CHAPTER TWELVE

A Real Man’s Aeroplane

Esmé and the girls had set up home in Belfast after leaving Aden and I went to join them for another post-overseas spell of leave. Belfast at the time was a relative haven of tranquillity and it was a pleasure once again to be able to wander about without worrying about people trying to shoot or hurl hand grenades as one passed by; a bit ironic to think how desperately all that changed less than two years later.

At the end of my leave I set off for RAF Manby in Norfolk to join a Jet Refresher Course, a thirty-hour burst of all the usual training exercises conducted on what had by now become the RAF’s basic trainer, the Jet Provost. The Refresher Flying Scheme had been introduced in the late 1950s when it was decided that pilots in staff jobs should no longer be required to try to keep in flying practice. Hitherto, keeping in practice had been the essential condition for retaining flying pay, itself a useful slice of the aircrew wage package. Providing the facilities to enable people in ground jobs to keep flying was expensive, and too many staff officers, unable or unwilling to get airborne sufficiently frequently to be safe in the jet era, had been having silly accidents and now and again producing the odd fatality. It was a blow to those who liked to escape from their office-desks to enjoy a burst above the clouds but, in the postwar era of cuts and modernisation, the flying facilities had to go.

I am sure that many pilots enjoyed the shortened version of the basic flying course that they got at Manby. For those whose career paths had taken them onto aircraft designed for straight and level work there would certainly have been novelty and fun in getting their hands on a fully aerobatic machine and tossing it about the sky. However, after thirty hours on the Jet Provost, pleasurable as they were, I had had enough to persuade me that I was ready to move on. I was impatient for the next stage, and felt – as an experienced, and possibly just a little conceited, ex-Hunter pilot – that I should be able to tackle the Lightning without any more time spent on refresher flying. Luckily for my desire to move on to the Lightning, I had not also been scheduled to do a Hunter refresher course, the normal next stage in the ‘rehabilitation’ process for people destined for the fighter and ground-attack forces.

The Lightning course was a five month-long affair, conducted at No. 226 Operational Conversion Unit, RAF Coltishall, a few miles outside Norwich. I started it in late February 1968. On the first morning the CFI, Wing Commander George Black, welcomed us and, doubtless anxious to impress upon us the complexity of the aircraft and the need to apply ourselves assiduously to the task of learning to fly it effectively, began by saying: ‘The Lightning is a real man’s aeroplane; it’s not for boys.’ I thought this a bit over-dramatic but, as I was aware that George had been flying Lightnings almost from the moment they came into service,¹ I accepted that he knew what he was talking about.

We started the course with an intensive series of exercises in the simulator–a dramatically more sophisticated machine than even the latest Hunter simulator had been and therefore much more capable of teaching – and of overloading – the occupant. Then we moved to the flight line to get airborne in the Lightning T4. On my first trip my instructor, Flight Lieutenant Al Morgan, got me to do the cockpit checks, start up and taxi out. He then did the take-off. He lifted us off the ground at about 180 knots, held us level a few feet up, raised the undercarriage smartly as speed was rapidly building and, before we reached the end of the runway, snatched the T4 into a near vertical climb. This was the Lightning’s party piece, shown at Farnborough when the aircraft first entered service. It was very impressive for the spectator on the ground and doubly so for the newcomer in the cockpit. I knew then that I was going to like the aircraft.

After five dual sorties in the T4, averaging forty minutes each, and twelve sessions in the simulator, the course members went solo in the single-seat Mark 1A, and twenty-four general handling ‘Conversion Exercises’ later, started the radar phase of the course. The Mark 1A was a delight to fly. Its two Avon engines, each producing 14,400 lbs of static thrust in reheat, a total not far off its al-up weight, gave it impressive acceleration, climb, speed, and height capabilities – all dramatically greater than those of the Hunter, itself no mean performer. For an experienced pilot, learning to handle the aircraft posed few difficulties, but there is no doubt that it was a fairly sensational bit of machinery for youngsters coming straight off the training courses. They had to be the pick of the training crop, and were.²

Getting used to handling the aircraft’s radar, or to give it its full title, the airborne intercept radar (AI), was the real problem for the OCU students – and, according to Coltishall’s records, not least for ex-Hunter pilots. For anyone coming new to AI it was first necessary to develop some dexterity in manipulating the dinky little joystick by which the radar was controlled in the Lightning. This was mounted on the left-hand console, just aft of the throttles, and carried on it what seemed like a myriad of functional controls. The radar scanner, or aerial, swept automatically to 40 degrees either side of the centre-line, but the pilot had to move it manually to search in elevation; he could do this, using the joystick, to 30 degrees above the radar sight-line and 10 degrees below it. When he had found his target in elevation, and had adjusted the scanner with some precision to ‘highlight’ it, he was ready to select ‘acquisition mode’; in this, scanner sweep was reduced to 5 degrees either side of the target thus enhancing the likelihood of a ‘lock’. When ‘lock mode’ was selected the scanner centred on the target and held it in azimuth and elevation during any subsequent manoeuvres of the fighter and target relative to each other. Lock mode also enhanced the scanner’s ability to move in elevation to –30 degrees.

