CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Balls! Keep Fighting

I drove up to Leuchars in my ex-Aden Fiat – its bodywork already rusting badly from its trip around the Cape of Good Hope as deck cargo. I knew nothing about my destination and wondered what to expect. After Newcastle the skies were leaden and, as I drove into Scotland, they took on a distinctly dark and drear look. My first impression of eastern Scotland was of coldness and greyness. And this was July! No. 11 Squadron’s Boss, Wing Commander David Blucke¹ was a little cool too in his welcome, so I had to assume that Coltishall had probably not exactly lauded me.

I had my first sortie on the squadron on 11 July – an initial check by the squadron QFI, John Sims – and was sent off immediately afterwards for my first ride in the Lightning Mark 6. This was essentially a Mark 3 with a 600-gallon ventral tank replacing the latter’s 250-gallon tank, an arrester hook, a slightly modified wing (the cambered wing), provision for carrying two 270-gallon over-wing jettisonable fuel tanks (for use in the ferry role) and a useful addition to its TACAN to enable aircraft so fitted to determine their range from each other.

As the squadron was holding the northern Quick Reaction Alert, or QRA as it was invariably referred to, which tied up two armed aircraft in a specially constructed alert shed at the end of the runway, and another as back-up, I didn’t get a great number of trips in July. Just nine hours on the Mark 6 – but enough to whet my appetite for the AWF role and, once I was reassured that the sun did occasionally shine over Scotland, for the location. Leuchars is on the coast, near St Andrews, in the middle of some delightful countryside and close enough to Dundee and, for that matter, to Edinburgh for the convenience of anyone with quasi-metropolitan tastes. The Station had, as I came to know later, a special atmosphere of its own, rather as Chivenor had; this was accorded by some to the fact that for most English personnel it was far enough from home to be almost an overseas posting, but that didn’t entirely explain the affection that people posted there developed for it. As my time on 11 Squadron lengthened I found a great number of things to like about Leuchars in particular and Scotland in general. But one thing Esmé and I never did get used to while I was on 11 Squadron was the chill of the northern climate – but this was possibly because the Married Quarter we were allocated was the coldest house we have ever lived in.

As I settled into the routine of training on the squadron I was intrigued to note how far the fighter world had come since my days on the Hunter in the air defence role. We had believed in our tactics and our ability to stop Soviet bombers if they had come, but we had been, in truth, woefully lacking in numbers and in the technical capabilities needed to have made success a sure bet. Now, although fighter numbers were down to sixty Lightnings and twelve Phantoms stretched along the east coast from Leuchars in the north to Wattisham in the south, capabilities had been greatly enhanced.

The role had changed too. The emphasis had shifted from pure air defence, held to be of prime importance for the protection of the V-force in its heyday. It was now given as ‘the prevention of reconnaissance, the investigation of unidentified aircraft movements, the deterrence and prevention of attempts to jam our radar system, and the supply of reinforcements for overseas bases and operations’.

For anyone who had flown PIs in the Hunter days, the AI could almost be taken to have made fighter controllers redundant – except, perhaps, for pointing fighters in the right direction at long range. But that would have been a facile judgement and we were well aware that there was more to the world of fighter controlling than simply setting up interceptions. The United Kingdom Air Defence Ground Environment, as the package comprising radars, underground bunkers, communications networks, and controllers was collectively labelled, had a wide range of responsibilities and values. The United Kingdom had become one of NATO’s four air defence regions in 1960 and as such the UKADGE shared information with NADGE (the NATO Ground Environment) and maintained a picture of aircraft movements from Murmansk southwards. It also liaised with civil air traffic systems, provided safety surveillance for activities such as air combat practices and air-to-air refuelling exercises, and generally kept a helpfully watchful eye on fighters allocated to a UKADGE radio frequency. Because we valued the controllers we were more than happy to give them, in their dark caverns, plenty of practice in setting up interceptions, and they were happy in turn to leave us to finish them off using AI.

From Leuchars we worked mostly with Buchan to the north of us, sometimes with Boulmer to the south, and occasionally with the reporting-post radars at Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides and at Saxa Vord on the northern tip of the Shetlands. And it was not just the old Hunter Mach 0.9 stuff at 40,000 feet. We practised against targets at all heights from 250 feet up to 50,000 feet plus, and at a variety of speeds up to and over Mach 1.5 – the speed that it was thought the most sophisticated Soviet supersonic bomber then in service could do (the TU-22 A or, in the NATO designation, the Blinder).

