CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Squadron Commander

Binbrook, perched on the Lincolnshire Wolds, was known for its miserable winter weather and its semi-isolation. However, when I got there on 1 June 1970 the sun was shining, I was full of anticipatory pleasure at having my own squadron, and Binbrook could have been in Siberia for all I would have cared. Siberia? Well maybe that’s taking anticipatory delight too far, but I was very much looking forward to running my own show.

Besides 5 Squadron’s Lightnings, Binbrook was home to a Canberra squadron, No. 85. This was an odd mix as the two aircraft were so totally different in terms of the technical support they required from the Station, in their operating requirements, their age, their roles and their capabilities. At Leuchars, the existence of another Lightning squadron, and a Phantom squadron, had provided compatible outfits that allowed all to establish a competitive, and friendly, rivalry – and, in the case of 23 Squadron, get and give some mutual support. I asked the Station Commander, Group Captain Mel Shepherd, during my arrival interview, how the two outfits got along together. ‘Just fine,’ he said, before asking me to shorten the flagpole that stood outside 5 Squadron’s crew-room as it was three feet taller than the one outside 85 Squadron.

When one takes charge of something it is an unquestionable advantage to find that it is ailing, or at least has not been a success story. It is then relatively easy to show an improvement. Eight months earlier 5 Squadron had been very ailing and the squadron commander had been removed prematurely. George Black, coming to the end of his tour at Coltishall, had been put in as an emergency stopgap to pull the squadron up to scratch. Now, on the point of George’s departure, and following a successful squadron deployment to Singapore and a win in the 1970 AFCENT Air Defence Competition, things were on the up and up and morale was high. I was taking over from a very successful and popular predecessor.

The unfortunate who had got the boot had himself been preceded by a squadron commander who had gone all out to squeeze as many hours from the aircraft as he could each month – a policy that will always be popular with the hour-hogs among the pilots but irritates the ground crews and screws up the aircraft-servicing schedule. It doesn’t take a great deal of wit to work out that the most sensible modus operandi is simply to aim to complete the syllabus of training flights as specified by Group, and get the annual hours’ total. This should be the proverbial blinding glimpse of the obvious, and most saw it. However, with bad weather, unserviceable aircraft, pilot sickness, and the unexpected occasionally getting in the way it was not always easy to achieve either. I was determined to have a good try, and I felt that it would be wise to start by making this clear to all the squadron personnel, officers, NCOs and airmen.

So, on my first day at Binbrook I had everyone assemble in the hangar, climbed on a chair, and set about explaining how I intended to run the squadron. I told them that I would not seek a single hour over the required 3,600 per calendar year, but I would want to get a few more than 300 each month so that we could approach December – the end of the training year – and the Christmas break with a few hours to spare. I would play fair with them, I said, and stand up for them should outside influences press too hard on them. However, and I emphasised this, they should understand that I would not accept anything less than 3,600 hours, and they would stay in the hangar and on the flight line until I got what we needed each month. As I spoke, I looked about the group clustering around, trying to assess reactions. All eyes were on me; all faces totally blank. I got no response at all, and I wondered if I was wasting my time. I hoped I was not.

That night, shortly after midnight, I was awakened by the telephone ringing beside my bed. It was a 5 Squadron airman, sounding very drunk. He wanted me to intercede with the RAF police who had hauled his mate off to the guardroom for fighting in the NAAFI club. ‘Sorry to be ringing you Sir,’ he slurred, ‘but you said in the hangar that you would stand up for us.’ God, I thought, somebody listened – but what message did I get across today? ‘Standing up for you,’ I explained, trying to avoid an edge of exasperation creeping into my voice as I spoke ‘does not mean that I am going to get up in the middle of the night to bail people out whenever they get into a scrap. Now, bugger off to bed and I’ll look into this in the morning.’ Happily I had no more nocturnal disturbances from the airmen; but there remained a risk from some of the pilots – and particularly from the squadron’s two practising miscreants, Ali McKay and Chris Coville (who tried hard, but couldn’t quite hide the talent that eventually took him to the rank of Air Chief-Marshal), looking for someone to serve them bacon and eggs in the post-Mess-party hours.