The real problem, however, both for newcomers to the role and for those interceptor pilots who had learned to scan the sky with the ‘Mark 1 eyeball’, was to interpret what the radar-scope³ was telling them and manoeuvre accordingly. A rubber ‘boot’ was fitted to the scope to enable the pilot to peer at the images on the screen in conditions of bright sunlight, rather as an old-time photographer might shield the back of his camera with a black cloth. It was impossible to peer in the rubber boot and simultaneously see anything else in or outside the cockpit and it was also necessary, therefore, to learn to alternate rapidly between the scope and the outside world and absorb fully the information available from both.

The OCU syllabus introduced the students progressively to canned ‘intercepts’ with targets crossing the intercepting aircraft’s heading at 90, 120, 150 degrees, and on a reciprocal of 180 degrees. The student had to assess the target’s heading from the behaviour of the blip on the scope and to manoeuvre to get himself into position for an ‘attack’ on it. At this stage of the course the intercepts were all subsonic ones, flown at Mach 0.9 at 36,000 feet. At this speed and height a comfortable 45 degrees of bank produced a radius of turn of 4 nm. If the student could organise his intercept to have the target crossing his nose on a 90-degree intercept at 4 nm he would achieve the OCU’s concept of the perfect subsonic PI, and with it, maximum brownie points.

To assess the target’s heading it was necessary to know what to look for in terms of a blip’s position on the scope on initial pick-up, and what its movement suggested. This had to be learned and practised and wasn’t immediately easy. And, there was a need to know what azimuth angles to go for at what ranges while manoeuvring if one was to achieve the ideal curve onto the target. These too had to be learned and committed to memory.

The longer the range of initial AI pick-up the easier it was to get the assessment right and still have time to manoeuvre correctly. For a perfect intercept on a 180, for example, the student needed to have time to turn to put the target blip at 40 degrees of azimuth by 12 nm range.⁴ A Canberra-sized target could be seen on the Lightning’s radar at up to 25 nm but it was seldom possible to see a fighter-sized target at more than 18 nm, which left very little time for interpretation and the necessary manoeuvring. Away from the academic approach of the OCU there were many adherents to the view that an entirely satisfactory intercept on a target of unknown heading could be made simply by ‘smashing it to the edge’, that is, turning to put the radar blip on the edge of the scope and then keeping it there until, at less than 40 degrees of turn to go, the image began to move into centre of the screen. Whatever approach was adopted, however, on closure with the target the pilot had to pull the ‘steering dot’, generated by the radar computer, into the centre of the scope to allow the missile heads to ‘acquire’.

Halfway through June, and with a total of forty hours on average on the T4 and Mark 1A, the course members moved on to the T5, the aircraft that was the twin-seat version of the Lightning Mark 3. There was also a new set of instructors to meet and get to know. The one I was allocated to, Flight Lieutenant ‘Oscar’ Wild, greeted me on our first meeting with what he probably meant as a joke, asking: ‘Are you going to try to be one of the few squadron leaders we let through this course?’ The thought of failure had not seriously crossed my mind but, as I was well aware that an embarrassingly high proportion of designated flight commanders had not made the grade on the Lightning course, I was not totally sold on either his sense of humour or his tact. I also hoped that his comment was not made as the result of something that had been written on my report from the T4 section of the course. I had been squeezing in about twenty-eight hours’ work each week on my law books on top of the work needed to get all the radar facts and figures into my head and I knew that I was coming perilously close to overloading myself, and was not always as sharp as I should have been. Whatever the reason, Oscar’s comments were unsettling. However, I simply grinned as he made them, and said nothing.

