by Mike Brooke
‘OK,’ I said, ‘but I’ll trade a bit of height for speed on the break!’
So we turned onto the centreline at about 5 miles from the runway and I called, ‘Nugget 51, initials.’
‘Nugget 51 you are cleared for the break – circuit clear,’ came the response from the man in the tower.
At about 1 mile I put the nose down slightly and managed to build the speed up to 210kt, just half the locally laid down limit. When I turned left onto the downwind leg I climbed from about 500ft (again about half the local limit) and, without touching the power the speed dropped nicely to below the undercarriage-lowering limit and I selected some flap. I could see Lossiemouth town ahead but we hadn’t yet reached the nearest dwelling so I dropped a bit more flap, reduced power and turned smartly left onto a close final turn. Soon afterwards we were rolling down the runway and receiving our parking instructions.
‘Nugget 51, taxi to three-quarters hard,’ came the mysterious directions.
‘Say again?’ I replied.
‘You will be parking between numbers 3 and 4 hangars, 51. Just turn left there and go straight ahead.’
Like a good pilot I did what I was told. But as we proceeded I could see that we were going to pass between the control tower and some buildings. I wasn’t entirely sure that I could get through unscathed. I advised the controller of my concern. ‘What’s your wingspan, 51?’ he asked politely.
‘95ft,’ I replied.
‘Stop!’ came the response.
I obeyed. There was then a pause while, no doubt, somebody was dispatched to find out just how wide the gap actually was.
‘OK, 51, turn left there and we’ll let the marshallers know that your parking arrangements have changed.’
‘Roger’ I replied and waited until a man with red table tennis bats directed me into a big enough space for our rumbling flying machine. When we had parked and were disembarking a young airman turned up who said that he was looking for the aircraft captain. I owned up.
‘Wing commander ops wants to see you right away, sir. Please follow me,’ he said, adding, ‘He seemed a bit peeved, sir.’
It was nice of him to give me a bit of a warning and I asked Sean if he would like to come and provide a bit of moral support. Being the nice chap that he was he readily agreed. We followed the airman to the open door of the wing commander’s office. We were instructed, not invited, by a loud, gruff voice to enter.
There followed a long, loud and continuous diatribe that included comments about coming too low on the break, flying over Lossiemouth town and having holes dug in his airfield. Mentally I accepted the first, denied the second and was totally at a loss about the third. The wing commander went on to complain about Boscombe Down and its way of doing things and closed with an instruction, not an invitation, to leave his office and, I imagined, the unsaid thought that we were not to darken its threshold again.
Outside and out of the said senior officer’s earshot I asked Sean what he thought of that. ‘He must be having a bad day,’ opined my nav, ‘but what was all that about holes being dug in his airfield?’
‘Beats me,’ I said.
Later on we discovered that another trials aircraft, a Puma helicopter from RAE Bedford, was sharing the same trial with its FLIR. It turned out that their system was mounted in a turret that was lowered through the cabin floor when in use. If the electro-hydraulic system that raised it failed then the only solution, to avoid damaging hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of white-hot technology, was for the helicopter to land over a hole deep enough to avoid ground contact. The Puma pilot, Alistair, from the RRS, had apparently sent all this information to Lossiemouth in advance. But when he had arrived, some hours before we did, there was no hole. Alistair was a straight-talking Scotsman and had obviously upset Wingco Ops with his demand for spade-equipped ops staff to get out on the grass and get digging! It was done but it did stretch the wing commander’s patience to breaking point. And then we arrived and broke it completely! Ah, such is trials life and life’s trials.
All after that went well, but we did get tired. On the third sortie, when we had got airborne at 1 a.m., we flew about two hours ‘on task’ with HMS Blake. When, finally, the word came from the boffins in the bowels of the aeroplane that they had got enough data recorded I climbed to 2,000ft, selected the autopilot on and headed back to Lossiemouth. The radio was very quiet and I told the controller that I would head towards the extended runway centreline and make an approach to land using the ILS. No more run-in-and-breaks, just the quietest straight-in approach that I could make. It was very dark and very quiet with just the gentle drone of the engines in the background.
