237 OCU - Honington Line

Hope some of you from 237 OCU are still out there.



We had this taken in 1978, the photographer did it from the top of a cherry picker. he spent half an hour on it, then a jaguar went over at 100feet, and a couple of hundred knots, with a recce pod on and did the same job in .?? of a sec.




Our squadron (when i was on the OCU) had 20 aircraft, but only 16 capable of doing day to day operations, the others were away on majors and swop rounds. we had a few hunters to make it like that and if they were included it would have been 22-24ish.

We used to do earlys to tow out around 7, probably the first dozen, which would be for the 8:30 wave.

After they were BF'd they would go and if it was a full day we would get an 11am wave ready, and tow out ones to top up and tow in the failures from the 8:30 wave.

Typically in the hanger the primarys and primary *'s would be done as a routine and the line was run by about 20-25 linies. in the hanger there was approx 50-60 guys of all trades.

The 11am wave would go and the 8:30 would return and because they would be up for a hour or two we would fit in lunch whilst they were away.

Generally in the afternoon there might be a 2pm wave, but the flying might be staggered with some on shift change to the evening shift at around 4:30, the shift change didn't have as many guys but was probably 50ish in total.

We did night flying so the evening shift covered a 7pm wave and maybe an 11pmish one.

We would recover the broken ones as that went on and on the hangar the ones that could be fixed for the following morning were worked on, and the primarys and primary *'s continued so they could be out there once completed.

The night shift had supper around 10:30 to 11 and the normal worked ceased around 02:30 the following morning.

To sustain the 12 ready in the morning, enough aircraft had to be worked on during the night shift so if there wasn't enough ready ,we would stay till they were ready which sometimes meant 5am, but we didn't often personally hand back to the day shift.

We did however work on saturdays on the OCU and flew two waves on saturday morning.