CHRIS BURWELL
THE INTRODUCTION OF NIGHT OPERATIONS TO THE HARRIER FRONT LINE
I took over command of 1(Fighter) Squadron in April 1991. The squadron had recently converted to the Harrier GR5 and was planned to commence night operations in autumn of that year, on a two-winter front-line night trial, re-equipped with the eagerly anticipated night-capable GR7 variant. With three tours on the Harrier behind me, I was only too well aware of the demands of daylight single-seat offensive support operations – and now we were being asked to do this at night! Up until this time, Harriers and night flying had been very rare bed-fellows. I recalled a time in the Falkland Islands early in 1983 when ‘normality’ began to return to RAF Stanley and OC Supply Squadron put out a station order to the effect that stores exchanges and issues would only be available between the hours of 0900 and 1600. As Harrier flight commander I promptly put out an order saying that with immediate effect the Harrier Detachment would only be available for the air defence of the Falkland Islands between 0900 and 1600 hours and that outside these times the Phantom Detachment should be contacted for assistance. This was not far from the truth, of course, since our role in that theatre was limited to daylight hours only. But now the Harrier Force was going operational in the dark.
Although by this stage in my RAF career I had about 130 hours night flying, quite a lot for a Harrier pilot but much of it gained as a flying instructor, the rest of the squadron had much less night experience than me. In addition, from a personal perspective, I had now been away from flying for over five years on staff tours. So one concern was whether I would have the flying currency to lead the squadron into this task and another was whether we all had the experience and background to undertake the new role. But what did the task entail? And what experience and background did we need? My own first-hand experience was confined to one night trip in a Harrier T4 with Keith Grumbley when he was boss of the SAOEU; he had NVGs, I didn’t, and it was frankly pretty scary. But there was no doubt that the ground-breaking work undertaken by the SAOEU, much of it on the very demanding Nightrider, had provided a sound experiential basis for us to introduce night operations to the front line and a firm belief that a Harrier day-combat-ready pilot should be able to cope with the demands of this new role.
In the event, due to delays with the introduction of the GR7, the night programme was delayed for a year and it was not until September 1992 that the squadron undertook the first night sorties. Even then, although the NVG-compatible cockpit lighting was ready, the goggle ejection system11 was not, and we commenced night operations without the benefit of NVGs. By this time I had acquired an OC Night – Mike Harwood – from the SAOEU, who was experienced in NVG/FLIR operations and who would be key to converting the squadron to night operations over the coming two night seasons. Since none of us apart from Mike had any experience of NVG/FLIR, it was incumbent on me as the squadron commander to be at the forefront of whatever we were doing. Whilst Mike had devised a night-combat-ready work-up syllabus, I would have to ensure that I was happy with what we were asking the pilots to do and put a stop to anything I was uncertain about. I chose Rob Adlam, my squadron QWI, an experienced and very capable Harrier operator, as the man to join me in stepping out into dark and unknown territory and to help me decide what was safe. Without the NVG clearance, Mike’s view was that we would benefit from flying without the goggles (using the naked eye and FLIR only) as this would help build our confidence. The early sorties achieved this although, at times, they could be somewhat exciting. Rob and I did quite a lot of night close formation and although the exterior night formation panels on the aircraft were excellent, without NVGs it was very difficult to assess how close you were to the other aircraft. I remember one night Rob calmly asking me to ease out as I had settled in too close to his aircraft without realising it – he could feel me interfering with the airflow over his aircraft. Trust was certainly required. 150 ft night bombing at Tain, rejoins into close formation and night tanking all had their moments as well. We quickly realised that we were all learning things by experience and, at times, making mistakes that we might not want to own up to. So we introduced a ‘lessons learnt’/honesty book in which all pilots could put down anything that they thought might be of use to the rest of the team; entries were unattributable and hugely valuable.
It was a great source of comfort to me that I had one pilot who had a good amount of experience of EO operations; I also knew that Mike had an excellent reputation from his time with the SAOEU. However, this did not assuage my concern that, as squadron commander, I was responsible for the two-year trial and that no-one above me in the command chain had any appreciation of what we would be doing. It was a privileged position to be in and I was very grateful for the trust placed in me by the AOC 1 Group, his staff and both my station commanders over this period; they allowed us to get on with the job without any undue interference. I remember Group Captain Syd Morris saying that he always knew when we were getting towards the end of a night-training period because I would start getting tetchy. It wasn’t a complaint; just a statement of fact that I, and the rest of the squadron pilots, would get noticeably tired after two-three weeks of continuous night operations.