The next thing that I was aware of was my head snapping upright. I’ve been asleep, I thought. I wonder for how long? I was about to tell Sean and looked across the cockpit only to find him in a somnolent posture! I looked at my watch and decided that it could have only been a minute or two. Good old ‘George’ our very mature autopilot had kept us on heading and height. But it was a worrying event. I turned the small louvers that let cold air into the cockpit to open and directed them to blow into my face, disconnected the autopilot and gave Sean a nudge. I didn’t let on that I had nodded off too. We flew again later that day having spent a few hours in bed trying to sleep while the local jets tore the sky asunder.
Another foray with the Royal Navy involved a submarine; this time in the English Channel. It was a hazy day but there was a very high priority on this adventure. Questions were being asked as to whether FLIR could detect the wake of a submerged submarine, due to the heat generated by the engines and propellers. We had been given a position and time for our rendezvous and set off south from Farnborough to be there. The brief was that the sub would start on the surface and then make a slow submerge while we flew around to see whether we could see the wake. As we neared the RV position on the heading given by the sub we could see nothing ahead in the water. Varsity 679 had a Low-Light TV camera alongside the FLIR and the boffins could display either on our screen up-front. Outside the visibility was not good so I asked for LLTV, which often penetrates mist quite well. But to no avail, nothing in the water ahead. We went back to the FLIR display. The nav, Mo Hammond, said ‘One minute to go.’ I wondered whether the Navy had done one of their favourite tricks again – mixing up time zones and being an hour out.
‘Thirty seconds,’ said Mo.
‘Wait a mo, Mo,’ I said. ‘What’s that hotspot there?’
‘Not sure.’
As we watched the spot grew bigger and out of the window I could now see the bulk of one of Her Majesty’s underwater boats rising impressively out of the water. Spot on time and spot on position. Well done, Navy! The trial went well but the answer to the question was ‘No’.
Note
21 ‘Nugget’ was a long-standing collective callsign for RAE pilots.
19 AND THE ARMY
But it wasn’t all playing with the dark blue – the khaki became our targets as well. Someone somewhere, probably from the Ministry of Silly Trials again, wanted FLIR imagery of a Main Battle Tank (MBT) firing its gun. Could the shell be seen and tracked? So we were dispatched to the Army firing range at Lulworth Cove on the south Dorset coast. An MBT was being sent there especially for the trial. We arrived a little ahead of the planned time to be greeted with ‘Ah, hello Nugget 51, I’m afraid that there’s going to be a bit of a delay.’
No further information being forthcoming I responded with the usual aircrew question, ‘How long?’
‘Not sure, old boy. We’re trying to find out what’s going on ourselves. Apparently the tank transporter has had a bit of a problem.’
We decided that we would follow the road out of the range to see if we could spot it. Within a very short time we had spotted a long truck at an odd angle and an MBT lying upside down next to it. We informed the range officer. He was not best pleased. It was soon obvious that our MBT was going to remain on its back, like a stranded turtle, for more time than we ha
d fuel to wait. So we took a few infrared pictures of the underside of the said armoured vehicle and hightailed it back to base. There won’t be many air-to-ground infrared images like that, I thought. The trial eventually happened but someone else flew the slot. However, I did see the recordings and the shells were very easily visible. What use that knowledge was I never really grasped!
The Army had an annual exercise on Salisbury Plain called Exercise Phantom Bugle – soon known to us as Phantom Bungle. We were to be allowed to fly over the exercise during set periods by day and by night. So the planning went ahead. In order to maximise the data that we could gather the trials protocol brought with it a requirement to fly at the periods just around dusk and dawn. This was because of a phenomenon known to the boffins as ‘thermal crossover’. This was when there was a waning of thermal contrast in the terrain due to the cooling down or warming up of the landscape. This effect made it harder for the FLIR to give a sharp and definitive image to the scenery and so much harder for an operator to interpret what he or she was seeing; this was of particular interest for us up front using the images to avoid hitting the ground.
