S2F Overhead Hatch

Once again, I have overlooked the obvious. Not only do I know that the hatches over the S2F pilot and copilot slid inside and aft, I have sat in an S2F-1 and flown a Turbo Firecat. But in looking for illustrations/pictures of the open hatch for a response to a question about them, I suddenly realized that there isn't enough distance behind the aft end of the hatch and the bulkhead for the pilots for the hatch to slide open.

(Both pilots are showing both hands away from the controls while a red shirt is arming or disarming stores on the wing pylons.)

 The answer is that it slides into a small compartment in the bulkhead. The dashed line on this illustration of the bulkhead behind the pilots shows approximately where the lower side of the compartment is.

 

Alan Weber provided a picture of an S2F cockpit display that shows the compartment the hatches slid into.

Note that because of the length of the passageway between the cockpit and crew compartment, the aft end of the hatch hole cannot be seen in the crew compartment.*

S2F-1 Radar Crew Position

S2F-1 MAD/Sonobuoy Crew Position

The following are from Calum Gibson's website (http://a4-alley.x90x.net/models/Walkarounds/Tracker.html) and used with his permission:

Here is a Bill Spidel picture of the hatch in the closed position that I was able to lighten enough to show the actuating mechanism and the track the hatch slid on. Rotation of the T-handle lowered the hatch and then it could be slid aft.

And in response to another question, the overhead windows were tinted green, although I don't know when that practice began. (The hatches were solid initially.) Alan Weber, who worked on civil S2Fs used for fire fighting: "in fact I never saw one first hand that wasn’t. We had stacks of them in our parts room and they all were tinted green."

* In the utility conversions where the equipment was removed and the seats mounted facing rearward more towards the cockpit, the hatch compartments were usually covered with interior quilting. In this case, the right side is uncovered.