I wasn’t a good helicopter pilot. If you have ever piloted a helicopter you were probably much better at it than I was, and if you have never been a helicopter pilot you would in all likelihood have done a better job than I did.
After commanding the battalion’s reconnaissance platoon, I was posted to Brunei to instruct at the Training Team Brunei, which was the army’s jungle warfare school. Along with another captain who was in the Royal Marines, I was responsible for delivering the jungle warfare instructor’s course and, additionally, I ran the long range reconnaissance patrol course, for small groups of soldiers who would have to learn to spend weeks in the jungle without the close support of other troops. Most of our non-commissioned officers had served in the SAS and the school had a particularly relaxed but professional operating ethos. It was a very happy time which also saw the birth of my first son, Daniel.
I thrived in my new role, but I was young and adventurous. The Gurkhas were going through an unusually quiet period in their history; for political reasons they were not allowed to serve in Northern Ireland, although British Officers were allowed to serve there with other regiments, as I had done in Belfast with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. I needed a new challenge and I decided to apply to become an army helicopter pilot.
The selection course for helicopter pilots was in three parts. Initially candidates attended the aircrew selection board, which in the late 1970s was at RAF Biggin Hill, the famous Battle of Britain airfield just to the south of London, where the prospective pilot was subjected to tests which would be more familiar to modern day computer game players. There was also a very strict medical to go through. Then, for those who had passed the initial phase of selection, it was off to the Army Aviation Centre at Middle Wallop where the focus was on interviewing the candidate to decide if he was suitable – this was decades before female pilots were rightfully recruited. Most who got to this stage were found to be suitable and then it was off to the joint services psychiatric unit, which was the last remaining section of the large Netley military hospital near Southampton. This was not, as some suggest, to test whether or not you were mad enough to fly army helicopters, but simply to see whether or not you suffered from epilepsy. A few years before there had been a fatal accident when a helicopter coming into land with its headlight on had possibly caused a helicopter which was taking off from the same site to crash. One theory was that the light shining through the blades of the helicopter which was taking off had caused a stroboscopic effect which had caused the pilot to have an epileptic fit. As a result all applicants were tested by having electrodes connected to their skulls, then being made to lie on a bed formed by a rubber latticework while having a series of lights flashed into their face over a prolonged period to see if this would induce an epileptic fit. It rarely did and virtually everyone passed, but there was a apocryphal tale that one candidate was found to be so prone to having a fit that the staff took his car keys away and refused to allow him to drive away from the hospital.
The initial part of the flying course was fifty hours on fixed-wing aircraft and on our course this was the De Havilland Chipmunk which had gone out of production over twenty years before, but was still an ideal aircraft for fledgling pilots. The theory was that you could train virtually anyone to fly an aircraft, but the army did this within a strict timetable, and any students who didn’t reach the required standard at each point in the course were immediately sent back to their unit.
We started with sixteen students, but by the time we finished the fixed-wing phase we were down to thirteen. We then moved to the rotary phase of our training and I very clearly remember the initial words of our ground school instructor who said that although he was going to explain how helicopters flew, this was contrary to his personal belief that such flight should be impossible.
Our first sixty hours were spent on the Bell 47, the aircraft featured in MASH, which was first produced in 1946 and was still going strong some thirty years later. In most respects it was a very easy and forgiving helicopter to fly, but it had one difficulty which had to be mastered before students went solo. Unlike later generations of helicopters which had automatic throttles that applied additional power when the collective lever was raised when lift was needed, the Bell had a manual throttle which had to be turned at the same time as the collective lever was raised or lowered. This was a very pleasurable phase of learning to fly because we were simply required to pilot the machine. Even so, we lost another two members of our course before this phase ended.