In November 1992 we got the NVG clearance and began the night work-up properly. By this time it had become apparent that the aircraft modification programme for the blow-off system was going to be protracted which would limit the pilot conversion rate; this presented a new challenge since all the pilots were desperate to be at the cutting edge of bringing night operations into front-line service. Reluctantly, Mike and myself agreed that we would have to split the squadron into three groups of pilots: the A team who would get priority for night assets this first winter; the B team who would convert at a slower rate; and the non-combat-ready pilots who would not commence night operations until they were day combat ready, when they would join the B team. The exec, Ashley Stevenson, took over leadership of the B team. Unfortunately, but quite understandably, the B team always felt like second-class citizens. I was acutely aware of this and had trouble addressing it to their satisfaction. However, it says much for the commitment and engagement of the pilots on the squadron that this was how they felt. With the squadron operating a day team and a night team during our two or three-week night phases, just carrying out routine but important tasks like execs’ meetings could prove difficult. At one point, it had become so difficult to get the flight commanders and SEngO together that I said we would have to meet after night flying one night; and this we did, starting a meeting at 0030 hours in the boss’s office with a beer. In addition, with a pilot complement of just sixteen, all the execs (including the boss) took their turn as duty authorising officer, doubling up as duty pilot in the tower once the last night wave had been despatched.
Late in 1992 we were fully into night operations with Mike selecting the weeks we flew nights depending on the phases of the moon i.e. the light available, initially flying on well-lit nights but later on choosing nights with no moon at all so that we were using 2 millilux12 from the stars at best to find our way around at 250 ft. During night-flying weeks, the squadron and the station had to adjust to us starting flying in the early afternoon and continuing through until around 2300 hours when the night low-level flying system closed. I was very fortunate to have those understanding and supportive station commanders throughout this period. Besides reorganising the station’s support to meet our requirements, they also agreed to keep the bar open late for us so we could unwind after flying. It was not unusual for pilots to find it difficult to sleep after night operations because of the level of adrenalin in the body; unsurprisingly perhaps, we found that a beer or two with the other night fliers was a good way to wind down.
We had some visitors to the squadron to see what we were doing. I took a film crew from ITV to the ATC tower to ‘watch’ a pair of aircraft departing on a night sortie. They were somewhat surprised as we drove to the tower when I explained that I had twelve £14m Harrier GR7s on my squadron, 130 personnel and the task of introducing night operations to the Harrier Force yet my squadron commander’s car, which they were travelling in, was so unroadworthy that it was not allowed off-base. In the tower we could hear the engines start and listened to the leader call for taxi clearance. We then went out onto the balcony to look across a completely black airfield (no light from the squadron apron either as the ground crew had, as always, despatched the aircraft in black-out conditions) and saw just two red wing lights accelerate rapidly across the unlit airfield, lift off and depart at low level towards the west; and that was it. We also had a visit from a very senior RAF officer from the MoD who came to find out what we were doing. Unfortunately he impressed by interrupting the two ex-Tornado Gulf War pilots, who were debriefing their mission for his benefit, to complain that they were not wearing the aircrew watches which he had fought a major battle in the MoD to acquire. My pilots wrapped up the debrief very quickly after that somewhat misplaced interjection.
Whilst the focus of what was happening on the squadron was decidedly on the air operations, it should also be remembered that the advent of night operations meant a huge change for the ground crew as well. Over the preceding year, the squadron had been busy relearning off-base deployment skills, culminating in a two-week deployed Maxeval13 to a woodland site on the north side of the (at the time) disused airfield at Kemble. The two training exercises in Vigo Wood at Wittering and the deployment to Kemble had enabled the squadron to come together as a team and this stood us in good stead as we moved into a new phase in the squadron’s development. In between night seasons, the squadron also deployed to Incirlik, Turkey, on Op Warden carrying out reconnaissance missions into northern Iraq in the aftermath of the First Gulf War. With Peter Coyle, followed by Peter Ewen as SEngO, and ‘Charlie’ Chaplin as squadron warrant officer, everything that we asked of the ground crew was done without a quibble. Despatching the aircraft from a fully dark apron became routine and this continued whenever possible on deployed operations as well. It was probably just as well that the Health & Safety at Work representative tended not to come out at night.
Towards the end of the first night season, we deployed to Leuchars in February 1993 to carry out night operations in the Highlands including dropping 1,000-lb high explosive bombs on Garvie Island off Cape Wrath. Late one afternoon, some Tornado F3 crews came into the planning room and asked if we were planning our low level for the next day but thought we were joking when we said we were going to fly the route that night in the dark. I recall one particular mission on that detachment when I was flying as number two to Chris ‘Snorts’ Norton, one of the most capable first tourists in the Harrier Force at the time. Encountering some decidedly poor weather, I eventually gave up the struggle to keep with him in fighting wing14 as we went through rain and snow showers in some demanding terrain and I pulled up above cloud. A quick exchange on the radio and we had agreed a rendezvous en route/on time with Snorts taking the north side of a valley whilst I let down through gaps in 5 octas15 of cloud cover on the south side of the valley. The GPS/INS16, navigational display, software and NVG/FLIR combination in the GR7 made such a task reasonably straightforward. At the debrief I asked Snorts how he had managed to remain at low level when I had pulled out? His answer was that as the NVG performance reduced, you could get more texture from (i.e. visibility of) the terrain by flying lower. I could appreciate that he was technically correct, but we all had to decide where our own personal levels of ability, comfort and safety lay.
