss had laid on transport home which seemed like a good way out from under the searching eyes of SMEG for me (what a decent chap he is!), and after visiting the duty free to stock up with Gin I headed for Mutley’s transport home.

 

At passport control, the boarder control man took one look at me and turned to his left and nodded to a colleague. I was promptly surrounded by two big lads and asked to accompany them. By the looks of them it would be a shame not to.  A shame for me that it as I suspected they may well re-arrange my face if I didn't. 

 

I was ushered into a small room where no lesser person than Jasmine Pond was waiting for me. She assured me that they were doing all they can to clean up SMEG so I wouldn't be a fugitive for the rest of my life, but until then it was best to keep on the move and make no obvious public journeys SMEG agents were waiting for me at the gate of the homeward bound aircraft.  I clearly wasn’t going home then, Mutley’s arranged transport would have to go without me.  I mentioned the laid on transport to Jasmine, who said that they knew all about it and had told the crew that I wouldn't be going with them.  They had already left. Three days ago. Great, Hobson's choice on what happens next then.  

 

My case with Prison collection stickers. (Nice one Captain Coffee) 

 

I grabbed my suitcase, now festooned with stickers of all the places and prisons I had been to, and followed Jasmine out of a second door to the room and straight out onto to the airport tarmac. She and I quickly boarded an RAF BAe 125 Dominie jet and within seconds we were rolling of towards the runway.  I thought that this was good, the M.O.D.¹ seemed to be pulling out the stops to look after me.  It turns out that actually they were using me to draw out a man called Ernst Stavros Putinfeld, the top man at SMEG, and said to be the most dangerous man in the world.

 

Jasmine showed me a photo of Putinfeld, and I felt sure I has seen him before.

 

Putinfeld

 

As we taxied past the aircraft I was due to return to the UK on, I saw a man with a white cat on the tarmac, it was assuredly Putinfeld.

 

The Dominie took us on to Osmani and dropped me there with Jasmine.  She was to baby sit me until I had the baton again. 

 

So, Osmani, what have we got?  For a start the airport is called Osmani, It actually serves the city of Sylhet that sits astride the Surma River. Like many towns on the Indian sub-continent still shows signs of the British Raj with many of the British built grand building still standing, although the city was originally founded by the Mongols. Sylhet is a real mixture of ancient, colonial and modern, and is swarming with people. Everywhere is rush hour from sun up to sun down.

Sylhet.

 

The city itself has a population of about half a million people, and is surrounded by tea estates.  It is an important Islamic spiritual centre and has numerous Sufi shrines. It passed into British hands in 1765 when the British East India Company took its governance over. The region gained independence with the rest of the subcontinent in 1947, becoming part of West Pakistan and then in 1971 part of the newly formed Bangladesh, and independent from the Pakistan we know today.

 

General M. A. G. Osmani, a man with a ferret up each nostril.

 

The airport was built by the British as defense against the Japanese aggression from Burma. It was originally known as Sylhet Airport, but was renamed after a Bangladeshi independence war hero General M.A.G. Osmani.

 

Osmani Airport terminal (Post British Raj period, built in the Concrete Crap period I believe.)

 

Jasmine made a load of phone calls on her secure mobile (Cell) phone from our hotel while I helped myself to the contents of the mini bar.  When that was empty I started on the room service drinks menu. You are in luck, she said, we have an aircraft that you can fly it from Here to Kaley.  We will wait here until we have the baton and the aircraft arrives.  Ok I said, not exactly sure who the “we” was, but only if you restock the minibar.

 

We waited with me confined to the hotel for my safety, it felt like H.M.P.² Hiltown³ Sylhet. It got tedious, we tried scrabble, then Monopoly, then cards. We had a few gamed of I-Spy, and then charades. All we really did is prove that time could be slowed down so that every minute could become an hour, thus confounding the worlds physicists, and making the large Hadron Collider at Cern partially redundant. Interestingly we found that the application of copious amounts of alcohol could speed up time again by inducing a semi-conscious state in the space time continuum. I will be writing to Steven Hawkins with my findings.  After what seemed like a hundred years, but was only a week, news came that the Aircraft was confirmed and was due in the next few hours. There was still the matter of what the aircraft was.  Jasmine was holding back on me with this, she had clearly got something in mind but wasn’t telling.