We now moved on to advanced rotary and the Gazelle helicopter for the final phase before becoming qualified pilots. This was a beautiful aircraft to fly, much easier than the Bell 47 and still in service over forty years later. There is a theory which applies to most learning processes, but is particularly applicable to the army pilots’ course, that says you start with a certain capacity that you use up as the course progresses. When all of the spare capacity was used up, the student pilot simply was unable to take in more information at the pace required by the course. We now had to learn not just to fly a new type of helicopter in the tactical way required by the army, but also to monitor several radios at the same time, to control artillery fire, to direct jet aircraft, to reconnoitre enemy positions and map-read while flying a few feet above the ground at 120 knots. The pressures were too much for another three course members and by the time we received our pilot’s wings we were down to eight from the original sixteen.
I loved flying the Gazelle and I assumed I would be posted to Germany. However, events earlier that year were to have an impact on my future. In February 1979, China went to war against Vietnam in response to the latter occupying Cambodia during the previous year. A significant number of the troops China sent into action were stationed to the north of the Hong Kong border, and into the vacuum caused by their absence flooded hundreds of refugees intent on getting to Hong Kong to seek a new life.
For much of the year Hong Kong was hot and humid, and often buffeted by strong winds which made flying through its mountainous terrain demanding, particularly for recently qualified pilots. I was the only Gurkha pilot in the Army Air Corps and it was felt that my ability to speak to the soldiers on the Hong Kong border, the vast majority of whom were Gurkhas, would be useful.
This meant I had to learn to fly the Westland Scout, an aircraft that had come into service nineteen years previously, with avionics many years behind the sophistication of the Gazelle which I had come to enjoy flying so much.
I now had my wings and, with the birth of my second son, Tom, I felt settled into my new flying career. However, my spare capacity, which was enough to carry me through the initial pilots’ course, had been significantly depleted during the conversion to flying Scouts and I found this helicopter far more challenging to pilot than my passengers and I would have liked.
I arrived at 660 Squadron in Hong Kong at the end of 1979 when the operations to stop refugees streaming into Hong Kong were well underway. My first few flights were designed to acquaint me with the geography of the territory from the air and to familiarise me with some of the tasks I would be required to undertake. One of my very first flights nearly ended in disaster when I was tasked, by the officer responsible for my familiarisation, with picking up a trailer using the hook underneath the helicopter. Unbeknown to me, the fellow officer had chosen a very overweight container to test my skills. As we moved away from the pick-up site with the trailer slung underneath, it started to swing violently under the helicopter. Within a short time it was swinging up to level with the cabin on one side of the aircraft and then swinging back under and up to the level of the cabin on the other side, and at the extent of the swing it was putting significant strain on the engine and rotors. In the back of my helicopter the aircrewman was yelling for me to sort it out (in those days we only flew with one pilot in the front and an aircrewman in the back of the aircraft). It was fortunate that I had just come from the flying school, because I suspect that in a few years’ time I would have forgotten how to respond to what was happening. I gradually put the aircraft into a tight turn and used the centrifugal force to stop the trailer from swinging, after which I gradually came out of the turn with the trailer staying in place. It worked and the aircrewman stopped yelling.
The next three years were spent primarily supporting the operations against illegal immigrants. We worked in shifts and patrolled the Hong Kong border at first light and before last light. The first few patrols were harrowing, as we hovered over the bodies of those who had drowned trying to reach a better life, using the down wash from our rotor blades to shoo away the dogs who were trying to feed on the bodies. Most days we found several bodies, but after the initial shock of seeing groups of bodies lying together where they had floated ashore, one became relatively desensitised to this grim sight. The only exception, which always tugged at our emotions, was seeing dead children lying next to adults in what we assumed to be a family group.
On one occasion I was tasked with going to a sector of the border which was manned by British troops to pick up a body. After an overflight of the area I failed to locate the body and I landed on the seawall next to the British base to grab a quick breakfast. As I walked along the seawall I passed a group of soldiers sitting with their feet hanging over the edge of the wall having their photograph taken with a Chinese man. I stopped and turned round to look again at what they were doing, to discover that the Chinese man in their midst was the dead body I was looking for, and the soldiers had propped the body up to take their group photographs. I was just about to say something when their sergeant major rushed past me to lay into the soldiers for being so despicable, in a way that only a raging sergeant major knows how to do.
