Radschool Association Magazine - Vol 24

Page 8

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Red Eye.

If you take a lot of photos you’ll notice that some people, and some lighting conditions, are perfect breeding grounds for the devilish “red-eye”.

Rather than wearing garlic around your neck and carrying a wooden stake, all you have to do to stop this is use the “red-eye reduction” facility on your camera – but!!, how does it work????? It’s simple really.

Wide-open pupils, whether by nature or stimulated by low light conditions, allow the camera's flash to bounce off the blood vessels at the back of the eye and leave your friends looking like they're possessed. Your camera's red-eye-reduction flash setting emits a preflash that causes your subjects' pupils to constrict and help prevent the flash associated with the taking of the photo from bouncing off the blood vessels at the back of the eyes.

Isn’t that clever!!

18 RMT.

This is the official RAAF photo of 18 RMT which was an air course, and which went through Laverton early in 1968. Nothing special about that you say, well no, except, this photo caused quite a stir.

After the photo was taken the photographer from CPE counted up the faces in the photo and came up with 26 which was funny as there was only 25 blokes on the course. So they matched names to faces and found they had an unknown stow-away.

Arthur Woods, (arrowed) who was a cook at Laverton, just happened to be in uniform and talking to his mate Don Gilbert (4^th from left, front row) when the blokes were told to line up for the photo – so, being a good disciplined airman, Arty did what he was told, he lined up – and got his photo taken. As you can see from Arty’s face, he thought it a great joke, as did nearly all the blokes on 18, but Mr RAAF didn’t. The Super Sleuths were put on the job and about a week later they identified Arty who was charged and given 14 days CB for his troubles.

As it does, time has wiped the memory cells partially clean and neither Woodsy nor Don was able to put a name to all the faces, those that have surfaced are: 

Back row L-R No 3 - Bernard Grob, Middle row L-R: No 2 - Colin Stephens, No 3 - Arthur Woods, No 5 - Kevin Dunlop, Front Row L-R: No 1 - John Joiner, No 2 - Curly Powell, No 3 - Geoff Blunt, No 4 - Don Gilbert, No 5 - Danny Crane, No 9 - Geoff Brown and  No 10 - Tony ??

Can anyone put some names to the rest of the faces??

Geoff Collins.

Born in 1926, Geoff Collins first played first grade football with the Melbourne football club (The Demons) in 1948, and was given heritage number 680 with the club. In his first year in senior football, he played half back flank, and that year the Demons made the finals with Essendon (the Bombers). The first finals game was a draw, (the first ever drawn finals game) so they played it again the following week, and this time the Demons were triumphant 13.11.89 to 7.8.50 in front of 52,226 people.

Geoff was made captain of the team in 1954 and played under the legendary coach, Norm Smith along side another legend of the game, Ron Barassi. In total, he played 88 games for Melbourne in years 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, and was captain in the losing 1954 Grand Final side. He is mentioned in Melbourne FC’s top 150 players. He missed the 1953 season while on armed service in Korea. 

During the Korean conflict, Geoff Collins, was a Sergeant Meteor pilot with 77 Sqn, based at Kimpo and his aircraft had a life-sized demon emblazoned on its fuselage. The photo (left) of A77-207 was Geoff’s aircraft and the demon can be seen just forward of the legs of the bloke standing on the wing.

It is uncertain as to what happened to this aircraft, some records say it was originally accepted by the RAAF in 1951, went to Korea and after there it went to 38Sqn Comms Flight and was destroyed by a missile at Woomera in 1971. Another source says it was de-commissioned in 1967 and is currently preserved at RAAF Edinburgh however this could be another aircraft painted with 207’s identity.

A popular hobby among pilots of 77 Sqn, during the conflict, was to build and fly model aircraft. Geoff Collins is seen here, kneeling with hat on, working on the engine of a model Bearcat.

We only have skimpy details on Geoff Collins, we know nothing of his Air Force career, when he joined or when he was discharged.

If you know, please pass on the info so we can pass it onto others.

The Black Box.

As an engineer at the Aeronautical Research Laboratory in Melbourne in the mid 50’s, Dr David Warren was helping to investigate the cause of an aircraft crash that had no witnesses. He realized that reconstructing what happened would be a lot easier if the information was stored onboard.

He then recalled the world's first miniature (tape) recorder that he had recently seen at a trade fair, and suddenly he could visualize such a recorder placed in all aircraft, continually recording voices and instrument readings and able to be recovered after a crash.

In the 1950's a number of De Havilland Comet jet airliners had crashed and for a while a cause for the disasters could not be found.

David knew that a recording of the pilot and other members of the flight crew, as well as instrument readings at the time of the crash, would give clues as to the cause of a crash.

So, with the help of two of his colleagues, he made a recording device that would do the job. It was named the "ARL Flight Memory Unit" and was produced in 1957. It would record, on steel wire, the pilot's voice and instrument readings for 4 hours.

The machine was tested successfully but still no one in Australia was interested in building and selling them.

In 1958, the Secretary of the United Kingdom Air Registration Board, who was visiting the ARL, saw the Flight Memory unit and was very enthusiastic. He arranged for David to take his machine to England.

In England, David was given a team of scientists to help him make new and improved models of the Flight Memory Unit. New models were housed in crash and fire proof boxes and were sold to many countries.

Typically, no one in Australia was interested in his idea. It was only after the crash of a Fokker Friendship at Mackay (Queensland) in 1960 that the inquiry judge strongly recommended that black box flight recorders be installed in all airliners. Australia then became the first country in the world to make cockpit-voice recording compulsory.

Now every airline in the world has a "Black Box" fitted to their aircraft, though they look like this (they're never black!).

In 2002, he was awarded the Order of Australia (AO) for his contribution to aviation. On receiving the honour, he said, 'It's very comforting that the black box is now accepted as being something useful to humanity.'

Dr David Warren was born on March 20, 1925, on Groote Eylandt, Northern Territory, and was the first European child to be born on Groote Eylandt. To ensure he received a good education, his parents sent him "south" at age four, to spend most of the next 12 years in boarding schools (mainly Launceston Grammar and Trinity Grammar, Sydney).

In 1934, his father was killed in one of Australia's earliest air disasters, the loss of the Miss Hobart in Bass Strait. His last gift to David was a crystal set. David found he could listen to the set after lights-out in the school dormitory and became interested in electronics. He began building radios as a schoolboy hobby and enrolled for the public examination to become, he hoped, Australia's youngest "radio ham". When the sudden war-time ban on amateur radio dampened his hopes, he turned to chemistry as a hobby and, ultimately, a life-time profession

He graduated from Sydney University with a Science Honours Degree then worked as a teacher and as a lecturer in chemistry. He moved to Woomera in South Australia and worked as a rocket-fuels chemist in 1950 and in 1953 he started work with the Aeronautical Research Laboratories.

Great truths about life that little children have learned:

*     If your sister hits you, never hit her back. They always catch the second person.
*     Never ask your 3-year old brother to hold a tomato.

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