Getting to grips with the entire spectrum of activities and practices in the single-seat AWF role was going to take a little time. The OCU course had allocated only four trips in the dark, one dual and three solos, and now, on the squadron, virtually half the laid down training syllabus had to be done at night. There was a whole raft of new things with which to try to develop an easy familiarity. One of these, for example, was the technique for getting close enough to a target obscured by darkness – or by cloud – to see it and identify it, the ‘visident’ in air defence parlance. This required closure initially to close line astern of the target using the AI, first establishing the target’s height by using the scanner elevation reading to attain level flight behind it, and its speed by holding steady with it on the radar at about 1,000 yards until this had been assessed with some precision. Provided the target was not at low level, when a different technique had to be used, the next step was to drop a hundred feet below it and to close on it at a gentle overtaking speed. The radar would break lock at about 300 yards, but the slow steady closure that had been set up would get the interceptor close enough to find the target in all but the thickest cloud, or ‘skylight’ it against the stars on a dark but cloudless night. As pilots became comfortable with the technique, and had been assessed as competent at it, visidents were flown against practice targets at night with their lights switched off. A successful visident required a considerable degree of concentration, split between flying smoothly on instruments and peering in the radar-scope boot. A manoeuvring target complicated the process enormously as I discovered on one occasion as I closed on a mischievously crewed Russian Badger bomber in cloud.

At the beginning of August I was introduced to another advantage of the Lightning: its ability to take on fuel in the air.² One of the more experienced members of the squadron, Dave Eggleton, took me up in the T5 to introduce me to the tricks of this trade. Tanking was a splendid leap forward in the fighter business, making airborne readiness a realistic tactic where circumstances suggested it, and making the role of oversees reinforcement an entirely practicable proposition. The trick was to close on the tanker, as one would on any aircraft that one intended to formate on, holding steady by using it as the reference point, and giving just a fraction of attention to the refuelling basket. The latter, about three feet in diameter at its open end, was designed to guide the receiving aircraft’s probe – on the Lightning, a length of pipe extending from under the port wing to a few feet short of the aircraft’s nose – into the refuelling nozzle. Once contact was made it was necessary to move forward just enough to put a little pressure on the hose and ensure that the socket in the basket held the probe in a leak-proof lock. At the same time the refuelling pod automatically wound in any slack in the heavy hose to keep it from developing a refuelling probe-damaging ripple. This did not damp out all undulations, however, and even in smooth air the refuelling hose, and hence the basket, were seldom steady. If the pilot gave up concentrating on the tanker as the point of steadying reference, and tried to follow the movements of the basket while closing on it, he was lost. And if he was using a wing-pod hose, and allowed his aircraft to rise just a little above the level at which the basket was trailing he was likely to be seized by the turbulence coming off the tanker’s wing and hurled outward. To break from the basket he simply reduced power and slid gently backwards. At least that was the idea but it didn’t always work that way. David Blucke and his number two, Brian Fuller, found this out on one tanking sortie: after filling up they both started to slide back but the Boss’s probe-tip refused to disconnect and broke off, and Brian came away with the basket and about six feet of heavy hose still attached to his probe.

The tanker towline was normally flown on Lightning practice sorties around 30,000 feet, with height variations to avoid cloud. There was a whole raft of procedures, worked out by No. 1 Group, the parent body of the tanker force, with the good intention of keeping things simple and safe for the people they were serving. These ranged from a routine for ensuring a successful rendezvous to rules and techniques for joining a tanker and conducting business in radio silence. We accepted and followed No. 1 Group’s procedures but sometimes felt a touch of frustration when a particular tanker crew stuck unnecessarily rigidly to them, especially when a little flexibility and trust in our capabilities would have speeded things up. As far as the Lightning force was concerned, finding and closing on the tanker was very straightforward given that our AI could illuminate a Victor at 40 nm.

On my first solo-tanking trip my confidence that tanking was easy took a beating. I closed rapidly on the tanker using my radar. I curved in behind it, slowed almost to its speed, moved forward at walking pace to the basket, and then committed the cardinal error of trying to steer into it by fixing my gaze on it. I found out the hard way what Dave Eggleton had told me: the basket, undulating gently in the wash off the tanker’s wing, was an impossible thing to formate on. The harder I tried to stab it with my probe the more I got out of phase with its movements. Things just got worse – and I got a little desperate – with every failed attempt to engage and finally, short of fuel, I had to give up and head ignominiously back to base. As I entered the squadron operations room to sign in after the sortie I got, as I expected and deserved, a few smirks and a chorus of gibes about spending less than an hour in the air on a tanking trip.

