The great day dawned.
We stopped shore leave at 0700 this morning, and were working right up to the very last minute, embarking stores and other bits and pieces. The shore telephone lines were disconnected, the gangways were removed and, promptly at 1100, we slipped out into the estuary, watched by a crowd of literally thousands. It was unkindly suggested that most of them were family or friends of the men serving on the Invincible, and were simply there to make sure we went, so that she could come back, but whatever the reason, we got a very good send-off indeed.
We were in Procedure Alpha, which is everyone up on deck (not me: people with sunglasses or tinted lenses like I wear were banned) along with the aircraft ranged accordingly. We had embarked one Sea Harrier this morning, but the others we were expecting couldn’t make it, due to poor visibility in the dockyard area, so the remaining aircraft embarked once we were well out of the harbour and heading south west.
As well as 814 NAS (nine anti-submarine Sea Kings) and 809 NAS (ten Sea Harriers), we now have 824 NAS ‘D’ Flight (Airborne Early Warning Sea Kings), and the latter squadron, assisted by all of the 814 aircraft , did a fly-past as they joined us. The AEW Sea King carries its radar in a sort of bulge effort on the side, looking not a million miles unlike a large knocker. The Captain obviously agreed, as he sent a message to the two aircraft as they joined, stating that they were the best pair of tits he’d seen in a long time. Not exactly in those words, but that was the sentiment he expressed.
A slight digression here. One of the problems about fighting a battle at sea is that the horizon is not all that far away, and because radar signals, broadly speaking, travel in straight lines, the distance at which you can see an enemy ship or aircraft is comparatively limited. Obviously the higher the aircraft is, the greater the distance at which you can see it. But in practical terms, and using very rough figures, the horizon is about 25 miles away, and anything small and low – like, for example, a fast patrol boat armed with anti-ship missiles – will not be detected until it’s at about that range.
And by that time, it might be too late, because most such missiles travel at supersonic speeds and might well not be detected by the ship’s radar until perhaps five or ten miles away, and a matter of mere seconds before impact.
In the old days of the real carriers, AEW Gannet aircraft were carried and would set up a radar screen some miles in front of the fleet and provide an over the horizon radar picture, by linking what their radars were seeing back to the ship. The AEW Sea King is, if you like, the modern version of that aircraft.
A slight digression, and a couple of mildly amusing stories about the Gannet. On all aircraft, the crew carry out a comprehensive series of checks to make sure that everything is working properly before take-off. One of the niggles in the old Gannet was that the pilot sat at the top of the aircraft, quite high up, with the officers who did all the work – the two radar operators – lurking inside the fuselage behind and below him. In the event of the intercom failing, communication between the pilot and the radar operators would be impossible. Apparently, one radar guy worked out a way around this and took to carrying a length of bamboo into the aircraft, equipped with a peg at one end. The idea was that a message could be written on a piece of paper, clipped to the bamboo with the peg and then the pilot could be jabbed with the length of wood, and read the message.
During tests before flight, on one occasion, the radar operator wrote ‘Testing, testing’ on a paper, clipped it to the bamboo and prodded the pilot sharply in the thigh with it. His reply, if he made one, is not recorded.
On another occasion, the old Ark Royal was involved in an exercise with the Americans as the enemy forces, which involved flying a Gannet well ahead of the British fleet to provide enhanced radar cover. This particular aircraft was flown by a notably crusty and very senior pilot, who refused to wear the conventional flying helmet and instead used a WW2 leather helmet, and who was also the possessor of a long and substantial beard. And, because his job was really remarkably boring, just flying the Gannet in a long racetrack pattern while the guys in the back did all the work, he spent most of his time in the cockpit reading a book and sucking on a curved pipe, which was obviously never lit, for safety reasons.
The American ships clearly detected the Gannet on radar and ordered a fighter aircraft to intercept the identified content. Some bright eyed and bushy tailed young American pilot duly pitched up alongside the Gannet in his fighter to attempt to identify it, and was almost immediately called by his controller back on the American carrier.
‘Can you identify the contact?’ the controller asked.
The American, in his high-tech jet surrounded by flatscreen displays and the very latest technology, peered out of his cockpit window and saw what looked like an obsolete aircraft, being flown very slowly by a man with a heavy beard, smoking a pipe, wearing a Second World War flying helmet and reading a book, and who was taking not the slightest notice of the intruder.
For a few seconds, he didn’t reply, and then, in response to another request from his controller, finally responded.
‘I don’t know for sure,’ he said, ‘but I think it might be God.’