 

We met up with a couple of Jasmin’s local heavies and made for the airport. Once there we drove directly to a hanger and stopped outside. Jasmine then told me that the Royal Navy was doing a world tour in one of their new aircraft and I could borrow it for the next ATWC leg. It was a single seat aircraft so jasmine would not be coming with me for protection, but the aircraft was perfectly capable of doing that itself.  The hanger doors were pulled open.  

 

Wow! I was to fly an F35B Lightning 2. Fantastic, I had flown the English Electric Lightning F1, F4 and F6.and now the modern one. That left just the P38L Lighting for the set of RAF lightnings.4

 

In the hanger

 

The flight plan was already filed, all I had to do was change places with the pilot scheduled to fly out of Osmani, fly to Kalay and once there swap back.  The beauty of this arrangement is that any nosy SMEG agents wouldn't know I was the pilot of this aircraft, and so I would effectively disappear.

 

I clambered into the Lightning and surveyed my new realm.  Wow was this different, very different, with few switches and virtually no dials at all. I was basically looking at a… well, a switched off touch screen TV. The ground crew went through all of the controls and handed me a booklet that explained them all. It was very intimidating, with nothing but the throttle and joystick being recognizable to me, but even then the stick was off the right hand side, and not in the centre as usual.  

 

I joked with the ground crew: “At least it has a throttle and stick!” The reply wasn't encouraging:

 

“Well yes and no. It has, but they don’t work in quite the same way.” Oh great, this wasn't going to be easy

.

“Oh well, let’s get it powered up then” I said.

 

“Not on your Nellie, out you get, you are going back to flying school” was the reply.

 

And so it came to pass.  Fortunately I had arrived well in advance of the baton, and even more fortuitously, the baton was running a bit late. I was put on a flight to Edwards Air Force Base where I spent the best part of a week of twelve hour days in the class room and in the simulator learning the ropes. Learning to fly this aircraft was beginning to seem like I was being taught how to pilot a flying saucer, the simulation experience was one of precision and of absolute control. Well you could certainly make the simulator do anything you wanted it to, surely the aircraft couldn't be this good.

 

The good old Harrier was like a steam engine when compared to this beauty. In the Harrier, hovering was a skill perfected by hours of practice, and a balancing act of stick, throttle, rudder, and nozzle angle. To get it right you really needed three hands and two brains.  The Lightning 2 was very different indeed. For a start it had three modes, a normal flying mode a STOL (Short Take-off/Landing) and a VTOL (Vertical Take-off/Landing) mode. In the Harrier you had to coax the aircraft from normal flight to the hover, the Lightning 2 had a switch for it. In the Harrier you had to have one brain for flying the aircraft and a second brain to control the hover. The Lightning has its own computers that significantly reduces pilot effort such that flying the aircraft with one brain will do the trick.

 

The Harrier relies on vectored thrust, pumping jet exhaust through its rear two nozzles and highly compressed air through it front two nozzles, it also has a reaction control system that involves a series of thrusters at key points in the aircraft's fuselage, nose, and also the wingtips. Thrust from the engine can be temporarily syphoned to control and correct the aircraft's pitch and roll during hover or near hover. The reactive control system is controlled by the joystick and rudder, the thrust by the throttle, and the thrust direction by a leaver that controls the nozzles.  A piece of cake if you happen to have three hands and two brains. Essentially, once in a hover, the Harrier is doing its best to crash, so you need one brain to maintain a hover, and another one to control the three dimensional position of the aircraft within that hover.