In October I led six aircraft to Gutersloh for a fortnight to hold the RAF Germany ‘Battle Flight’ while the Lightning Mk 2As of the two squadrons based there were undergoing some essential modifications. At Leuchars, with long-range warning of intruders approaching UK airspace available from Norwegian, Icelandic and Danish radars, and closer in from Benbecula and Saxa Vord, we could almost have been home in bed and still got airborne in good time. As it was we held a ten minutes’ alert state – a belt and braces measure just in case something popped up closer than expected. We could strip off to some degree and sleep reasonably successfully at night in the accommodation provided next to the two armed aircraft in the ‘Q’ shed, and still get airborne within that time. In Germany, a five-minute state was held and this meant remaining fully kitted and dozing off only if one was pretty sure that one was going to be instantly clear-headed should a call come to scramble. The disadvantage of allowing oneself to fall asleep at Gutersloh was well illustrated the first night I held ‘Q’ there. I was torn out of a doze by the telephone jangling at the other side of the room to find the other pilot on standby with me sitting by it and staring at it as if he had never heard or seen a telephone before; dazed with sleep he was totally unable of answering it straight away.

Gutersloh was a whole new experience in a number of ways: being taken along the border ‘buffer zone’ by the radar people and being told that one was being shadowed by a Soviet fighter just across the divide; carrying out supersonic PIs overland seemingly without protest from the populace below; having a drink in the tower room in the Mess at Gutersloh that had often been patronised by Goering in bygone days when he felt the need to come and crack a joke or two with his Luftwaffe crews. And, silly as it may sound, it was good to be able to fly in standard flying overalls rather than the immersion suits that were the norm for our sorties from Leuchars for so much of the year.

The immersion suit had not changed since I first used it on 19 Squadron and, potential lifesaver as it was, it was unquestionably uncomfortable. The neck and wrists seals had to be irritatingly tight if they were to do their job properly, and the rubber boots, in which sweat always seemed to collect, were an essential part of the whole. That said, few people grumbled about it – or about the practices with dinghies and other bits of survival equipment that were conducted routinely and frequently on the squadrons. However, an experienced pilot who had come to us from 74 Squadron, now based in Singapore, sadly paid the price for taking neither the suit nor the requirements of survival in cold seas sufficiently seriously. I remember him gazing out of the window in a bored fashion during a session of ‘dry’ dinghy-drill in the crew-room just a couple of days before he had to eject, at night, because his aircraft was on fire. He lost his dinghy-pack on the way down because he had not attached it to his Mae West; he had not tightened the waist strap of the Mae West itself and, as a result, it rode up as he entered the water and did not keep his head clear as it should; he wasted time until his hands numbed, unnecessarily trying to get the survival beacon battery out of its housing in the Mae West rather than the beacon itself; and, because he had cut the rubber boots off his immersion suit trousers (so that he could wear his leather flying-boots instead) he had created a path for the icy water into the suit.³ He had gone down just off the coast and was being looked for very quickly both by rescue helicopters and by the local lifeboat. The sea was calm and visibility was good but, as his survival beacon had not been activated, he could not be homed onto and it was several hours before he was found. He had succumbed to hypothermia, lost consciousness and drowned long beforehand – and so totally unnecessarily.

Throughout November and December the squadron concentrated on air-to-air refuelling by day and by night, in preparation for a deployment to Singapore planned for January. There was an extra-heavy engineering task too, imposed primarily by the need to reorganise servicing schedules to get ten aircraft ready for the deployment. And there was also the task of fitting and testing the over-wing fuel tanks. Things were not helped by a Special Technical Instruction issued by Strike Command requiring engines to be changed on most of the aircraft and replaced by modified ones. All that notwithstanding, the normal spread of PIs was flown. And a NATO call-out that had us out of our beds at 0300 hours was taken in our stride, me flying an air-test at 0600 hours as part of the intense scramble to get six aircraft serviceable and armed in the required time. Call-outs had become more commonplace since my unhappy introduction to them at Chivenor, encouraged by a NATO-led determination to promote a high state of readiness, and a home-grown determination to do well in the operational readiness testing by NATO teams that was now an annual event, known colloquially as ‘Tacevals’. Ambitious squadron and Station commanders had of course quickly come to recognise the value of a good Taceval result as an essential element in the competition for advancement.

The trip to Singapore was to test the Lightning force’s ability to reinforce the Far East with minimum stops en route. In November the previous year the squadron had flown a two-aircraft endurance trial to find out if there were any problems in keeping the Lightning in the air to its original Release to Service limitation of eight hours. Dave Eggleton and Pete Collins had circled the United Kingdom, tanking periodically, for eight and a quarter hours. The amount of oxygen and engine oil consumed on this, and on other eight-hour flights subsequently carried out, showed that the aircraft could be cleared to cope with the two nine-hour hops to Singapore that the planners wanted for an operational deployment. As 11 Squadron would not be rushing out to counter any aggression, it was decided that we should do the trip to Tengah in three hops, via Muharraq on Bahrain island and Gan in the Maldives. Unfortunately, few countries were happy about refuelling operations overhead and we were thus going to be forced to follow a pretty tortuous route to begin with: Leuchars to Nice (with no refuelling over France), down the length of Italy just off the east coast, Malta, Cyprus, the CENTO route to Tehran, and then directly to Bahrain. The planning required for a Lightning squadron deployment to Singapore, and its cost, were well illustrated by the figures that emerged from the Air Refuelling Planning Cell at No. 1 Group: we would need a total of 228 refuelling contacts and the pre-deployment of about 400 – mainly Victor – air and ground crew.