The thing that I found I was really going to have to concentrate on straight away, if I was to come anywhere near meeting the syllabus requirements, was night-flying. Half of the training year had gone by – and with it the long dark spells of the early months of the year – but less than a quarter of the required night hours had been achieved. George Black had rightly concentrated on the short-term needs of the situation he had found: raising morale, getting the engineering right, and pulling out the stops to win the AFCENT competition. Now, however, it was time to try and get back on to the normal training schedule. As Binbrook was not a Master Diversion Airfield it was not manned for twenty-four-hour a day operations, and so pushing hard at night-flying in the summer months meant asking for a lot of extra hours of work from all manner of support staff. This involved sweet-talking Wing Commander Engineering for technical support, Wing Commander Administration for the provision of medical and catering cover, and Wing Commander Operations¹ for ATC staff and the Station fire crews. Years afterwards, when I had an opportunity to see some of the monthly reports written by Bill Maish, the man in charge of operations wing throughout my time as squadron commander, I found that he frequently mentioned in them the efforts that he had to make to maintain the peace between 5 Squadron executives and those who thought the squadron was demanding too much from them. He said nothing to me directly during my time in charge. If he had, I would have bought him a beer, and pressed on.

As always on squadrons, normal syllabus work was going to be interrupted, sometimes disrupted, but more often made more pleasurable, by a variety of additional items. At the beginning of July, for example, we flew a nine-ship formation to mark the award of the Freedom of Grimsby given earlier to the Station; engaged in a ship protection exercise which involved flying CAP, supported by tankers, some 250 nm north-east of Binbrook; and sent six pilots and four Mark 6s on a NATO exchange to Beauvechain in Belgium. I flew Mel Shepherd over to Beauvechain in the T5 to pay the detachment a visit, which gave me an opportunity to see how things were going there, and Mel an opportunity to try his hand at handling the Lightning – and decide to stick to Canberras. At the end of the month I had another brief continental holiday when I took a Mark 6 to Bruggen over a weekend, accompanied in another by one of the two flight commanders that I had inherited, Jerry Seavers. I had not seen Jerry since I left 20 Squadron where I had known him as a young, cocksure, second tourist, one of the prima donnas from 92 Squadron’s aerobatic team – and a naturally gifted pilot. I was now interested to discover if he had matured into a responsible executive, and was very pleased to find that he had. The other flight commander, Barry Holmes, was a steady, dependable, Cranwell Sword of Honour winner, with an engagingly quiet sense of humour. I was lucky to have them both.

July, and part of August, were characterised by a large number of major component changes and a seemingly endless round of modifications, all part of a determined attempt to reduce the number of Lightnings being lost as a result of fires in the air. In fact, the series of initiatives that this – the Fire Integrity Programme – continued to produce throughout my time on 5 Squadron put a tremendous burden of work on the hangar crews, sometimes almost more than one felt they should have to tolerate. This was particularly true on two occasions, both on Friday evenings after work had stopped and everyone had gone home, when an order came from Strike Command to take the engines out, do a bit of intricate work on fuel pipes, and get the aircraft serviceable by Monday morning. I joined them in the hangar in sympathy, but also to crack the whip had that been needed. There was a lot of grumbling, but the work was done.

On 8 September, at 1930 hours, a NATO Tactical Evaluation Team suddenly appeared on the Station and declared us to be at ‘readiness for war’. As usual there was a rush of activity to get the maximum number of Lightnings serviceable, and live missiles out of the ‘bomb-dump’ and onto the aircraft. The preparatory phase achieved – we got six aircraft armed and ready within two hours – the ‘war’ phase started. As darkness fell our USAF exchange pilot, Captain Bill Schaffner, was brought to cockpit alert. An experienced pilot, he had been with us since March but still needed to complete a few sorties before being formally declared ‘Operational’ by the squadron. I assessed him to be competent to take part in the flying phase of the Taceval, and authorised him to do so. After an hour in the cockpit he was scrambled but, before he reached the take-off point, the scramble was cancelled. Returning to dispersal he ordered the ground crew to ‘top up the fuel’ but, once again scrambled, he started the engines and began to move before the turn-round servicing required by the rules had been completed. He climbed to 10,000 feet and, on being handed over to the MRS at Patrington, was told to accelerate to Mach 0.95 to intercept and shadow a low-flying target then at 28 nm range from him. What he was not told was that the target was doing a mere 160 knots. He called ‘contact’ when he had picked it up on AI and went on to say that he had ‘to manoeuvre to lose speed’. Very shortly after, he hit the sea about 200 yards behind the target, a Shackleton, whose crew saw his lights go out. With a shaky start, a need to lose a lot of speed as he hurtled towards a low and slow target, Bill Schaffner fell foul of the dangers of low-level work in the dark.

