by Harry Benson
The near disaster on Fortuna Glacier was a worrying start to Britain’s campaign to reclaim South Georgia and the Falkland Islands. One failed mission by the SAS; two crashed helicopters. But for the astonishing skill of the Wessex 3 crew, it could have been so much worse.
Chapter 2
Junglies: 1979–82
WHEN I LEFT school, I didn’t bother with university because I’d always wanted to fly. I tried for British Airways and failed the interview. The military was the obvious next step. The RAF didn’t appeal for the not terribly convincing reason that I didn’t fancy being stuck on some German airfield for years. My stepfather introduced me to a friend of his, a Royal Navy captain, who opened up the possibility of flying with the Navy. It also didn’t hurt to see the Fleet Air Arm adverts of the day showing Sea Harrier jets and helicopters. Underneath was the line ‘Last week I was learning to park my dad’s Morris Marina …’. I followed the recruitment trail and applied to the Admiralty Interview Board.
And so on a wet October day in 1979, I found myself squashed into a minibus heading for Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, Devon, one of forty apprehensive young men hoping to become Royal Navy pilots and observers. I was now Midshipman Benson, aged nineteen years and one week.
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For many years, pilots and aircrew of the naval air commando squadrons have been proud to call themselves junglies. The original junglies were the crews of 848 Naval Air Squadron who operated their Whirlwind helicopters in the jungles of Malaya from 1952. Operating in support of the Gurkhas and other regiments, the commando squadrons became known for their flexibility and ‘can-do’ attitude, an approach that has continued to the present day in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The very first commando assault took place during the Suez crisis of 1956 when twenty-two Whirlwind and Sycamore helicopters of 845 Naval Air Squadron landed 650 commandos and their equipment in a mere one and a half hours. Given the limited capability of these underpowered helicopters, it was an astonishing feat. In 1958, naval air commando squadrons were involved with support operations in Cyprus and Aden. From 1959, 848 Naval Air Squadron operated with Royal Marines from the first commando carrier HMS Bulwark, and later from HMS Albion, mainly in the Far and Middle East. It was at Nanga Gaat, the forward operating base deep in the jungles of Borneo during the Indonesian confrontation of 1963, using Whirlwind 7 and Wessex 1 helicopters, that the nickname junglies was born. The new twin-engined Wessex HU (Helicopter Utility) Mark 5 entered service in 1965 in Aden, Brunei and Borneo, bringing with it a substantial improvement in lifting capability. The Sea King Mark 4 increased capability further, entering service with 846 Naval Air Squadron in 1979.
By early 1982, Britain’s political and military priorities had altered dramatically. In place of the Far East adventures, the typical junglie could expect to spend a substantial part of their winter training in Arctic warfare in northern Norway and the rest of the year on a couple of six-week rotations in Northern Ireland.
It was into this environment that I emerged as a baby junglie on Monday 1 March 1982. Officially we were Royal Navy officers first and Royal Navy pilots second. Unofficially we all knew exactly who we were. Junglies first, Navy second.
My training was fairly typical. After convincing the Admiralty Interview Board that I had sufficient leadership potential as a young officer and sufficient coordination as a trainee pilot, I joined Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth in the autumn of 1979. For many of my new friends and colleagues, this was the first time they had been away from home. For me, with ten years of boarding school under my belt, the routine and discipline of Dartmouth was a piece of cake.
My naval and flying training took nearly two and a half years from start to finish. Along every step of the way lurked the ever-present threat of being ‘chopped’. Most of us survived our first thirteen hours of flight experience in the antiquated tail-dragging Chipmunk aeroplane at Roborough airport near Plymouth. The similarly antiquated instructors at Roborough were all experienced assessors of young aviators. Those of us with sufficient aptitude passed. Those who didn’t got chopped.
After passing out of Dartmouth, I spent the summer of 1980 on ‘holdover’ at RNAS Yeovilton in Somerset. Holdover was the Navy’s attempt to slow down the flow of pilots to the front line. Defence cuts meant that there were simply too many aircrew in the system. Yeovilton was home to the junglies, flying Wessex 5 and the new Sea King 4, and stovies, flying the Navy’s shiny new Sea Harrier vertical take-off and landing jets. My few months at Yeovilton were brilliant fun. I knew that either junglie or stovie would be an attractive option once I finished flying training.