 

How a Harrier works

 

The lightning 2 is an easier aircraft to fly, as long as you forget all you know about the Harrier and then re-learn the hover and control skills required for the new aircraft.  The Lightning 2 can vector its thrust, but it is done through its single main exhaust at the rear of the aircraft. It too has a system that temporarily siphons compressed air from the engine to control and correct the aircraft's roll by ducting it through under wing outlets. Pitch is controlled using the main thrust and a lift fan just behind the pilot. In hover mode, a large hatch opens over the lift fan, and the fan, driven by a shaft from the jet engine, provides downward thrust forward of the centre of balance.  The main exhaust nozzle is vectored downward to supply downward thrust aft of the centre of balance. Forward movement is provided by changing the angle of the main thruster at the rear of the aircraft, the hover balance by changing the relative thrust of all the thrust devices and pitch by the thrust deferential between the fan and the exhaust. And to make things easier it has a hover hold capability that is controlled by a computer, it even takes account of wind strength and direction.

 

How an F-35B Works

 

Thank God for the aircraft’s computers, my one brain was beginning to hurt.

 

At last, one evening, the trainers decided that I was ready to fly. The following day, weather permitting I was to fly the Lightning 2.It would have been a time to celebrate, but the bottle to throttle rules put the mockers on that. 

 

The ground crew were confident in my flying capabilities when it came to straight forward flying, but wanted to make sure I could use the STOL/VTOL capabilities of the aircraft before I went on to fly leg 20. To satisfy them all I had to do was a simple vertical take off, hover and then a vertical landing. Typically no one thought to take pictures of the momentous event, but it went something like this:

 

 

All went well, in fact, very well indeed. The simulator experience was precisely the same as the real thing.  This was a beautiful aircraft to fly. 

 

The next day I was put back on another flight back to Osmani (Ferret nose) airport.  I found Pete in some dubious looking accommodation at the airport and, after making my apologies for keeping him waiting over a beer or two, I took the Baton from him. The next day was spent going over the aircraft I was going to fly the leg in, and the following day it was time to say goodbye to Osmani (ferret-nose) international airport and move the baton forward.

 

I said goodbye to Pete who had come along to see my departure and went off to get kitted up in the flight suit and helmet.  I handed over my bag to Jasmine as there was no room to take it with me. She would deliver it to me as soon as she could. I was allowed to keep the baton, and secured in the leg pocket of my flying suit. When ready, I climbed into the cockpit, powering up the aircraft and started to feed in the data I would need for the flight including the flight plan.

 

 

The Flight Plan

 

Taxi clearance was given to the active runway, and when I had arrived at the threshold, permission to take off came almost immediately. I lined up on the runway and put the aircraft into STOL configuration with the main jet nozzle at about 45 degrees , the front fan hatch open and the auxiliary air intake doors open.  These are the doors just behind the fan hatch and allow more air into the engine space to ensure that both the engine and the fan have sufficient air to function properly. Aircraft ready I started my take off run.  

At this point I should mention that the in order to do a vertical take-off the aircraft must weigh 40,600 Lbs or less. It can’t do it with a full load, some sacrifice must be made with armament and/or fuel load. Interestingly, the harrier also has this issue, but it is even worse in the Harrier as it needs a water injection system to hover. Water is pumped into the engine to further increase gas expansion and therefore thrust while hovering.  The water is a dead weight and its load is therefore kept to a minimum, in terms of the size of the tank, thus strictly limiting the amount of time in the hover. The F35B does not need a water injection system to maintain a hover, but still has a weight limit.

 

Set up for short take-off.

 

For a supersonic aircraft, the F35B needs very little runway in STOL mode, and after a very short distance I felt the aircraft float gently into the air. Wheels up and then as speed increased to around 180 knots and normal flight became viable, the aircraft disengaged STOL mode, the fan and auxiliary air intake doors closed, the jet nozzle back to its normal position and the aircraft accelerated quickly to its cruising speed in normal flight. Did I say it is a beauty to fly? I think I may have.