I was strapping into a Lightning to come to readiness when Mel Shepherd came up its ladder and called me out of it to go and break the news to Bill’s wife, Linda. I grabbed Esmé and we went to do what we could in the circumstances. As the hours passed without the searching helicopters or lifeboat finding anything it became more and more obvious that he had not survived. Linda, however, was convinced that he was alive and would eventually be rescued. Esmé and I sat with her through that night and the following day, and every time a vehicle moved on the road outside her Married Quarter she jumped up, thinking that Bill was on his way home. The USAF made arrangements to fly her back to the States a few days later but she wanted to stay, totally convinced that he would turn up. It took a lot of sympathetic persuasion by her friends on the squadron, together with the people sent up from the USAF base at Alconbury, to get her to see that she had to go. When two months later the wreckage of Bill’s aircraft was located and raised, and the cockpit was found to be empty, her distress was compounded by renewed hope that he had indeed survived the crash.

It proved possible to deduce a sad sequence of events from the wreckage. Bill had survived the initial impact with the sea, as was shown by the fact that he had attempted to eject. Tragically, by one of those coincidental and terrible misfortunes that can literally make the difference between life and death, his ejection seat did not fire. By design the seat will not go unless the hood has first jettisoned. This should occur as the ejection seat handle is pulled to it full extent, and this had been done. However, the canopy gun had not fired because, as the accident investigators discovered, the firing head had been incorrectly seated.

Bill was clearly determined to survive for he had then opened the hood electrically and released his seat straps. He had also released his dinghy-pack connections, doubtless to help him get free of the seat. The Board of Inquiry concluded that before successfully freeing himself he had probably been pulled too far down by the sinking aircraft, may have become unconscious, and may never have reached the surface. Linda’s uncertainty and distress cannot have been helped by articles later published in both the Grimsby Evening Telegraph and the Hull Daily Mail, mentioning the empty cockpit, connecting this with alleged sightings of ‘bright lights’ and UFOs, and reporting local loony claims that Bill had been abducted by aliens.

September passed into October and on the 9th, because we had hit a patch of excellent serviceability, and because I felt that it would be good to show the ground crew the fruits of their efforts in the air, we flew eleven aircraft in a figure five configuration. It was quite a difficult formation to get right as numbers two and three had to fly a fairly wide line abreast on the leader. We put up a twelfth aircraft to tell us how we were doing and to get us into a neat figure ‘5’ before we flew over the airfield. A bit of swank, I know, but it was great for squadron morale. The following day we took over the Southern QRA. And it was back to pretty standard stuff.

One other event in October, which we were delighted by, was the fitting of the first twin 30-mm Aden gun pack to one of our Mark 6s. A modification programme had been under way since the beginning of 1969 to prepare the aircraft on the Mark 6 squadrons for the packs and now they were being delivered. The two guns together with 240 rounds of ammunition were mounted in a redesigned front compartment of the aircraft’s 600-gallon ventral fuel tank for the loss of just 170 gallons. John Ward, the squadron IWI, went off to check out the guns by firing into the sea. While the new gun pack may not have been the complete weapons’ enhancement that many would have wished, the provision of guns recognised, at last, that missiles alone might not be enough for either a sophisticated ECM environment or for a fighter V fighter dust-up abroad.

Meanwhile, back to missiles. We went to Valley on 15 November with six Red Tops to fire. It was a bad time as the weather was very poor and Aberporth’s radar was unserviceable for the first fortnight. While we waited for range slots to be allocated to us I decided to press on with normal syllabus flying – a bit of a gamble as it was imperative that we kept enough aircraft serviceable and ready to fire should the call come. We even persuaded Valley to keep the airfield open on a couple of evenings so that we could get a few night hours. One night the weather was particularly dodgy with the severe thunder storms around and about. I sent Jerry Seavers to the ATC tower to keep an eye on the storms and we achieved what we set out to do, albeit at the cost of losing some goodwill from a rather shaken IWI, fresh from descending through one of the thunder clouds.

Towards the end of the detachment all fell into place: we were allocated two slots on the range and were able to fire five missiles, and so went home happy. The sixth missile was fired off a QRA scramble a few days after we got back to Binbrook.

By mid-December, a couple of weeks before the end of the training year, we had achieved the 3,600-hour annual task, and completed the syllabus requirements. I was thus able, and glad to be able, to fulfil my promise to let the squadron quietly stand-easy in the run up to, and over, the Christmas period.

January saw us starting to prepare for the 1971 AFCENT Competition. I had been left in no doubt by Strike Command that we must attempt to win it again but, also, that we must not expect the considerable level of support that had been provided for the 1970 event, the first year that Strike Command had decided to compete. The rules too had been changed since the previous year and had been made more stringent – for example, in 1970, interceptions had to be completed within 300 seconds, but this time every second to completion was going to be counted. The tactics that had enabled the squadron to win in 1970 were clearly going to have to be changed quite drastically. I made John Ward responsible for tactics and training, and Jerry Seavers overall Project Manager. I charged Barry Holmes with the rather difficult task of ensuring that pilots not in the running for selection for the competing team, mainly the newcomers on the squadron, would not miss out on flying while the lion’s share of effort went into training for the competition.

