Thread: Tracker...anyone

what could you do with them? Immensely powerful, wonderful flight characteristics, very poor fuel efficiency, most awesome sound......were they used in any other role?

You're right about the great sound they make Ramblingboy42, we used to be able to hear them on sonar flying around above us on Oberon submarines. Not bad being able to tell the skipper there is a Tracker overhead the boat from 200 or more feet down. If memory serves me correctly they had radial engines which make a very distinctive sound.

Greg

They've been used for water bombing over the last 20 years or so - and many fitted with turbines in that role... but at a huge cost.

I've seen an airworthy one sell in the US for 65k, and a few years ago a yard of them met with an excavator in Florida, soon to become coke cans.

There's no real shortage of airframes in the US, so no demand there. Fingers crossed they survive.


Matt.

Shame they are not individual lots. Might have bought one for the kids. Great cubby house!

When I was in Sale a few years ago I got quietly shown over a couple of Trackers and the airframes and engines looked to be in a very poor state. The guy there said they should have been kept at the Woomera boneyard where corrosion is minimal. It then wouldn't have mattered if there was a quick sale or not as the aircraft would have been preserved for later use.

Apparently some time after they were cocooned for storage, it was decided they needed to make sure the engines still ran (possibly in preparation of a sale). After spending several months prepping the aircraft, the engines were duly started but then some RAAF idjit decided that they did not need to re-mothball the engines. That is not a recipe for longevity so corrosion-city here we come!

Basically the time has long past for selling the bulk of them as airworthy examples. Corrosion-wise the engines and airframes are pretty much scrap metal and it would take some serious money to get any of them flying again. What a colossal waste.....

Yeah, typical. About 17 years ago I was involved with the Navy museum at HMAS Albatross and there were about 8 Westland Wessex helicopters there with nowhere to go. The museum was allocated them but could only find a use for two of them. I enquired and was told/offered them for 5k each. That was a complete airframe with avionics, engine and rotor set all stored correctly in nitrogen and with service tags. The problem of course was the transport, future storage and if required, airworthiness maintenance and type certification. Anyway, as that prospect was a pipe dream, and with no takers, the Navy used them for fire training and 6 were burnt.

I was in Tucson Arizona last year and there's a bucketload of Trackers in storage for domestic and foreign use/sale, so these ones are no doubt too far away and too far gone. Incidently, in Tucson there was about 115 hulks of the (piston) version of the Wessex (Sikorsky S-58) there that went for scrap at 1k per ship. They'd been there since the early 70's.

I'm sure I'm a hoarder deep down. Bugger.

Matt.

Originally Posted by ramblingboy42

what could you do with them? Immensely powerful, wonderful flight characteristics, very poor fuel efficiency, most awesome sound......were they used in any other role?

Sounds like a top fuel dragster.

Immensely powerful
Wonderful flight characteristics (when they do)
Very poor fuel efficiency
Most awesome sound


Of course they would, with any engine be of use at the moment in a fire fighting role. But that would be foresight and initiative and we all know that doesn't come from those people.

IMHO, Best sounding aircraft in the world. I remember being at a beer can regatta, Darwin early 70s when a trio of them did a very very low fly past about 100ft and poured it on. (No rules in Darwin those days) Better than a dozen rail dragsters flat out. Awesome.