EACH OF THEM armed with a pair of R.550 Magic heatseekers, DARDO (‘Dart’) Flight patrolled at 30,000 feet above the islands. From the cockpit of his Mirage IIIEA, Gustavo Garcia Cuerva called up the radar controllers on the ground at Puerto Argentino to ask about the condition of the runway at BAM Malvinas. The answer never came. Instead, he and his wingman, Carlos Perona, were told they had trade. Two bogeys 30 miles ahead. The northern Sea Harrier CAP.
‘Jettison the tanks,’ ordered Garcia Cuerva, as the two big 1,700-litre tanks tumbled away from beneath the wings of his Mirage. Twelve hundred yards to his left, Perona’s starboard drop tank stuck stubbornly beneath the wing. A hang-up. It would affect his jet’s performance but there was nothing he could do.
The bogeys, reported the controller, were coming straight at them, 15,000 feet below. As DARDO Flight dived towards the intercept, Perona kept his eyes fixed on the radar screen.
‘Looks as though they mean business this time,’ reported Glamorgan’s ‘D’ as he watched the two contacts accelerate towards the CAP pair under his control.
In the cockpits of the two 801 Squadron SHARs, the pilots stared intently at their radar screens. Steve Thomas, on his second mission of the day, saw them first. He hit transmit. ‘I’ve got them,’ he told his wingman, Flight Lieutenant Paul Barton, flying in battle formation a mile off his starboard wing, ‘ten degrees high at seventeen miles, ten degrees right.’ As he watched the two glowing green contacts track down his radar screen towards them he called ‘Judy!’ to assume control of the intercept from Glamorgan. ‘Fifteen miles. I’m going head-on. You take it round the back.’
The two formations of fighters closed on each other at near 1,000mph.
Barton advanced the throttle to the stops and felt the Sea Harrier surge forward. As he carved into a turn to starboard, he lowered the nose a touch to help boost his acceleration to combat speed. As they executed the Hook, both pilots armed their weapons.
‘Ten miles,’ reported the Puerto Argentino controller.
Failing to pick them up with his radar, Carlos Perona looked up and out of the Mirage’s cockpit to make a visual search. He was immediately rewarded. The dark grey of the Sea Harrier’s warpaint stood out like a sore thumb against the white cotton-wool cloud, 6 or 7 miles ahead and below. But he could only make out one of them. He knew that, like his own squadron, the British CAPs hunted in pairs. He strained to catch sight of the Sea Harrier’s wingman without success. Unable to establish visual contact with a second jet, Perona had no choice but to focus on the machine he could see. He kept it in his sights as he pushed the throttle lever all the way forward with his gloved left hand. The rpm needle began to arc around the dial as the Atar engine spooled up. He needed to gain speed and height to try to take advantage of his jet’s superior performance. But as soon as he pulled the Mirage into a steep climb it was clear that the big fuel tank still hanging off his wing was holding him back.
The British jet shouldn’t have been able to stay with him, but Perona was surprised and alarmed to discover it was keeping pace. Even outclimbing him.
While Barton racked round from the right to try to tuck himself in behind the Mirage flight, Thomas hoped for a head-on shot at the Mirage pair. But, as he ran in from the east, the closing Argentine jets had the afternoon sun behind them. Against that background, the Nine Lima’s sensitive seeker head was unable to pick up the heat from the Atar engine. And without the distinctive electronic growl of the Sidewinder’s acquisition tone buzzing in his ears, he knew his missiles hadn’t locked on to their target. He pulled back on the stick and rolled into a climbing turn towards the soaring Mirage. The anti-g suit inflated around his legs and waist as he was pressed deep into his seat. Tightening the turn, Thomas hauled the nose round as his jet swept upwards on a collision course.
Then they flashed across each other, SHAR over Mirage, dissecting the sky. Barely 100 feet separated them.
Thomas craned his neck over his shoulder to keep visual on the Argentine delta. Running on adrenalin, it was as if he could make out every rivet and curve of the enemy jet’s camouflage. He’d seen the white helmet of his opponent in the cockpit as the Mirage streaked past beneath him. And then, as he held the turn to starboard, Thomas swept over the path of his own wingman as he dropped unseen into the Mirage’s six o’clock.