John Ward went over to Patrington and sorted out with the controlling team there – and particularly with the advice and assistance of Flight Sergeant Lofty Weatherill, who had been heavily involved in the previous competition, and was an instinctively good Fighter Controller – how we were to tackle the airborne side of the event. This was divided into four phases: day low-level; day subsonic; night subsonic; and day supersonic. Each competing squadron would be required to fly two pairs on each phase. Our low-level interception phase was to be sited over the lumpy Yorkshire Moors and would have to be tackled by scrambling to set up a CAP across the 10-nm wide corridor that the target could appear in; the essential visual sighting would be very dependent on where the fighters were on the CAP when the target came through, and on the level of visibility ‘on the day’, but we were confident that our ability to accelerate the Lightning in a matter of seconds from a low-level loiter speed of 300 knots to the permitted maximum (short of going supersonic) of 600 knots would more than compensate for late pick-ups. Film of missile acquisition and ‘launch’ had to be delivered to the competition judges after the sortie. To help with the low-level work-up Bill Maish acquired, and had sited in the Moors, a mobile radar (of much the same capability as the one we had at Chiang Mai but, nevertheless, just what was needed).

On the high-level phases the AFCENT people at Patrington would give the nominated fighter-controller the go-ahead to scramble a pair when its designated target entered a box of fixed width but whose length depended on whether the target was subsonic or supersonic. The scrambled pair then had to be controlled so that they were kept at least 5 nm apart from one another throughout the intercept. The first fighter had to be vectored onto the target, ideally at the moment it crossed a ‘startline’ depicted on the controller’s radar screen, fly past it and call out its identification letters; then and only then could the second fighter be directed in for the ‘kill’. As with the low-level phase, film of the attack and ‘kill’ was essential. Penalty points were accumulated for every second that elapsed from the target crossing the start-line until the kill was made. The difficulty in achieving the minimum time was compounded by the fact that the target was allowed to change heading within the box once it was within 90 nm of the start-line; the change was not excessive but for the controller on the ground, aiming to position the first visually-identifying fighter along the start-line for a perfect 90-degree intercept the moment the target crossed it, any change of heading could make all the difference between the 90-degree being impossibly tight or so slack that precious time would be thrown away on a stern-chase. And, the later the change of heading was made the greater the problem for the controller.

Our opponents were expected to be USAF Phantoms, Mirages, F104s and RAF Germany’s Lightning Mark 2As. But, early on in the work-up period, the Mirages, F104s and Lightning Mark 2As withdrew. We had not been too concerned about the first two types, as we knew that the Lightning’s radar was more capable than that of either, and we would have welcomed a like-for-like contest with the Mark 2As. However, we were concerned about the capability of the Phantom’s AI and the aircraft’s ability to ‘launch’ its Sparrow missiles from a frontal attack on subsonic as well as on supersonic intercepts, and from a greater range on any type of intercept than we could hope to ‘launch’ our Red Tops. We reckoned that we would have to seek to complete the subsonic interceptions in less than 125 seconds if we were to beat the USAF Phantoms. And we would have to use the Red Top’s head-on capability for the supersonic phase – something of a gamble as the relatively short firing range of the missile meant that the ‘kill’ aircraft would have to be committed to the attack profile before the ‘visidenter’ had completed his task; any delay by the latter would make it impossible to maintain the required five-mile separation between the two Lightnings.

Our preparations on the ground included the assiduous identification of the best AI radar sets, and ensuring that all of these, and the aircraft that were going to carry them, would be in peak condition for the competition itself, scheduled for mid-April. We did not give up all normal flying training while we practised the AFCENT stuff during February and March as I remained determined to avoid the hard chase after short-falls in the syllabus exercises and in night-flying that had characterised the second half of the previous year – and I didn’t want to make Barry Holmes’ task impossible. But the competition had to have as much effort as it required and by mid-March we moved out to the Operational Readiness Platforms situated at the ends of the runway.