This in turn meant that the plan involved getting airborne at around 4 a.m. for the dawn slot and not landing until after midnight for the dusk one. It was at this point that I learnt that we would therefore have to detach to RAF Lyneham at the far end of Wiltshire, home to the RAF’s Hercules Tactical Transport Force. I queried why we could not fly out of Farnborough and was told that it was because of a local working agreement between, of course, the management and the unions. It turned out that any member of a trades union who was still on the premises after midnight had to be paid until 8 a.m., and at an elevated rate. Apparently management were not going to be paying anyone anything if they were not actually doing something for it!
The next time I was strapping into an aircraft I chatted to my two ground crew, who were, like all their colleagues, civilians. I asked them whether what I had heard was true. They confirmed it.
‘But do you realise that if the unions had not insisted on this blanket eight hours of extra payment and if we flew from here next week and were not detached to Lyneham you’d all get about another three hours at time and a half? Instead you’re going to get nothing.’
I didn’t think any more about it until I got a call from the group captain’s PA who asked me to go over and see him. I complied as quickly as I could, as you do. I was shown into the great man’s office. ‘I’ve just got back from a Board Meeting and heard that you have been stirring up dissension in the ranks. Apparently some of the ground crew have been giving the shop stewards a hard time over the ban on working after midnight. What did you actually say, young fellah me lad?’
I told him and didn’t spare him my opinion that the men had been given a bad deal by this arrangement.
‘Yes, I see. Well, I have to order you to desist in any future interference between the ground crew and their union masters. As a serving officer it’s not your place to get involved in civilian working arrangements. Understood?’
‘Yessir,’ I replied with a suitably hangdog expression.
‘Right that’s it, you can go now. By the way, strictly entre nous, I do tend to agree with you.’
So the following week we set off for Lyneham, with a bevy of boffins, two ground crew and Sean Sparks as our directional and positional consultant, aka ‘nav’.
We arrived at Lyneham on Tuesday 11 July after having flown for a couple of hours back and forth over the exercise areas on Salisbury Plain chasing tanks and other assorted militaria. After landing we were parked amongst the Hercules, for once feeling relatively small. As we were offloading our bags for onwards transport to our accommodation a Land Rover turned up with a young airman in it. Memories of our reception at Lossiemouth resurfaced.
‘Could the aircraft captain please come with me?’ asked the youthful driver politely.
Sean offered to come with me but, being pretty certain that we had not done anything remotely approaching naughty, I declined and asked him to take charge of getting everyone to the accommodation. I was taken to the rather grand building that announced itself with a large nameplate as Station Operations. Inside I was guided to – yes, you’ve guessed it – the office of Wing Commander Operations. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘The Station Commander has just been on the phone rather angrily demanding to know “What on earth is that Varsity doing here?” I told him that you were from Farnborough doing some sort of trial with the Army on Salisbury Plain, but he was still not very happy.’
My puzzled look gained more information.
‘Last week we took delivery of a Varsity from RAF Training Command that was due to go to the Fire Section’s Practice Ground. We had heard that this was the last of the RAF’s Varsities so we put on a bit of a ceremony; you know, flags and fizzy wine and that sort of thing. We even had the RAF News come and take photographs. So it was a heck of a surprise that, less than a week later, you turn up in a perfectly serviceable and obviously still in use Varsity with RAF roundels on it!’
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there were still another three flying. ‘Well, strictly speaking, sir, the Varsity you are going to burn may well be the last that the RAF operated. Ours is not RAF, it is part of the Ministry of Defence Procurement Executive’s fleet. I think that you can reassure the Station Commander that he hasn’t jumped the gun,’ I said as reassuringly as I could.