Towards the end of 1980, I resumed my place in the training pipeline and completed a range of ground courses. My fellow trainees and I spent a gruesome week being schooled in aviation medicine and advanced first aid at Seafield Park in Hampshire. Here we learnt how easy it was to become extremely disoriented whilst airborne. Each of us was strapped in turn into a rotating chair that was spun around. Starting with our heads down and eyes closed, we were then asked to lift our heads up and open our eyes. Watching others become completely unbalanced and fling themselves involuntarily out of the chair was a lot more entertaining than when we had to experience it for ourselves. The most shocking demonstration was to sit in the chair with eyes closed while the chair was spun up very slowly indeed. I was not aware of any movement at all. Opening my eyes to discover the world rushing past at a rate of knots was extremely disconcerting, though highly entertaining for onlookers.
In an adapted decompression chamber we all experienced a few minutes of hypoxia, the state of drowsiness that ensues at high altitude, and which can lead to death if insufficient oxygen reaches the brain. The staff set up a realistically simulated helicopter crash scene for us to use our first-aid skills. All Royal Navy aircrew have a special memory of the horribly realistic sucking chest wound that blows little bubbles of blood and the supposedly wounded leg that turns out to be completely severed.
We also spent eight days in the New Forest on survival training. This involved being dropped in the middle of nowhere with only the clothes we were wearing and a tiny survival tin full of glucose sweets. The first twenty-four hours were not fun. Ten of us were invited to swim across a freezing lake to clamber into a nine-man liferaft that simulated a ditching at sea. Discomfort, sudden attacks of cramp, and one of our colleagues with the runs, made the time pass very slowly indeed. It was a relief to be able to swim back to the shoreline and start an eighty-mile trek over the next three days. The last five days were spent building a shelter called a ‘basher’ and practising our survival skills – setting traps, carving spoons out of bits of wood, and skinning and cooking a rabbit that had been temporarily liberated from the local pet shop. I lost a stone in weight during these eight days.
Our final noteworthy course was one well loved by all Navy aircrew. Colloquially known as ‘the dunker’, the underwater escape trainer is a diving tower filled with water. The purpose of the dunker is to teach aircrew how to survive a ditching at sea. Perched on the end of a hydraulic ram above the water is a replica of a helicopter cockpit and cabin. The aircrew, dressed in normal flying gear and helmets, strap into the cockpit at the front or the cabin at the back. The module then lurches downwards into the water rolling neatly upside down some twelve feet underwater. Our mission is to escape before we all drown.
The staff took us through the ditching procedure. As soon as you know you’re heading for a swim, the first thing is to pull the quick release lever that jettisons the door. In the dunker, we simply had to simulate this. As the helicopter hits the water, with one hand you grab onto a fixed handle in the cockpit, with the other you prepare to release your straps. As the helicopter disappears under water, you grab one last gasp of air. When all movement stops, you release your straps, haul yourself out using the handle as a reference point, and allow buoyancy to take you up to the surface.
My first experience of the dunker was unnerv
ing and disorienting, which is of course the point. But after a couple of goes, we became confident and even cocky. With six of us plonked in the rear cabin, a sign language game of ‘After you’, ‘No really, after you’, ‘No please, I insist’ then ensued, to the growing irritation of the excellent Navy divers who were there to watch that we didn’t get into trouble. The module only stayed under for less than a minute. The really cool customers were the divers who watched us vacate the module safely before strapping themselves in to ride it back upright and out of the water. We also practised the same escape in darkness with the tower windows blacked out. The dunker saved lives: those aircrew who survived crashes or ditchings at sea which killed their passengers, undoubtedly did so because of their sessions in the dunker.
Learning to fly helicopters is an expensive business. The Navy wants to make sure its pilots can learn as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s far cheaper to get used to the unfamiliar environment of being airborne in a fixed-wing aircraft than a rotary one. So the first seventy-five hours of our flying training involved a few months based at RAF Topcliffe in Yorkshire learning to fly the Bulldog, a small single-engine propeller-driven aeroplane that was a vast improvement on the Chipmunk. After just eight hours flying, the instructor stepped out and left me to fly my first solo. Aerobatics, navigation training, night-flying and formation flying were all progressively introduced to us. The Bulldog was easy to fly and our time passed all too quickly.