The competition rules required the nominated aircraft to get airborne within four minutes of a scramble being ordered. A second pair was allowed to start engines as substitutes should either of the first fail to get airborne. Penalty points were given for any failure to scramble and these on top of other things could lose the competition. Pilots were required to be out of their aircraft, and not touching them prior to the scramble. Jerry Seavers organised a horn to sound the order to go, backed up by the waving of a large flag in case anyone was slow off the mark. We practised leaping into the cockpit, dropping into the seat and plugging in the connector for oxygen, communications and anti-g suit with the left hand while getting the Number 1 engine started with the right, pushing the Number 2 start button as soon as the AVPIN burn for the Number 1 was complete, plugging in the leg-restraints and completing strapping in while checking that the engines were lighting correctly and all warning lights were going out. The ground crew member up the ladder would then remove the top ejection-seat safety pins, stow them, shin down, and remove the ladder. Closing the canopy was the signal for the chocks to be removed, and we were off. The pilots finally chosen to comprise the team for the competition itself had worked up to the point where no scramble took any of them more than two minutes from the order to go to the wheels lifting off the ground; and, when we got to the competition itself, the AFCENT people were so surprised by the speed achieved that, after the first scramble, one member insisted on climbing the ladder after the pilot to check that he was actually strapping in fully before moving.

At the beginning of the work-up period we were not achieving anything like the target of 125 seconds that we had set ourselves. By the end of February, despite a series of disruptions to the programme caused by fuel leaks and the Fire Integrity Programme, we were getting around 200 seconds for the subsonics and just a little less for the supersonic profile. Then, in mid-March, the people at Patrington were able to watch the USAF Phantom squadron based in Holland undergoing its competition runs off the Dutch coast, and reported that the Americans were achieving times as low as 90 seconds. Things didn’t look good and a practice dispersal exercise called by STC on the 18th while we, and some of the Patrington controllers, were sitting with wet towels around our heads trying to think how we might improve matters, was not a morale booster. By the end of March, when the Commander-in-Chief Strike Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Andrew Humphrey, paid us a visit, we had improved to just under 150 seconds. He asked me if we were going to win and I told him that we were going to try, adding the warning that ‘the USAF Phantoms have achieved much better times than I think we can hope for’. His immediate response suggested that candour was not what he wanted. ‘Just make sure you win,’ he snorted.

By 19 April, when the AFCENT team turned up to test us, we were still short of our target of 125 seconds but everything else was going well and the ‘firers’ were consistently meeting the scope steering demands, getting good ‘acquisitions’, and ‘firing’ at the right ranges. Over the course of the next four days, while we were put through the phases of the competition itself, the ground crews worked magnificently, the aircraft suffered no unserviceabilities, and the pilots turned in performances that were magical – Ali McKay, for example, controlled by Lofty Wetherill, achieving an incredible sixty-three-second day-subsonic visident. And our concerns about the capabilities of the Phantoms were proved to have been unnecessary, for their times were not as good as Patrington had seen achieved in practice (as low as 95 seconds by one pair on the day subsonic event, but stretching to 300 seconds on the day supersonic one). Both of our pairs came first and second on the day subsonic (118 and 144 seconds) and the day supersonic (120 and 127 seconds) events, and first and third on the night subsonic (136 and 163 seconds) one. All competing pairs were judged equal on the low-level event. Our times, together with our performance in successfully meeting all the other requirements, clinched the competition for us and, for the second year running, the Lightning came out on top.

May started well with a very straightforward MPC. We got the range slots and we got the weather and fired off the allocated five missiles in two weeks. By mid-May four of our Mark 6s had been fitted with the twin 30-mm gun-pack and the modified sight that was part of the deal. However, we were still having problems with fuel leaks on two of the aircraft and a third, due to come to us after major servicing, was held up owing to its failure to satisfy a series of air-tests at the Maintenance Unit doing the work. We finally got it on 25 May and gave it an acceptance check. On the 26th Ali McKay took off in it for a night sortie but about a minute and a half after take-off he got an indication of fire in the Number 1 engine followed by fire-warnings for both reheat areas. He declared an emergency and headed for the coast, climbing to a good ejection height of 10,000 feet. His number two, Merv Fowler, reported a brilliant white flame from the rear end of the aircraft and, with controls starting to malfunction, Ali baled out. He did everything correctly on the way down and, despite the night being particularly dark, was picked up within minutes of climbing into his dinghy by a rescue chopper from Leconfield. The bad news was that he suffered compression fractures of the spine and was flat on his back for several weeks and off flying for several months. When this happened I was down in London sitting my Law Degree finals. I would have preferred to have been on the spot, although there was not anything that I could have done at the time. But I felt responsible for my charges even if I couldn’t sit in the cockpit with them. I had at least forced the pilots to confront the problems of going down in the sea by getting them all into Binbrook’s open-air swimming-pool in freezing weather earlier in the year to discover how quickly fingers become uselessly numb in very cold water. That might not have saved Bill Schaffner had he been around for it but it might have had some bearing on Ali’s text-book survival actions.