 

Airborne with loads of runway to spare.

 

I climbed to my cruising altitude and settled into the first section of the flight plan. Everything going smoothly I had a bit of a play with the instrument panel. The instrument panel is a piece of art. Essentially there are five main sections and up to a further eight smaller sections to the display. The top section is called the control bar, non-configurable, containing most of the basic controls and information that you need all the time.

 

Under this there are four large displays that are totally configurable and the bottom of these displays, or portals as they are called, can have two sub portals. That is up to thirteen display areas in all. The instrumentation is fantastic, there isn't anything left out, everything you want to know is there and then some more. It just great. The display is touch screen and so as a pilot you interact with aspects of the display in the most intuitive way. Below we see the control bar with a navigation display, control surfaces display, engine data display and a fuel distribution display with a further eight sub portal displays any of which can be called up to a main display at the touch of a finger.  There is a HUD that displays all you would expect a standard HUD to display, but this can change to suit the task in hand, from navigation to weapon status, and finally there is a helmet mounted display for weapon status and other flight information. The pilot flies in an information rich environment that can be tailored to suit a current task. 

 

From my perspective as the pilot on this leg, I was as happy as Larry with new toys at Christmas! And it was a dream to fly. Whoops there I go repeating myself again.

 

The Instrument Panel

 

All too soon reached the first way point and made the turn south west to the next one and then very quickly towards the third way point. Set up for the next stretch, I started to play with the instrumentation some more changing the portal displays around until I had a layout, A brief glance at the ground confirmed that now I was over dense jungle that smothered a rocky and mountainous landscape  This was to be the terrain all the way to my destination. 

 

Just cruising....

 

Portals set up nicely, I looked for other toys to play with. Strictly speaking I was not supposed to go supersonic over the landmass here but I reasoned the fauna of the jungle was not going to complain about a little sonic boom.  I opened up the throttle to see what this baby would do. Full afterburner and a kick in the back later I was doing well over the speed of sound. I am used to flying old iron through the sound barrier which can be I little interesting as some of the older buses are a little quirky at that speed. Not so the Lightning 2, it went through the sound barrier as it is didn't exist. At this point I realized I was approaching my first way point and needed to make two course corrections in short order. I rolled off the throttle and let the bird slow down to a more sedate speed. I felt like a Formula One driver in some bizarre three dimensional Grand Prix as I took the bends of the first and second way point. 

 

Pedal to the metal.

 

I had a bit of a longer stretch after that little chicane so I started looking at things to play with. I shouldn't really do this, but what the heck, I started to play with the weapons systems. The missiles I had on board were practice ones, they would fire but had no warheads, so I couldn't do any real harm anyway. I pulled up the armaments screen into one of the portals. I practiced opening and closing the arms bay doors (seen open in the picture below and changing the weapons firing configurations, to get a feel for the business end of this killing machine. The missile selected started to growl as it searched for a target, then it suddenly changed its tome to a higher pitched whine. Oh my God!! I had locked on to something! the missiles range was over 20 miles, and I had picked up a commercial jet I closed down the weapons system quickly and  hoped no one out there had noticed.... It would have been so nice just to fire off one tiny weenie, ever so small, little missile, but I knew that if I did I would be so deep in the do-do I would never be allowed to borrow an RAF aircraft again if I did so, and didn't hit anything. It just wasn't worth it. If I had hit something... well that doesn't bare thinking about.

 

Weapons unveiled.

 

I stopped playing at the next way point and, that passed, I was now I was on the last section of my flight plan and the next way point was my destination. I was running out of my time with this hideously expensive toy. I looked at my fuel and realized I would be overweight for a vertical landing. I could dump it or burn it. What the hell, I would burn it. Full afterburners on and I was eating up the miles and the fuel. The aircraft was tested to Mach 1.67. So I thought I would do some testing myself……. Mach 0.8…0.9….Mach 1.0 – The speed of sound – Mach 1.1…1.2…1.3…..1.4…….1.5………..1.6. It was here that I bottled it. as I said before, it wouldn't have done firing off some of Her Majesties missiles, but to bend the air-frame of a one hundred million dollar aircraft might just get me into a world of trouble. 