Illegals were often brought into Hong Kong by speedboat during the night and only the raiding craft used by the Royal Marines were fast enough to catch them. The marines, however, had the disadvantage that although they were faster than the Chinese boats, they would often lose them in the darkness. The response from our headquarters was to tell us to use our ‘night sun’, a powerful searchlight controlled by an aircrewman in the back of the helicopter, to follow and illuminate the Chinese boats, while the marines captured them. Although it was to become standard practice in later years, we unusually flew these operations with dual controls and two pilots in the front of the helicopter, one focusing on the flying and the other commanding the aircraft and operating the radios.
We waited on the arm of the jetty of the headquarters building close to the Star Ferry on Hong Kong Island, waiting to be called by the marines. When the call came we were told that a Chinese speedboat was heading for Aberdeen on the south side of the island, whose harbour was narrow with high ground and high buildings on either side, and with large electrical cables hanging across from one side of the harbour to the other. This was not an environment a helicopter pilot would readily go into at night-time. Our instrumentation was antique by modern standards and the only instrument which set us apart from the planes at the end of World War One was a radar altimeter, which told us how far the ground was beneath us, which our barometric altimeter also did. However, what it didn’t do, which would have been far more useful in Hong Kong’s mountains, was tell us how far in front of us was the rock face we were heading for in the dark.
We actually found the Chinese boat fairly quickly, but almost immediately after finding the boat, we entered low cloud, which is the last thing you want to do at low altitude in an unsophisticated aircraft in hilly terrain. We immediately climbed, praying that there were no hillsides or buildings in the way. If anything, the cloud got thicker as we climbed and we popped out in moonlight at 2,000 metres. All we could see was a wide unbroken expanse of cloud. We called up the control tower at Kai Tak, which was the old airport in Hong Kong, and asked them to find us on their radar, in the hope that they would be able to guide us down. Despite trying for several minutes they failed to locate us. By this stage we were starting to get a bit desperate. We had no idea where we were, or what lay under us, and we were starting to get low on fuel. We were very afraid, but the need to be so focused on trying to escape kept the fear under wraps; in such a situation all emotions, particularly fear, have to be blanked out, and the Scout needed all our efforts to keep it in the air. Time and again we circled over the sea of cloud, still begging the air traffic controllers to find us, trying not to watch the fuel gauge as it moved inexorably lower.
There may have been more holes dotted around us which we didn’t find, but there was one special hole in the cloud that we did find that night. We didn’t even need to discuss whether we were going to try and descend through it. The fuel was very low by this stage and we dived through the hole below us without any discussion. We arrived under the cloud above a small hill, fortunately well clear of buildings and wires, some fifteen kilometres north of where we had entered the cloud and only a short distance from our airfield. We landed and walked to the officers’ mess, where I drank a glass of whisky (not my normal drink) in an effort to calm my very stretched nerves. I can’t recall ever being so afraid, but I then travelled home to my family who remained blissfully unaware that I had thought I wasn’t coming home that night.
During a Hong Kong search and rescue exercise I was tasked with locating dummies which were being used for the exercise to represent survivors and casualties, after which air traffic control, who were running the exercise, would send a larger helicopter to recover the dummies. Sweeping the area of sea I had been given to search, it didn’t take me long to spot nine dummies around 300 metres from the shore. I radioed to Kai Tak, who were controlling the exercise, that I had found the nine ‘bodies’, only to be told to confirm the number of bodies. I repeated that I had found nine, to be then told that there were only three dummies being used for the exercise. What I had located was the drowned crew of a fishing boat who had by sheer coincidence floated into the exercise area.
One of the great things about a helicopter is autorotation, which means the rotor blades can be turned by the air travelling up through them when the helicopter is descending, if the engine stops. The pilot can still fly the helicopter in this state with the aim of finding a suitable piece of ground to land on. Although it is unable to ascend, the helicopter flies almost normally in this state, and during our flying course in the UK we would invariably end the flight by autorotating to the ground, in what was known as an engine off landing (EOL).