The next two months went rapidly by, with two major air defence exercises, several rehearsals for a parade at which the Dacre Trophy for the best fighter squadron in No. 11 Group for 1970 would be presented to us, pushing hard to extract some night-flying from short nights, and working up for the annual inspection by Air Vice-Marshal Ivor Broom, the AOC. We were also busy getting aircraft serviced and ready for a detachment to Akrotiri, scheduled to begin on 29 July, to try our guns out for the first time.

About a week before we set out for Cyprus I got a salutary reminder of one of the disadvantages of losing sight of an opponent in air combat. The prime disadvantage – or incipient disaster in a hostile environment – is that an opponent may get into a firing position unseen. On this occasion Jerry Seavers and I were flying a 1V 1 sortie. Pulling around in the wide circles that characterised the best that could be achieved in the Lightning, we ultimately both lost sight of each other and, as one should in an operational environment but perhaps not in a training one, we both kept turning hard. Suddenly we flashed past each other, canopy to canopy, less than twenty feet apart, travelling in opposite directions, both doing about 500 knots. Twenty feet closer could have produced an inexplicable loss of two aircraft, not to mention two pilots who should have known better.

We took nine Mark 6s, the T5 and a Mark 1A to Cyprus, getting there in good order and in one hop, thanks to the tanker fleet, and took over Battle Flight the following day from the resident Lightning Mark 6 outfit, No. 56 Squadron. With the arrival of an 85 Squadron Canberra on 5 August we started flying cine sorties on the flag. When a second Canberra arrived later in the month we were ready to begin a full firing programme. In anticipation of this Jerry Seavers and John Ward had been arguing about how best to harmonise the guns. Jerry, a product of the DFCLS during his Hunter days, and John of the post Hunter and therefore post-gun-firing IWI course, each had strong views. I let them argue it out and eventually they reached a consensus. The results we got in the first week of firing were not very impressive (a top score of 10%) and so the consensus shifted. But no great improvement resulted, and we had a final squadron average of less than 10%.

Akrotiri’s annual Summer Ball took place halfway through our gun-firing programme. On arrival at the Ball the Station Commander, Air Commodore John Stacey, parked his car, as was his wont, in the Station Commander’s slot outside the Officers’ Mess. One of my pilots, the worse for a glass or two of Cypriot wine rather foolishly decided that it would be a bit of a joke to remove the Air Commodore’s star from the plate on the car, move the car and hide it. Backing out of the parking slot, he ran over some previously unseen glass and punctured a tyre. John Stacey was understandably a trifle upset when he wanted to leave the party, noticed the missing star, and then discovered the puncture – incandescent in fact. The following day, Group Captain Operations, Mike Beavis (later Air Chief-Marshal Sir Michael and, in retirement, a friend), charged with making enquiries by a man convinced that his status and authority had been under attack, came to see me at the squadron to ask if I knew anything about it. I had not known anything until about an hour before his arrival when a somewhat shame-faced lad came to confess and to ask what he should do. I had suggested to him that he really ought to consider confessing to the Station Commander but added that there might be some danger in that action as John Stacey was well known for his wrath. He thought it best not to risk the wrath, and I must confess I was inclined to agree with him. I then had to try and persuade Mike Beavis, without actually lying to him, that it was highly unlikely that any member of 5 Squadron was involved. A couple of days later the Station was subject to a Taceval and, as 5 Squadron was tasked by John Stacey to supply most of its complement of airmen to mount guards in some very unlikely locations for over twenty-four hours, I had to assume that he had his suspicions.

Three days before we were due to leave Akrotiri the squadron engineers had got all eleven aircraft serviceable and ready for the off. To say thank you to them and to end a good detachment on a high note – not to mention cocking a snook at No. 56 Squadron, whose members had been less than hospitable to us as a visiting outfit – we flew our trademark figure five over the airfield. As 56 Squadron had lost a Lightning the previous day when one of its pilots experienced a fire in the reheat section and had had to eject, we should perhaps have been kinder. Unhappily for Barry Holmes, fate struck back via HQ 11 Group when the SASO selected him, in response to a request from the Command HQ at Episkopi, to stay behind and conduct the consequent Board of Inquiry.