Barton’s ADEN guns spat 30mm cannon shells.
He’d loosed off a few rounds as the Mirage streaked across his gunsight, but he knew he’d never had a proper lead on him. But now, as the two Mirages continued their climbing turn to port, Barton rolled on to the Flight Leader’s tail. The pilot seemed preoccupied with the hunt for Thomas, oblivious to the Sea Harrier 500 yards behind him.
If he’d seen me, Barton thought, any red-blooded fighter pilot would have broken hard. But there was nothing to complicate the British pilot’s attack. He had to act fast, though.
Bleeding off speed as the SHAR juddered through a fierce 6g turn, he was already starting to fall behind the faster Argentine jet as it soared skyward. Now out of gun range, he switched to missiles, keeping visual on the Mirage through the top of his canopy. From behind and beneath, the distinctive delta shape was framed against the cold winter sky, its jetpipe presenting itself like a flare. The Sidewinder’s acquisition tone growled in his ears. Through the head-up display in front of him, a hollow X was projected over the turning Mirage. He pressed the ‘ACCEPT’ button on the control column to lock the missile to the target. The growl changed to an insistent chirping at the same time as a hollow diamond boxed his view of the Mirage through the HUD. The Nine Lima was locked and tracking. Barton flipped up the safety catch with his right thumb and pickled the fire button.
‘Fox Two,’ he reported as the Sidewinder raced off the rail trailing an angry white rocket plume in its wake.
‘Break!’ called his wingman, but Garcia Cuerva’s warning came too late. A moment later Perona felt a thump as the Mirage bunted forward from the impact, shedding debris behind. Perona lost control immediately as the jet, clean aerodynamics shredded, began to shake. At the right of the instrument panel, the engine gauges kicked as a bank of warning lights lit up to a devastating soundtrack of fire, hydraulic and system alarms. He shut down the engine. There was no hope of saving the aircraft, but as damaged as she was, she was still flying. He might save himself, but only if his ruined aeroplane made landfall. Because he’d opted not to wear a cumbersome immersion suit, he’d be unlikely to survive more than three or four minutes in the chill South Atlantic. Thirty miles ahead he could see salvation. He hit the RT button.
‘Paco,’ he called, ‘I’m looking at a coast. I’m going to try to get there to eject.’
‘Be lucky, asshole,’ came the encouraging reply from Garcia Cuerva, ‘eject safely.’
The stricken Mirage, unbalanced by the single drop tank still hanging off its starboard wing, began to roll uncontrollably. At 15,000 feet as he coasted over Pebble Island, Perona pulled the ejection handle.
Out to his right, Steve Thomas had seen Barton’s missile hit home, the rear of the Mirage disintegrating from inside a violent yellow fireball.
‘Splash One, Mirage,’ confirmed Barton.
But Thomas was already on the trail of the Argentine Flight Leader. After witnessing the destruction of his wingman, the surviving enemy jet pulled into a steep, spiralling turn towards the cloud cover 8,000 feet below. Thomas rolled the SHAR on to its back and hauled down the nose into a vertical dive behind it. When the acquisition tone growled, he pressed ‘ACCEPT’ to lock on to the target. As the system began to chirrup, he fired, watching the Sidewinder streak after the evading Mirage. As the Argentine jet disappeared into the 4,000-foot cloud layer, the missile streaked in close behind it.
Thomas never saw either again. Now low on fuel, he and Barton climbed to medium altitude to return to Invincible. Uncertain of whether or not his Nine Lima had hit its target, Thomas would only claim the second Mirage as a ‘possible’.
If Garcia Cuerva had hoped luck was on Perona’s side, it had definitely deserted him. For while Garcia Cuerva’s Mirage had survived the initial attack by the Sea Harrier, its encounter with Steve Thomas had no less caused its destruction than if it had been shot from the sky. Initially there was confusion about what had happened, but after Perona, who survived his ejection and was picked up by an Argentine Army helicopter, had been medevacked back to Buenos Aires for treatment of injuries sustained during the ejection, Grupo 8’s Commanding Officer, Carlos Corino, revealed the truth. Or most of it.