Anyway, the AEW Sea King is a modern version of the venerable Gannet. In the inflatable dome is a Searchwater radar, and inside the helicopter is a radar display and data link facility. One slight oddity about the aircraft is that the dome has to be able to rotate from the operating position, when it points downwards, to the in-flight position, when it points backwards, simply because in the down position it extends well below the lowered undercarriage of the helicopter.
I’m told that the high-tech arm to which the dome is attached at one end, and which is secured to the helicopter at the other, is actually a length of gas pipe, because that was all the designers could come up with in the time they had available to develop the concept. If true, I suppose that’s quite a good example of British ingenuity, of simply getting the job done in the time available with whatever materials were to hand.
And there wasn’t that much time. I also gather that one of the two aircraft had carried out its first flight only nine days earlier, and first time a Navy crew had flown it was the previous Friday. The other helicopter had run to an even tighter schedule: it had completed its Acceptance Test Flight only 30 minutes before it embarked on the ship.
As long as they work, and as long as they can link their radar data to our displays in the operations room, they will provide the ship with an unrivalled radar picture. We will quite literally be able to see all aircraft and surface movements within a radius of perhaps five hundred miles in front of us. If this technology had been available when the initial operation to reclaim the Falkland Islands had been mounted, in all probability there would have been far fewer losses of ships and men.
You can say, and with a certain amount of truth, that it’s just another example of the woeful lack of preparedness of the Royal Navy to fight any kind of a conflict in a modern theatre. Anti-ship missiles and low-level strike aircraft are not new. They’ve been around, in one form or another, arguably since the First World War, though then, of course, the strike aircraft were slow biplanes and the missiles were torpedoes, but the concept is the same.
It’s a constant source of mystery to me why nobody employed as a Naval architect apparently ever stopped to wonder how a modern British warship would fare in real combat. Because if they’d spent even five minutes looking at possible scenarios, unless they were completely dead from the neck up – about which I’d like a second opinion – they must surely have realized that without either some form of AEW aircraft and Close-In Weapons Systems or, better still, both, our vessels were sitting ducks. As the Falklands conflict has sadly, but very comprehensively, proved.
I spent some time in the library again, continuing the sorting I had started while we were alongside in Portsmouth, and actually managed to get it finished, which pleased me. I was even more pleased when I found quite a reasonable collection of books on the shelves that I had been wanting to read for some time, and several of which are now lurking expectantly in my cabin.
The main events of the afternoon were two briefings which the team, as it were, gave to the newly-joined aircrew of 824 and 809 squadrons, and the highlight as far as I was concerned was when Commander (Air) stood up immediately after I had finished my spiel and calmly announced that they would have to stick rigidly to the briefed recovery speeds and headings, otherwise the Vulcan/Phalanx, without a trace of malice or anger, would simply shoot them out of the sky. That caused a certain amount of sucking-in of breath and anxious glances among the stovies. (Decode: stovies = fighter pilots).
The Captain went on the SRE (Ship’s Radio Equipment) this afternoon to at last explain to us what we are going to be up to down south.
Briefly, the plan is that we are going to relieve Invincible – no surprise there – and we will be on a direct transit to the Falklands Islands area, and though we will be passing close to several places, like Gibraltar, Dakar and the Canaries, as well as Ascension Island, we will almost certainly not get close enough to even see them, unless we have to land or collect stores. Once in the South Atlantic, we will take over the tasks for which Invincible was employed, which principally will involve providing air cover – air superiority, in fact – to forestall any further attempt by Argentina to regain control of the islands.
Then more relevant information followed. Work is proceeding as fast as it can in lengthening and strengthening the runway at Port Stanley, in order that Phantoms and Buccaneers can operate from it, and the best estimate to date is that this work will be complete by about the end of September. Theoretically, therefore, we will be off task by early October, with any luck, allowing time for suitable air defence aircraft to be flown out to the Falklands from Britain.
After that, it is apparently the intention that we will go and exercise with the US Navy for a week or so, and then, I’m delighted to say, go into somewhere like Mayport on the US eastern seaboard, for about a week to unwind. Then, we are hoping to visit somewhere else on the same coast, but further north (the Captain was a little coy about exactly where, and that was the best he was prepared to offer us), aiming to get back to Britain in the early part of December. Then, we will all be taking, as the Captain put it, some well-earned leave, before putting Illustrious into dock in January ‘so that they can finish building her’, so it looks as if we will not be going too far away from Portsmouth in the early months of 1983. More details will follow as we get them.
We were featured, albeit briefly, in the national news this evening, and I must say I thought we looked very pretty indeed, sailing out of Portsmouth harbour. As soon as we had left, we sent a signal to Invincible, saying simply ‘We’re on our way’.