Back home we were almost straight away into our own Taceval – happily without incident this time and happily accomplished satisfactorily. And then into several small exercises with the Navy as a lead-in to a major air and sea exercise scheduled for November. We wondered if all of this was an attempt by the Senior Service to disprove the RAF’s assertion that we could defend ships from air attack within the cover of the UK air defence region. We were determined to prove that we could. The first exercise involved us in three days of PIs controlled by HMS Antrim, cruising about 100 nm north-east of Leuchars. The next was the defence of some ships about 200 nm north of Lossiemouth. Then, on 24 November the squadron was put on standby to deploy to Lossiemouth for the main thing – Exercise Highwood. Two days later, just to make life awkward, the Fire Integrity Programme struck again and the ground crew had to remove all No. 1 engine jet-pipes and perform some fiddly work on the fuel system.

On the 30th we flew ten Mark 6s into Lossiemouth and began an intensive eleven days of around-the clock flying. The pace was intense and it is doubtful that we could have kept it up without becoming dangerously fatigued had it not been for the nearby availability of V-force dispersal caravans, all nicely sound-proofed and blacked out and, regrettably, all long-since scrapped.

There were many individual brushes with minor panic, and many hasty fuel calculations as people found themselves at extended distances from usable airfields with no supporting Victor tanker in the immediate vicinity. Flying intensively can court disaster – an accepted risk during wartime operations but less justified during peacetime exercises. Luckily disaster did not strike 5 Squadron and the only RAF loss during Highwood was a Buccaneer that caught fire at the take-off point of the main runway at Lossiemouth. The ignition of the Lepus flares that it was carrying rendered the runway unusable for a couple of days but, by sheer good fortune, there was a persistently strong wind blowing during that period favouring the short secondary runway and this allowed us to keep operating. The Navy might have argued that the incident exposed a weakness in relying on shore-based aircraft for ship defence, but we could have taken off from the burnt runway and operated from elsewhere if it had been necessary.

The approach of the end of the training year saw us once again in the happy position of having all syllabus exercises completed and the required hours in the bank. I asked for a formally recognised stand-down to reward the troops for a lot of hard work during the year but perhaps this request was rather naïve. It was refused on the grounds that a stand-down could not be given to one unit alone. As it happened, this didn’t matter much as I was able to ease most people away for a few days in the run up to Christmas.

The new year started with yet another bit of necessary work identified by the Fire Integrity Programme: the replacement of fuel system seals in all the aircraft. However, this didn’t interfere unduly with the flying programme and we entered February with things going well – at least until the then on-going miners’ strike began to affect us. Flying within the RAF was suddenly restricted solely to daylight hours because of the power cuts that were occurring as a direct result of the disruption of fuel supplies to electricity-generating stations. To try and get something extra out of the available daylight hours, and keep a reasonable rate of flying going, I persuaded Bill Maish to open the airfield for flying from 0630 hours while the strike continued. This was not popular with the support services on the Station but they did what was asked of them.

March was not a great deal better than February as it was not until well into the month that we were again able to operate in the dark hours. By the end of March we started to work up for another Akrotiri deployment, with cine work on the flag, only to have this programme disrupted at the beginning of April by yet more fire integrity stuff.

Over 6 and 7 April we flew the usual mix of 9 Mark 6s, one T5 and a Mark 1A directly to Cyprus, again courtesy of the Victor tanker force. As was standard practice, we had the over-wing tanks off the first pair and the aircraft ready for take-off within an hour of landing. I went along to the Station Commander’s office to make a courtesy call. John Stacey had gone and had been replaced by Air Commodore David Craig. ‘Have we met before?’ he asked, in a sort of defensive half-question. Not only had he been my flight commander on 247 Squadron, but he and I had taken turns to drive each other to work on alternate days for the duration of the petrol shortage caused by the Suez crisis in late 1956. I was a little taken aback as I didn’t think my appearance had changed so greatly in the sixteen years since then. However, he had barely asked the question before he realised who I was: the Short Service, not highly thought of, Flying Officer that he had known during my first six months or so on 247 Squadron. I couldn’t blame him if he was thinking it extraordinary that that particular junior pilot had metamorphosed into a wing commander.

Because the weather in the range area was uncharacteristically cloudy for the first week, and we could not therefore clear the range area visually, we could not get cracking on the firing programme. I took the opportunity to push hard on the normal syllabus exercises and to make up the shortfall in our night achievements – the latter not entirely with the blessing of the occupants of Akrotiri’s Married Quarters. Once we did start firing we were eager to see if the ideas that had emerged since our previous detachment, largely from discussions between the Mark 6 squadron IWIs about harmonisation and sighting, would give us better results than last time. Two new flight commanders, Tim Nelson and Tim Guvain, had replaced Barry Holmes and Jerry Seavers. As neither claimed any serious knowledge of gun harmonisation, John Ward’s replacement, Mal Gleave, was left in undisputed charge of the harmonisation programme. Our final results were still far below those that had been achieved with the same guns on the Hunter (my best was a miserable 13 per cent) but there was an improvement, and it was welcome.