Both Perona and his Flight Leader had been shot down, Corino told him. ‘Garcia Cuerva’s aircraft was badly damaged during the dogfight – fuel was streaming out so he couldn’t get back to the mainland. He diverted to land in the Malvinas, where his Mirage exploded on landing and killed him.’
What Corino couldn’t bring himself to admit was that, attempting an emergency landing on the damaged runway at BAM Malvinas, his pilot’s crippled jet had been finally brought down by Argentine anti-aircraft guns. Despite being warned about the incoming Mirage, an Army Oerlikon 35mm battery got spooked when Garcia Cuerva jettisoned his weapons in anticipation of a difficult landing, and opened fire. Garcia Cuerva had cried ‘They’re firing at me!’ over the radio before rolling away to the south and crashing in shallow water just off the coast.
DARDO Flight had been wiped out. The first air combat of the war had resulted in the loss of two of Grupo 8’s most capable Mirage IIIs. And there was worse news to come for the Fuerza Aérea Argentina.
A section of three Daggers from San Julián had got through at low level to inflict relatively minor damage on the destroyer HMS Glamorgan and frigates Alacrity and Arrow as they steamed close to Stanley shelling Argentine positions ashore. They just managed to escape the attention of a pair of Sea Harriers as they turned for home. Out of ammunition and low on fuel, the Daggers climbed to height as the SHARs slowly gained on them from the east. Once they’d reached cruising altitude and Mach 0.9, they knew the British fighters didn’t have the performance to close to within range of their Sidewinders.
But as they accelerated away to the west, another Grupo 6 Dagger, operating alone after his wingman suffered a technical failure, was vectored towards what was reported to be a single contact. But when the single glow on the screen of the Grupo 2 controller resolved into two bogeys, the Dagger’s pilot, Teniente José Ardiles, knew he was outnumbered and outgunned. He jettisoned his tanks and advanced the throttle to full power as he pulled into a hard climbing turn. But he was too late. The 800 Squadron CAP from HMS Hermes had him, the spear of flame from his engine’s reheat presenting an irresistible target to the Nine Lima. Caught near the limit of the Sidewinder’s range as he tried to escape to high altitude, Ardiles was killed in the fireball. He was the cousin of the Tottenham Hotspur star Ossie.
At dusk, a pair of 801 Squadron SHARs intercepted a flight of three Canberra bombers skimming in 50 feet above the waves 150 miles northwest of Stanley. Low on fuel, the Sea Harrier pilots had to break off their attack more quickly than they’d have liked, but not before they’d taken down one of the bombers with a Sidewinder. Neither of the remaining Canberras, nor those of another section of three bombers that followed them into the air at Trelew, got anywhere near their targets.
In the ‘Duty’ column of 801 Squadron’s Fair Flying Log, Thomas and Barton’s successful sortie was marked as a ‘Mirage Killer’. But while there had been kills for the Sea Harrier squadrons aboard both carriers, it had also been a frustrating and relentless day during which every pilot had flown at least twice. Their opponents’ apparently poor grasp of tactics was a surprise and a comfort, but there was concern in the 801 crewroom about the level of intensity so far. During the afternoon’s raids, three or four pairs of SHARs had all been separately engaged against scores of raiders. If it carries on like this, thought one of Sharkey Ward’s two Air Warfare Instructors, hardly any of us will get home. It was simply that the maths counted against them. If the Argentinians throw enough missiles at us, he thought, sooner or later some are going to hit.
The prospect of a bloody war of attrition may have hung over the crewroom but it was the price you paid, thought 801’s Senior Pilot, for getting to strut around in a tailored flying suit and wear a big watch.
After dark, a relieved JJ Black addressed his ship’s company. ‘The first day,’ he told them, ‘has been a success. The Sea Harriers have given an exemplary display and the scoreboard is in our favour.’ Invincible’s Captain allowed himself to enjoy a little more of the confidence he was projecting to his crew. But the damage sustained by Glamorgan, Alacrity and Arrow had shown that British ships were far from invulnerable to attack from the air.
Nor, so far, had there been any sign of Argentina’s own aircraft carrier, 25 de Mayo, and her potentially lethal complement of A-4 Skyhawks.