Having been ensconced in Frankfurt, Charlie and I became integral members of the crew after we’d all been billeted in one of the local hotels. Daily, depending on the nature of the mission, we’d be taken through security to whichever area we’d be flying sorties from.

One of our first tasks was viewing air-to-air refuelling from one of several USAF KC-10 and KC-135 ‘flying tankers’, which returned to Germany after a good day’s work. Though pretty mundane to those doing this sort of thing each day, each sortie had its moments, especially since we were usually operating almost within sight of what was then still the Yugoslavian coast.

It was a massive operation and in the final weeks there were almost 4, 500 personnel from a dozen NATO countries including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. At any one time there were more than 100 NATO aircraft in the air around us, the majority heading in from air bases in France, Germany, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom or from aircraft carriers in the Adriatic.

Sometimes, it would be only half a minute between one of the fighter jets having topped up and another arriving under our port or starboard wings to do the same. Since we were linked to the cockpit, we could listen to all transmissions taking place, including some fighters heading in to us with almost-empty fuel tanks and perhaps a minute of flying time left.

It sometimes needed a pretty deft hand at the controls to manoeuvre these fighters into position under the boom so that the receiving receptacle atop the fighter’s fuselage could marry with the fuel line.

Apart from the usual range of USAF F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s, and US Navy EA-6Bs, there were also French-built Mirage 2000 fighter and ground-attack aircraft, Super Etendard and Jaguar fighter-bombers as well as Tornados operating from a variety of air bases in Italy, including Istrana, Gioia de Colle, Practica di Mare and a host of others. Add to those tallies Dutch F-16s, British GR-7 Harriers as well as Sea Harriers, Spanish EF-18s, German Jaguars, Turkish F-16s and many others. All had their specific requirements and some were thirstier than others.

It was, as one British journalist described it after seeing this operation from up close, ‘a veritable air armada’. As he declared, it involved the most modern planes available from many like-minded nations and was something that modern-day Europe had never before experienced on this scale.

To us supernumeraries, it was interesting that the KC-10 from which we took many of our pictures is a military version of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and can carry an average payload of 40 tons. The KC135, used for in-flight refuelling, is a military version of the Boeing 707.

We were to discover afterwards that in an effort to improve the capabilities of the Air Mobility Command (AMC) tanker fleet, and to provide support to carrier-based aircraft, wing-mounted drogue refuelling pods were installed on a number of both KC-10s and KC135s. This was done largely to provide the extra margin of receiver safety necessary for over-water operations.

Everything linked to fuel delivery took place at the rear of the plane, where we would sit in comfortable seats and view the process from up close. We could wave at the pilots if we caught their eye, though most of the time they were preoccupied with monitoring a situation that could rapidly become critical if not properly handled.

Since some of this work took place over enemy territory, combat jets that came in never switched off their weapons systems during the refuelling process. Several times we’d watch a pilot break off contact and swerve away, sometimes violently. Their onboard radar had picked up hostile emissions from the ground.

As it was explained afterwards at a pre-flight briefing back at base, the Serbs needed to activate their ground control stations in order to ‘lock onto’ NATO aircraft flying above if they were to have any hope of firing their SAMs, of which they had an inordinate number. Almost all the missiles were of Soviet origin and quite a few were very sophisticated indeed. Occasionally, Coalition aircraft were fired at, but the moment the enemy activated its missile radar systems, all fighter planes in the vicinity would be alerted. Within moments, several clutches of missiles would be heading in towards the target on the ground.