Shortly before we left for Cyprus we had learned from HQ 11 Group that we had won the Dacre Trophy for the second year running, and that a date for its presentation by Mrs Dacre had been agreed for the week after our planned return to Binbrook. As was usual on these occasions the squadron would have to mount a parade and, as this would require a fair amount of practice in marching and in rifle-drill beforehand, we had no option but to begin the process while we were in Cyprus. I knew that this was going to test sorely the good will of the ground crews, many of whom tended to go into holiday mode on detachment to sunny Cyprus, and most of whom would feel that supporting the demands of the firing programme was quite enough to fill their time. But they did it, and the detachment ended on a high note, with an all-ranks’ party in the NAAFI club, an eleven-ship figure five formation fly-past followed by a 4 V 4 session of air-combat, and two days later, with the over-wing tanks fitted, an incident free air-refuelled flight home.

At the party I received something that I felt to be worth more than the two Dacres and the AFCENT Trophy combined. Late in the evening two squadron airmen, their confidence boosted by a lot of beer, lurched up to me. One simply stood swaying in front of me nodding his head as if to affirm something that his partner was about to say. The second poked me in the chest a couple of times to ensure he had my complete attention and then said: ‘The lads gave them to you sir, didn’t they? They gave them to you. We didn’t believe you when you said you would only go for the hours you said. But you did. And we gave them to you, didn’t we?’ They most certainly had, and I couldn’t help thinking that if the entire country’s workforce could be motivated to work as hard and as selflessly as 5 Squadron’s ground crews had done, and indeed as RAF ground crews have done over the years, Britain would have a sparkling economy. But, that aside, I was particularly pleased to know that my soapbox oratory on my first day had not been in vain.

We were met on landing back at Binbrook by Group Captain Don McClen, who had taken over from Mel Shepherd several months before. ‘Have you thought about the Dacre parade?’ he asked. ‘You haven’t got much time to prepare for it.’ I had got to know and like Don when we were on the Lightning course together at Coltishall, and while he was in command of 23 Squadron concurrently with my spell on 11 Squadron. And, although I would not have presumed on friendship in any way while he was my boss, I felt I could get away with a tiny bit of cheek in response: ‘It’s OK Sir, we’ve done it before,’ I replied. He laughed, and riposted: ‘Well, you had better make sure you’re perfect this time.’ We did. We paraded and, later, we flew past with style – and I could not have been prouder of the officers and the men that I had been given the privilege of commanding.

When Esmé and I had first arrived at Binbrook, finding a school for Caroline in the surrounding area had posed a problem and, halfway through my tour there, the small privately run enterprise that we had found and sent her to had failed financially. At the same time Julia, at the age of ten, and rather more seriously determined than her sister to achieve some stability in her young life, decided that she wanted to board. Sending children away to school is not everyone’s choice but it is an action that is almost inevitable if the academic turbulence that Service children can suffer as a result of the near constant movement of their parents is to be avoided. We had already had an unhappy experience with Caroline boarding at an independent school in Belfast after returning from Aden. The experiment had not worked as the constant change of schools up until then had put her well behind her contemporaries in age. However, we decided to bite the bullet again and boarded both girls, basing our choice of school at Whitby as much on the east coast location of fighter Stations as on anything else. That worked well while we remained at Binbrook. However, I was now going south at the end of my tour as squadron commander to attend a course at the National Defence College at Latimer in Buckinghamshire – and Whitby was beginning to look very much like the wrong choice.

I had my last flight on the squadron on 17 August – ending with an extremely satisfying high-speed zip at lowish level along a line between the hangar and the flight line building. When I landed, I was met by a group of the pilots, with the two Tims bearing glasses and a bottle of champagne which, when opened, had everyone falling about with embarrassed laughter as it was absolutely flat. The line-crew clustered around too, adding to the levity of the moment by presenting me with a pocket device for checking tyre-pressures, a tongue-in-the-cheek response to the fact that I had invariably insisted on having my aircraft’s tyre-pressures checked before I flew it.

I left Binbrook with a great deal of regret. I had reached the end of my hands-on flying career; and, besides, I felt a distinct reluctance to hand over 5 Squadron and its air and ground crew to someone else. But I should confess that I also left feeling a great measure of relief that all had gone as well as it had while the squadron was my responsibility.