 

Playtime was nearly over and I was rapidly approaching my destination. This baby ate up the miles very quickly, I was really enjoying flying this aircraft, and I didn't want to hand it back. With Kalay Airport ahead, I bought the speed of the aircraft down to a sedate 250 knots and hit the STOL button. The aircraft re-configured itself for a short landing and slowed even more. I did a slow flypast to take a good look at the airfield and then checked my fuel. I had a total weight of 40,000 Lbs, just under the maximum for a vertical landing. Time to see how she hovered. I planned to pull up to a hover on the active runway and then to land vertically before taxiing to my parking spot.

 

STOL Approach

 

In STOL the main jet pipe points down and rearward, only when you engage the hover will it point directly down. The above picture shows the aircraft in STOL mode from the rear with a view of the underside. The jet pipe is at about 60 degrees, and the small stability duct under-wing doors are open.

With the undercarriage is still up, I reduced the airspeed to about thirty knots and engaged the hover. All forward movement stopped and the aircraft's on-board computers held the aircraft in a stationary hover twenty feet of so above the runway, dust swirling underneath the aircraft.

 

At the hover

 

I lowered the undercarriage and slowly pushed to the right, the aircraft gently moved to the right. I held it there until I was exactly over the runway centre line.  The precision in the hover was incredible. 

 

Wheels down, a foot or so to the left....and land.

 

I gently bushed the stick forward and the aircraft sank slowly towards the ground and settled onto its wheels. I shut the throttles and then the engine spooled down to idle. Beautiful.

 

Touchdown with the aircraft still configured for vertical landing.

 

With the aircraft was safely down, I made the after landing checks and put the configuration into CTOL (Conventional Take-off and landing) modes to taxi to my parking slot. The RAF ground crew were waiting for me at the ramp. I was guided into position by one of them and once given the signal I shut down the engines and opened the cockpit and the heat flooded in. It’s a little weird, opening the way it does, but the whole aircraft is, to say the least, a bit of a strange beast. From its stealth profile, to its myriad of hatches and doors and its three modes of flight, it is a bit of a Marmite aircraft:  Strong and tasty, it has a powerful kick and you love it or hate it.  I love it.  

 

 

Cockpit open (strange ain't it?)

 

The aircraft was secured with the efficiency you would expect from Her Majesties Armed Forces, and I clambered out of the cockpit. As the RAF personnel ushered into a nearby building for the post flight de-brief, my eyes scanned the apron, taking in my new surroundings, there was only a couple of other aircraft at the airport, one was an RAF Hercules, so no guesses as to how the RAF team got there.  The building was little more than a shack with a tin roof, it was like an oven inside. The debrief was short and an attended by a single RAF officer, and after it was over, I was given some RAF fatigues to change into.  I handed the flying suit back before leaving the building, It seemed that there was a hotel room booked for me in town but apart from that, and that my baggage would catch me up tomorrow, I was on my own.

 

Customs, immigration and passport control was a bloke on a gate and as I was showing this guy my passport, I heard the F35 and the Hercules power up. The RAF wasn't wasting any time in leaving this place, a couple of minutes later the Lightning 2 roared over my head and the C130 was lining up for take-off.  Suddenly I felt strangely alone. A shiver went down my spine, and I too wanted to leave this place. 

 

Kalay Airport Customs, immigration and passport control.

 

I saw that there were a couple of rusty old cars that did as taxis, and I took one of these to the hotel. At least the hotel; looked okay, a colonial pile that had seen better days, but it was clean. As soon as I had checked in and sorted out my room, I went down to the bar wondering how long it would be before the baton would be picked up. Soon I hoped as I relaxed with a cold beer, at least I had out run SMEG. I wouldn't have relaxed quite so much if I had seen the furtive looking man in the corner of the bar staring at me as he reached for his mobile phone……..