We moved down to Cornwall and our first real taste of proper Navy life at RNAS Culdrose for Basic Flying Training on the Gazelle helicopter. All helicopters are inherently unstable. Left to their own devices, they would much prefer to roll over and crash than remain in stable controlled flight. Having arrived with a confident belief that our ability to fly Bulldogs made us masters of the universe, we were put firmly in our place by our feeble slapstick attempts to hover a helicopter.
In any helicopter there are three sets of controls. The collective lever sits in the left hand. Raising it up adjusts the pitch on all of the blades at the same time. Increasing the angle of attack to the wind through the blades causes the helicopter to rise up. The cyclic stick in the right hand alters the angle of attack of the blades at only one point in the rotor disc, causing the entire disc to tilt forwards, backwards, left or right. The pedals increase or reduce the angle of attack in the tail rotor, whose purpose is to counter the torque or twisting motion of the aircraft. Newton’s laws tell us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If the main rotor blades are spinning one way, the aircraft fuselage will try to spin the other. The tail rotor prevents this from happening.
Learning to use any one control at one time is easy enough. The problem is in learning to use all three at the same time. Pulling in power on the collective requires simultaneous use of the pedals to correct the tendency to yaw. But the additional downdraft on the aircraft fuselage means that an adjustment is also needed with the cyclic stick. For the Gazelle, a vertical take-off means lifting the collective, pushing smoothly on the right pedal, and easing the cyclic back and to the right. Now comes the hard part. A movement on the cyclic to tilt the disc also means that the thrust from the disc is no longer vertical. A compensating increase in power is required. Raise the collective lever and all the other controls need further adjustment. And so on. Hence the comedy value of trying and failing to maintain a hover for the first time within an area the size of a football field. Concentrating on adjusting our height above the ground, we would neglect to stop the helicopter from racing sideways across the ground. All of us very quickly became hopelessly out of control.
Fortunately our instructors were tolerant of our early incompetence, up to a point, and we either learnt fast as expected or faced being chopped. Six months and eighty hours flying time later and most of us were completing our captaincy checks before being awarded our wings. My own captaincy check was fantastic fun. I had to recce and land on top of Longships Lighthouse, just off the coast of Land’s End. Wings are the motif that Navy pilots wear on their left sleeve. Being awarded my wings was an extremely proud moment.
Little did I know that I would be on my way to war exactly a year after my first solo flight in a helicopter. Altogether I spent eighty hours learning to fly these sporty Gazelles, based at RNAS Culdrose in Cornwall, before progressing onto the bigger Wessex at RNAS Yeovilton in Somerset.
At this point, our training course of nineteen pilots went their separate ways. Twelve pilots were appointed to stay at Culdrose and do their Advanced and Operational Flying Training on anti-submarine Sea King Mark 2 helicopters. They would become pingers, named after the pinging sonar that Sea Kings dip into the sea in order to hunt submarines. I and six others were appointed to head up to Yeovilton to become junglies, the Navy’s commando squadron aircrew tasked to support the Royal Marines.
And so we learnt to fly the Wessex HU Mark 5. By the time I flew my first Wessex in 1981, the old bird had already been around for sixteen years. The Wessex was a whole different animal compared to the Gazelle. Whereas the Gazelle was light, fast, and handled like a sports car, the Wessex seemed heavy, slow, and handled more like a tractor. But once we got to know her, we quickly fell in love. The controls may have seemed sluggish at first. But we learnt to see them as forgiving. For a large helicopter of seven tons at maximum all-up weight, the Wessex was extraordinarily manoeuvrable. My personal record was of throwing a Wessex into a 110-degree wingover turn. That’s as near to upside down as I could get without the rotor blades flapping vertically upwards and applauding my impending crash. Having both frightened and impressed myself in equal measure, I resolved to be a little less ambitious in my aircraft handling. It never lasted. The Wessex was simply too much fun to fly.