A couple of months later the squadron deployed to the USMC base at Yuma to undertake night operations in the desert (very low or nil cultural lighting/poor NVG – dry air/excellent FLIR) and at the end of the second night season, we carried out night operations out of Bardufoss in northern Norway in March (some good cultural lighting with the Northern Lights and white snow-covered ground – moist air/limited FLIR). It was during this exercise that Gerry Humphreys and I undertook some of the first night close air support profiles as a pair, inputting the FAC brief direct into the GR7 through the upfront controller as writing the brief down in the cockpit at night was a non-starter! Towards the end of the Bardufoss detachment we were hosting a cocktail party for our Norwegian hosts which I required all officers to attend. Mike Harwood insisted that that night was the last opportunity in the season for Ian MacDonald, the next OC Night, to get night-combat ready. I agreed that they could fly the mission provided they overflew the officers’ mess at exactly 2000 hours at 250 ft as part of Ian’s combat-ready check. I started my words of thanks to our hosts at 1957 and at 1959:30, after a timing nod from Gerry Humphreys, made our apologies for the two missing officers – “oh, here they come now!” – right on cue. The head-up display video was impressive and Ian passed his combat-ready check. In Norway we flew our first night three-ship and on return to Wittering, the last night trip of the season, and my last ever Harrier flight, was the first night four-ship. The next day I handed over command of the squadron to David Walker who would shortly lead the squadron into night operations for real in Bosnia.
Looking back, those two-night seasons were amazing – an exciting, challenging yet hugely rewarding eighteen-month period. We had progressed from a bunch of novices that knew nothing about offensive night operations to a team that could fly tactically at night with up to four aircraft, in different EO conditions, evade an aggressive air threat, locate a target and deliver weapons with a high level of precision. But what of the risks? I believe that by acknowledging from the outset that what we were about to undertake was inherently risky, we had already gone a long way to reducing the risk. In addition, by being open and honest when we could, using the honesty book when we couldn’t, and carrying out extended debriefs in the bar into the small hours of the morning when necessary, we shared our experiences for the benefit of all. We had a huge respect for the role we were trying to get to grips with and this, as much as anything else, helped keep us safe. Tragically, we did lose a squadron pilot during this period, but not at night. We had asked for the USMC exchange post to be transferred from IV(AC) Squadron for a tour so that we could have an experienced AV-8B night operator and benefit from the USMC’s night experience. Very sadly, Captain Brenden Hearney was killed when he flew into the ground on a low-level training exercise whilst he was attached to 233 OCU in January 1994.
There will not be a pilot who flew with the squadron over the two-night seasons that did not have ‘moments’ and, in truth, we were fortunate that none of them became more than that. I will end by sharing two of mine, which typify the pitfalls and risks:
• Rejoining the circuit at Yuma, as leader with my number two in fighting wing. The airfield is fully lit so we have removed our NVGs17 and my number two is now following my tail light and using air-to-air TACAN to maintain separation from me. I decide that I am too close to the airfield so I turn left by about 40° to give us some more separation from the runway before starting a turn back towards the airfield. Shortly after rolling out of the turn there is an incredibly loud roar as my number two flies right over the top of my aircraft, missing me by a matter of feet. He had not detected my turn and we were only saved from a mid-air collision by his religiously sticking to always flying higher than his leader in fighting wing when close to the ground.
• A singleton low-level night-navigation exercise. I coast out from the Lake District heading west over a very dark sea climbing to 1,500 ft. There is virtually no goggle performance and little on the FLIR. I start my turn back to coast in again and begin a gentle descent on instruments so that I will be around 500 ft crossing the coast. The trip has gone well and I am feeling on top of things, so when I realise I have to do something in the cockpit I start to do it. A small voice in the back of my mind is telling me that this is not a good time but I assure myself it will only take a moment. Before I know it, the radio altimeter low-altitude warner is going (225 ft) and I am rolling wings level, pulling hard back on the stick and seeing 180 ft on the altimeter. A salutary reminder – and I sadly needed one – that there is no room for complacency or over-confidence in single-seat, night, low-level operations.
We shared an amazing experience on 1(Fighter) Squadron over that eighteen-month period. The most gratifying part was that the squadron’s two-season night trial, built upon the excellent work of the SAOEU, provided a sound basis for night operations to be adopted by the other squadrons; and that night EO operations were used in anger in a number of operational theatres by the Harrier Force, from 1994 until the demise of the UK Harrier in 2010.