Saturday 19 May 2012

19 May 1982, Orf we jolly well go

Logbook entry: Stingray Vectacs, ECM 1.15 hours

So today the Bristol group sails south.  It's also the day the War Cabinet authorises the go ahead for the landings. It's all starting to hot up.

'Vectacs' are Vectored Attacks using torpedoes.  I mentioned earlier that we had some of the very new Stingray, air launched anti submarine torpedoes on board.  The anti submarine role for the Lynx was quite important but we had no sensors to find submarines, apart from the old mark one eyeball of course.  So the idea was that another unit, ship or aircraft (Sea King) would take us under control and vector us to a launch point.  For the old Mark 46 torpedo this had to be pretty accurate, for the Stingray which was far more clever, the parameters were far wider.  However the weapon had several new modes of searching so today we were trying out the first of a few new tactics.  ECM was us practising with the jammer - something we would be doing a lot of from now on.

Sorry, but from now on there will be less of my photographs.  In the non digital age we couldn't snap away at anything and everything and more importantly, even though I kept my camera in the hangar there wasn't much opportunity to use it - we were too busy.  I'll try to steal some relevant ones from the web though.

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