Once started, the Wessex was incredibly reliable; the problem was getting it started. The electric cables didn’t seem to like damp weather. I only ever had three emergencies in 700 hours flying a Wessex before, during and after the Falklands War. And they all happened on consecutive days. An engine failure was the first. I lost the primary hydraulic system on the very next flight and the secondary system the day afterwards. Had these latter two happened at the same time, I would now be dead. Without hydraulics, seven tons of air through the rotors would have caused the cyclic stick in the cockpit to thrash around wildly out of control.
Our Advanced Flying Training on the Wessex was spent mainly at Merryfield, south-west of the busy main airfield at Yeovilton. Our Gazelle training mostly took place in the same way at Culdrose’s satellite airfield Predannack. The ten-minute transit to and from Merryfield became a familiar routine that was usually an enjoyable journey free from practice emergencies thrown at us by our instructors. After just seven hours flying time of circuits and basic emergency drills it was an exhilarating feeling when my instructor Lieutenant Mike Crabtree jumped out and let me loose on my own for the first time.
Over the next few months, we practised basic circuits, instrument flying in cloud, navigation, night-flying and formation flying. On almost every sortie, we would practise autorotation, the emergency procedure needed when everything turns to a can of worms. If either the engines or transmission or tail rotor fail on a helicopter, the pilot’s only weapon to avoid making a big hole in the ground is the momentum in the rotor blades. In the same way that winged sycamore seeds spin around of their own accord as they descend from a tree, helicopters can descend without power under some semblance of control. Of course for a seven-ton helicopter (about the same weight as an old red London double-decker bus) the rate of descent is more akin to a flying brick than a graceful sycamore seed. But the principle holds. By dumping all power immediately you sense a problem; the blades continue to rotate on their own – hence ‘auto-rotation’ – driven by the wind now passing up through them as you descend.
So when disaster strikes, the pilot’s first job is to dump the collective lever immediately. You have about one second to do this before the rotor blades slow down irreversibly. Dumping power reduces
the drag on the blades. But it also reduces the lift that keeps you in the sky. As you descend rapidly, you are looking out for some suitable field or other landing point just in front of the helicopter’s nose. The choices are fairly limited once your helicopter has become little more than a rotary glider. At a critical moment, some 100 to 150 feet above the ground, you ease back on the cyclic to raise the nose, reduce forward speed, slow your rate of descent, and give the blades a bit of extra momentum as the wind through them increases. At about ten to twenty feet above the ground, you are aiming to wind up the flare so that the helicopter almost reaches a stationary hover. But with no power to keep the blades rotating, you are only going one way. Down. The final task is to haul on the collective lever and use all the remaining momentum in the blades to cushion the landing. We practised endless ‘autos’ from a variety of positions in the sky: from 1,000 feet, 200 feet, upwind, downwind, from high and low hovers. To our instructors’ considerable credit, and despite the huge size of the Wessex, none of us ever pranged.
Now that we could handle the basics, we moved on to Operational Flying Training where we learned to use the Wessex in its operating role. This involved winching, day and night load-lifting, troop-carrying, low-level flying, confined area landings, tactical formation, mountain flying (in Wales), search-and-rescue procedures, day and night deck-landings and 2-inch rocket firing.
Rocket firing at the range in Castlemartin, South Wales, was especially good fun. The seven students and two helicopter warfare instructors, Lieutenants Pete Manley and Paul Schwarz, took three aircraft away for a couple of days. Each of the Wessex was fitted with rocket pods. We could carry a maximum of twenty-eight rockets, seven in the top half and seven in the bottom half on each side. The firing range was an area of moorland and scrub leading to a cliff edge by the sea. Perched at the end was an old Second World War tank. The technique for firing was to approach the range at low level, about ninety degrees off target, pull up to about 1,000 feet and roll into a steep dive towards the target. The sighting system involved little more than lining up the cross hairs on a glass sight with a point on the windscreen behind it, marked with a chinagraph pen. It was hardly high-tech stuff and our accuracy reflected this. Although I did manage one hit out of the many rockets I fired, the proof of the pudding was that the tank was still there after years of Wessex firings and misses. Still, rockets might keep people’s heads down if ever used in anger.