The Scout had short rotor blades and if, in a real emergency, the engine malfunctioned and stopped, the pilot only had some four seconds to put the aircraft into autorotation before the turning blades slowed down too much. After that, the wind travelling up through the blades as the aircraft descended would not be enough to make the helicopter controllable – in effect it would tumble out of the sky.
Landing safely after an engine failure first and foremast requires the pilot to realise that the engine has stopped – a problem for army pilots who wear large helmets to prevent, amongst other things, their hearing becoming damaged by engine noise. In the early years of the Scout there was a design fault which actually led to the accidental switching off of the aircraft engine, and as a result at least four aircraft crashed, with the loss of life. Someone, in their wisdom, had designed a heating control lever which was identical to the lever which switched off the delivery of fuel to the engine, and to make it even more likely that this could cause an accident, the identical levers were placed next to each other in the same operating plane, offering the potential for the fuel supply to be switched off when the pilot was trying to change the cabin air temperature.
EOLs needed to be done into the wind, or at least very close to this direction. Unlike the huge field which was used during training in the UK, which allowed EOLs into whichever direction the wind was coming from, the single strip used in Hong Kong was twenty-five metres wide, which dictated that practice EOLs could only be done in two directions. Each squadron had a qualified handling instructor (QHI), and every month or so each pilot would fly with the instructor to practise how to handle the aircraft in an emergency. Our QHI was very experienced and had been a former display pilot and on one of my flights, on a particularly windy day, we took the Scout up high above the airfield to practise an EOL. There had been some doubts about whether or not the wind that day was within limits for EOLs but the Squadron QHI was always the captain of the aircraft when another pilot flew with him. The first 2,490 metres of the descent from 2,500 metres were straightforward: I simply glided the helicopter down and lined it up with the grass strip running along the side of the runway. All I had to do then was flare the aircraft by lifting the nose, which increased the rotor revolutions, then put the aircraft horizontal, and pull the collective lever to apply some lift as we touched the ground to run along the grass to a stop. What actually happened was that, as a result of the wind blowing strongly from the side of the aircraft rather from the front where it should have been, my flare had little effect meaning we virtually fell through the last ten metres. At the same time the wind had lifted one side of the rotor disc which meant there was now a high point and a low point to the revolving blades and the low point corresponded to the position of the tail of the helicopter, which the blades duly sheared off. Bizarrely, because we were wearing the noise-protecting helmets, we heard very little of what must have been, from the outside, a very loud noise, and the QHI said over the aircraft intercom that we should flare a little later next time. Still not realising that anything was amiss, we started to wind up the throttle which did lead to some strange noises, while at the same time several people were running towards us waving their arms.
We got out of the helicopter to find the tail was hanging limply from the main part of the fuselage and was almost split in half, while the drive shaft which sat along the top of the tail had been flung some 200 metres from what was now a very sorry-looking helicopter. It cost £250,000 to repair the aircraft, which was a lot in those days, and EOLs were subsequently banned, much to the joy of my fellow pilots who bought me several drinks as a result.
I loved flying and felt that is was the best job in the army, but I didn’t want to do it forever and I returned to the Gurkhas after four very enjoyable years spent as a helicopter pilot, mostly flying in Hong Kong during which time my third child Nicole entered the world.
I did manage to fit in some adventure during my time as a pilot before my return to the Gurkhas and I led an expedition into the jungle in Borneo to find the wreckage of a Belvedere helicopter which had crashed in the 5th Division of Sarawak on 4 May 1963. The aircraft was carrying drums of a particularly volatile fuel and all the RAF crew and the passengers, which included three SAS officers and an SAS trooper and the MI6 head of station, were killed in the crash. The crash site was particularly difficult to reach after a long trek through the jungle. I, along with two Gurkhas and a local Murut guide, located the site and a memorial which had not been visited for almost twenty years.