The trouble was, I was well and truly caught between the demands of the course and determination not to waste the time and effort I had already expended on the law degree. And I didn’t help myself, as far as my apparent commitment to the course was concerned, when I asked for a week off in June in the middle of our introduction to the T5 phase to go to London to sit my Final Part I Examination. Certainly, George Black was not impressed and suggested that I ought to sort out my priorities. His responsibility as CFI was to ensure that the OCU passed out properly trained students and he clearly didn’t feel that my absence at that point was compatible with that mandate. However, he didn’t refuse my request and I sat the examination. It was a considerable relief to get it out of the way, get back to Coltishall, be free of the crippling work-schedule that I had set myself, and be able to tackle the remainder of the course more readily, productively and enjoyably.

There were marked differences in the cockpit layout and instrumentation between the T4 and the T5, and some slight handling differences, but a week in the Mark 3 simulator and two familiarisation dual sorties were enough to take us into radar exercises on the new aircraft. There were differences too in the radar, brought about by the needs of the Red Top missile, which was now superseding the Firestreak, the standard fit on the earlier marks of Lightning.

It is an advantage if a missile can be fired pointing ahead of the target, particularly against fast ones. In simple terms this reduces the amount of manoeuvring required of it after launch. The Firestreak’s homing head had to ‘see’ the hot metal in a target’s jet pipe in order to acquire, and thus effectively had to be fired from pretty nearly astern of its target. The Red Top had a more sensitive homing head and could be ‘slaved’ to the radar sight-line by up to 30 degrees (in essence, launched pointing ahead of the target by up to this amount). Additionally, as the Red Top’s homing head was sufficiently sensitive to acquire on the reheat plume from an engine, it could not only be fired from decent angles off the rear but also head-on against anything flying at supersonic speeds.

The head-on attack against a supersonic target was exciting but, with the radar computer doing the work, relatively simple. Some Mark 1As had been fitted with a radar reflector, the ‘Luneberg’ lens, in place of the radar scanner. This gave a target response more like that of a large aircraft and thus enabled the Lightnings so fitted to simulate supersonic bomber-size targets. The intercepting pilot could lock-on early enough for the computer to do its stuff, getting him on a collision course in azimuth, but holding him initially level to allow him to accelerate to as high a speed as possible. At about 15 nm from the target the steering dot would give a command to generate lead on the target in elevation. At missile launch range a ‘breakaway cross’ was displayed and the pilot immediately initiated a hard roll and pull downwards to avoid hitting the target – a desirable miss at a closing speed around 2,000 knots.

My penultimate flight on the OCU was a final evaluation with George Black as my examiner. The target thrown at me was a ‘150’ passing behind – a bastard of a set-up. I made the interception, not neatly, but adequately and was about to head for home when the pilot who had been flying the target Lightning, Al Blackley, asked me to do a target run for him. Calculating that we would have just about enough fuel to allow this I complied, but his interception was more drawn out than I had anticipated and we started home at a lower fuel state than I should have allowed us to reach. However, as I knew exactly where we were, there was less than half cloud-cover, and the visibility below cloud was excellent I was not unduly concerned. I brought Al into battle formation, let down visually, ran into the airfield for a break and landed. During the debrief he complained that he had been unhappy with the amount of fuel he had for the descent and landing. George took me to task for not starting back to base with enough fuel to enable us to follow the standard Lightning practice of flying to a designated dive circle, and being directed down under radar to a point at a distance from the airfield suitable for either a GCA to landing or a radar-directed approach for a break in good weather. ‘That was punk,’ said George, ‘you might have got away with that sort of thing on the Hunter but there’s no place for it in the Lightning.’ Although I felt like protesting the validity of what I did in the prevailing weather conditions, I had to accept that he was entirely right to uphold the laid down procedures, and to emphasise the merit of erring on the side of prudence as far as fuel states were concerned.

That not very encouraging assessment of my performance notwithstanding, I passed the course, delighted and relieved to have done so. I had my last flight at Coltishall three days after my ride with George and, having said my farewells and packed my bags, I headed eagerly north for RAF Leuchars and No. 11 Squadron. I was looking forward to getting to grips with the single-seater interceptor role in an aeroplane that was both a delight to fly and a considerable advance over the Hunter in the role. The Lightning’s radar was a real plus; the TACAN it carried was a splendid bit of kit that gave both range and bearing from a ground beacon, and thus a ready ‘fix’ on position; its twin engines offered a level of redundancy that was well worth having over the cold North Sea; and its supersonic speed capability and its high service ceiling⁵ gave it a level of performance that was most certainly going to delight anyone who had flown in the air defence role in the pre-Lightning years. It could perhaps have been designed to carry a larger weapon load, and have a higher g limit and hence a decent combat manoeuvring capability.⁶ However, at this stage I simply wanted to fly the aircraft, not argue for perfection.