Another 0200 start, though when I got to the Ops Room it became clear that there was going to be very little for me to do, as we were operating a radar silence policy, and without radar it is quite difficult to give any sort of control to aircraft. They were engaged on a night encounter exercise, with Amazon acting as the enemy. The idea was that Amazon would try to find us (not easy, as we were not radiating with radar and nor was she, for the same reason that it gives your position away) while our helicopters tried to find her. In fact, our aircraft had detected her within the first ten minutes of the exercise, which started at 2000, but they still plodded on until 0500, when it all wound up and I went to bed.
I took over as Air Officer of the Day at 0900, despite being dead to the world at the material time. It was a very quiet duty: my only task, apart from doing my evening rounds as usual, was to man Flyco for a firing of the GPMGs (General Purpose Machine Guns) and the 20mm BMARC anti-aircraft guns at flare targets, which simply consisted of sitting there and making sure there were no aircraft in the way when they wanted to fire. Bearing in mind that there was no flying, this task was not unduly onerous, and it did offer a grandstand view of the proceedings.
I watched the afternoon ITV film – ‘Loving couples’, which was most amusing and very entertaining, dealing with the old eternal triangle, though in this case it was more a case of the eternal square, as each husband was playing around with the other husband’s wife, if you see what I mean. As flying had finished in the early evening, I also watched the evening Wardroom film, which was ‘Going South’. Again.