Although Scouts were used in the Falklands campaign in 1982, the pilots were from UK-based squadrons, much to the disappointment of those of us who flew in Hong Kong at the time. Instead I found myself leading a group of Gurkhas and aircrew to climb in Japan, on an expedition which had been set up by Peter Boardman the previous year. While I was in Hong Kong, Peter occasionally passed through with mountaineering expeditions and we always met up for a drink. I also arranged on one occasion for a flight for Peter, Joe Tasker, Chris Bonington and Al Rouse to view the Hong Kong border with China.
Just before we left for Japan, Peter again passed through Hong Kong and I was invited to join him at a drinks party organised by Jardine Matheson, their Hong Kong sponsors. For some reason Peter and I decided to demolish a bottle of Drambuie as we sat in a corner catching up on life. Peter was going to attempt the unclimbed north-east ridge of Everest, together with Joe Tasker, Dick Renshaw and Chris Bonington, supported by Doctor Charles Clarke and my good friend Adrian Gordon, who was an ex-Gurkha officer.
Peter seemed his normal happy self and as always he gave a clear analysis of what lay ahead. He also talked about Hilary, who he had married two years before, and it was obvious that he had found the perfect partner who could also join him on his adventures around the world. It was, therefore, very strange for Peter to tell me that he thought he would die on the expedition. My emotions had been dulled by too much Drambuie and I mumbled some inappropriate response. Peter was thirty-one years old and was established as one of the great mountaineers of his generation, climbing routes that others could only dream of.
Pete and the team went to Everest and we went to Japan, where we immediately ran into problems. I had arranged the expedition months before and certainly well before General Galtieri invaded the Falklands, but the Japanese Press quickly found out we had arrived. The next day the headlines read, ‘Gurkhas use Japan to train for Falklands War’, and this news featured prominently across the Japanese media. By this time we were en route to the mountains and when I got there I had a message to immediately phone the British ambassador in Tokyo. While I was talking to the ambassador, who fortunately had a very pragmatic approach to events and told me just to get on with the climbing we planned to do, helicopters were landing outside the mountain hut delivering members of the Japanese media. Unbeknown to me the Japanese sympathised with the Argentinians because the Soviet Union had annexed the Kuril Islands from Japan in the later stages of World War Two.
We did what the ambassador advised and got on with the expedition. I split the group into three smaller climbing parties and we rotated through a series of rock and snow routes. On the second day I led my group on a challenging snow climb which took most of the day and proved to be more difficult than I expected. The following day another of our climbing parties tackled the same route and in front of them were two Japanese climbers. Halfway through the climb one of the Japanese climbers fell, followed very shortly after by the second climber, who landed on his partner. Our group immediately climbed to their rescue and on arrival at the accident site they found the first climber to fall was already dead and the second climber was in a bad way. The team lowered the injured climber to a point where a helicopter could transfer him to hospital and also brought down the body of the dead climber. All this was witnessed by the congregation of Japanese media who had come to get a very different story. Of course, the Japanese knew we hadn’t come to Japan to train for the Falklands and they were human enough to appreciate that a life had been saved and a body honoured. Our status changed from villains to welcome guests.
Most of the Press flew back to Tokyo, but one enterprising television channel decided to recoup some of their expenditure by making a film about Gurkhas visiting Japan. I was asked by the film crew if the Gurkhas would dance for them, to which I replied that this could only be done if we had some alcohol to drink – the price of alcohol in a Japanese mountain hut would make a millionaire wince. But my ruse worked and enough alcohol was bought to create a very enjoyable party – and after a few drinks the Gurkhas wouldn’t stop dancing.
In the days of the British Raj, Indian Army officers, including those who served with the Gurkhas, were sent home to Britain every few years for six months’ leave; primarily to find a wife. This wonderful tradition still continued into the 1980s, whether an officer was married or not, and in 1982 I ended my time as an army pilot with a long period of leave back in England with my family.