Our parent body, No. 11 Group, wanted to make the trip ‘as testing as possible’ and to this end the first two pairs of Lightnings were scheduled for a take-off at night at forty-minute intervals. I led the second pair at 0140 hours from a crisply cold Leuchars into a beautifully clear star-filled night. My cockpit was a clutter of maps, booklets of flight and airfield data, a packet of absurdly neat bite-sized sandwiches designed to be popped into the mouth during brief removals of the oxygen mask, a pint-sized Tupperware container of orange juice plus straw and, most important of all, even if we didn’t know how the hell we were going to use them, given that we were well trussed up in our immersion suits for the first leg, a ‘Piddle-Pack’.

My number two, George Reynolds, and I rendezvoused with our first Victor tanker over Cambridge. This topped us up straight away and then transferred fuel to a second tanker designated to accompany us as far as Malta. We were, in fact, accompanied by tankers the whole way to Singapore, flying in formation with them, closely or loosely depending on cloud conditions, from time to time exchanging one tanker for another at pre-planned rendezvous points. The 1 Group policy of requiring deploying fighters to fly under the protective wing of a shepherding tanker brought the Lightnings the benefit of the Victor’s long-range radio communication facilities and its superior navigation gear, but there were penalties. No. 1 Group’s chosen speed for the accompanied transit, Mach 0.8, was on the slow side for the Lightning, particularly with over-wing tanks fitted, and the consequent slight loss of effectiveness of flying controls and engine response at the heights and weights experienced on the trip made flying in close formation for any length of time – and my number two and I were in dense turbulent cloud for two hours on the Gan to Tengah leg – very tedious indeed.

Additionally, on that leg our tanker took us up to 47,000 feet seeking sufficiently smooth conditions to enable us to get our probes into the baskets, using bursts of reheat to hold our wallowing beasts in contact when we finally got there. In similar circumstances, my fellow flight commander, Wally Hill, had the good sense to ask his tanker captain if he could go faster and found that the latter was happy to push the speed up to a very much more Lightning-friendly Mach 0.87. There were sections of the trip where we were quite definitely pushing our luck: on the leg to Gan, and again after Gan, there were two stretches where we were beyond any possible diversion unless we were completely fuelled up and, as a consequence, and to guard against failing to get a fill, we had to remain with the probe in the basket, essentially burning fuel directly from the Victor’s tanks.

Arriving in the circuit at Gan, and eager to get on the ground after nearly five hours in the cockpit on the leg from Bahrain, I was somewhat disturbed to find the starboard undercarriage failing to respond when I selected ‘down’. Normally a reassuring ‘clunk’ could be heard as the wheels locked down, quite apart from the indication given by the undercarriage lights in the cockpit, but I heard only one main wheel lock and I knew without having to look that I would have one main wheel green light and one red. The advice in Pilot’s Notes was that a landing should not be attempted in the Lightning unless both main wheels were locked down as it was suspected that the aircraft would cartwheel if one were not. While my number two landed I flew low and slow over the air traffic control tower for a check. This brought the information that the starboard wheel was out of its housing in the wing by several inches but that was all. I tried a further couple of selections up and down but without improving the situation. I could not see any logic in attempting to blow the undercarriage down using the emergency air bottle (charged at 1,000 psi) as there was nothing apparently wrong with the normal hydraulic system (charged at 3,000 psi), but I tried it anyway. The final, and I felt quite useless, piece of advice that I got from the laconic Lightning pilot pre-positioned in the tower at Gan to advise on emergencies was: ‘Eject over the lagoon, there are fewer sharks there.’ At this point I decided to ignore the 250-knot speed limit for flying with the undercarriage down, accelerated to 500 knots and, with a boot-full of rudder, skidded the aircraft away from the recalcitrant wheel. To my great relief this did the trick: the force of the airflow caught it and blasted it down – without apparently damaging it or the other two, or dislodging an over-wing fuel tank. I landed a little tentatively but the wheels and brakes worked as advertised and I came to a safe stop on the runway. The ground crew met me with a tractor, towing arm and undercarriage leg-clamps – and a cold beer. The beer tasted absolutely magnificent. I was more than happy to have avoided a swim in the lagoon.