 

¹ Ministry of Defense.

² H.M.P. – Her Majesties Prison

³ No it is not the Hilton, it’s the Hiltown. A blatant rip off of the international brand.  If you don’t believe me just Google “Hotels in Sylhet”.

⁴ In 1940, 143 aircraft were ordered but only three were delivered - AE878, AF105 and AF106 They were sent back as not satisfactory.

 

Aircraft:    Dino Cattaneo,s Freeware F-35 Lightning 2

Scenery: Orbx Global

                 Orbx Global Vectors

                 FS Global 2010

                 REX 4

 

 

 

 

 

[hurricanemk1c 195]

Excellent shots and story John - although arriving in a F-35 would surely be a little bit of an eye-catcher!

[Captain Coffee 2,030]

So funny. I was laughing rather loudly in a Fry's Electronics store parking lot where I caught a break at work today to read this...esp when I spotted that my suitcase sticker joke made it into your PIREP.  

 

Great read sir!

Have you considered writing a Travelog?

Reviews of prisons specifically might get you better accommodations in future if you hint that it will give their establishment an extra star in your book.

[Bruce (a.k.a. brian747) 142]

Great PIREP, John!   

 

At least this time you had the good sense to get banged up with Jasmine (maybe I should rephrase that) and, hmm, plenty of alcohol. So maybe she's just not your type?  

 

Good story, and a fascinating aircraft (though some old-time Harrier pilots I used to know would probably feel that the skill has been taken out of VTOL).  

 

Cheers,

 

bruce

a.k.a. brian747

 

[stu7708 244]

Great PIREP, as usual, John...

 

And you managed to avoid inspecting the local prison as well, you're getting better at this mate  

 

More info on section 3 will be posted tomorrow, or later on today if I can find a spare minute in my busy work schedule...

[J G 927]

Excellent shots and story John - although arriving in a F-35 would surely be a little bit of an eye-catcher!

 

You are quite correct Chuck. However the stealth properties of the aircraft, RAF cordon at the airport and the fact that Kalay is in the arse end of nowhere ensured that there were very few people to see me arrive. 

 

 

Great read sir!

Have you considered writing a Travelog?

Reviews of prisons specifically might get you better accommodations in future if you hint that it will give their establishment an extra star in your book.

 

@Captain Coffee.  - Hmmm... The Lonely Planet Guide To World Prisons.  (Recommended reading for stag parties, drug smugglers and the terminally unlucky).  It might sell.

 

I will see if I can get one published before the next leg I do.

 

 

 

At least this time you had the good sense to get banged up with Jasmine (maybe I should rephrase that) and, hmm, plenty of alcohol. So maybe she's just not your type? 

 

@Brian - She absolutely is my type. However I love my wife dearly, I cant afford a divorce, and I worry about her reacting violently if my advances were not welcome. she is a spook after all and has been trained to kill, maim, and generally do nasty things to people.. On the whole, best not to go there.

[mutley 4,487]

Well done JG another eventful PIREP!

 

I got a bit confused by the waypoints on your map but that was obviously done on purpose to confuse any SMEG agent who got to see it.

 

There's a pack of HobNobs waiting for you at reception.

 

Cheers

 

 

[J G 927]

@Boss.  I may have forgotten to mention that the way points are nap-of-the-earth route based.probably because whilst having a play with the aircraft I didn't stay as low as I should have!

[mutley 4,487]

I wouldn't want to fly NOE in an F35 either 

[brett 2,285]

Had me a good laugh reading this one JG, thanks for the chuckles and flying lesson.  

[ddavid 149]

Kudos for the technical description of the F35-B - very interesting, Thanks.

And an excellent narrative - that's a bonus!

CHeers- Dai.