‘OK, thanks. How long is yours going to be flying?’ he asked.
‘Oh, years yet,’ I said with a mischievous grin.
‘Get out,’ the wing commander rejoined – with a grin of his own.
A bit like the exercise with HMS Blake this trial brought with it some very unsociable hours and our fatigue was not helped by us being housed in temporary accommodation far too close to the taxiways and main runway to be conducive with sleeping during normal working hours. Messrs Lockheed’s C-130 Hercules is a fine beast and rugged transporter of all things military, but it makes a phenomenal amount of noise moving around on the ground.
Despite this we flew over ten hours of productive FLIR data gathering and we all learnt a lot more about the system’s capabilities. The one part of the trial that I still vividly remember was when we had arrived at dawn and the main force of Chieftain tanks were barrelling across the plain like the Russian hordes coming through the Fulda Gap. The problem was that no one could see them. There was a shallow but thick layer of fog. But as we flew towards the wide line of tanks the FLIR was picking up lighter coloured lines in the fog from the heat of the tanks’ exhausts warming the air stirred up behind them. Visually I could still see nothing but a white layer below us, but on the FLIR I was able to home in on a few tanks by following their warm wake.
Sure enough as we closed in on them the white hotspot of the engine compartment glowed on the FLIR. If I had been armed with an infrared missile I could easily have taken them out, despite them being totally obscured by the fog. Result!
As always in defence-related science, as soon as someone invents something that might become an effective threat then someone else (often from the same company) invents a countermeasure. So it was with FLIR. Because the infrared radiation can be blocked, dependent on the wavelength being used, the best countermeasure would be to produce a shield of something with elements of that size: in this case 8 to 13 microns.22 One of the ways of making a hot target disappear would be to immerse it in smoke with particles of the right size.
Thus it was that in the summer of 1977 I was summoned to a meeting in the office of Mr Terry Hallet, the RAE’s Air Weapons Department trials co-ordinator of all things FLIR.
‘We’re going to have a look at whether a tank can hide itself from FLIR in a cloud of smoke,’ he announced.
Not using mirrors as well, I thought, but said nowt.
Terry continued, ‘Next week a Chieftain MBT will be positioned in Long Valley and we are going to fly shallow-dive attacks at it, as if we were an infrared missile and see what
the effect of the smoke canisters will be.’
‘Well we won’t have to go far,’ I said. ‘That’ll give the navs an easy job for once.’
This was because the Long Valley Military Vehicles Trials and Test Area was literally over the fence from Farnborough airfield.
We had a chat about speeds, angles of dive and minimum heights. When I enquired about the latter the answer was, ‘How low can you come?’
‘I’ll have to ask but I expect that 100ft could be allowed,’ I replied, more in hope than expectation. When I got back to the office I talked over the trials protocol with ‘he who must be obeyed’ and he said that he would put up the request for a minimum pass distance of 100ft to higher authority. So that was that.
Some days later Terry rang me to say that the tank would be available on Thursday 4 August. ‘Right I’ll set it up; just let me have the times when you know them,’ I said. Come the day our boss, Sqn Ldr Rich Rhodes, had gone away so ‘Jack’ Frost was acting as the flight commander and was about to authorise me. We went through the trials procedure and checked that we had been authorised to fly our ‘attacks’ to a minimum of 100ft. He duly signed me off and Mo Hammond and I went off to meet the boffins at the aircraft over the other side of the airfield.
We got airborne on our planned time and by dint of a left turn found ourselves immediately over Long Valley, with its network of sandy tracks, scrub and fir trees. The weather was perfect. The tank was in position and we made a few practice runs to ensure that everyone was happy with all the parameters. Mo was calling out the heights from the radio altimeter in 50ft increments as we descended on our 8–10° dive. His voice got higher as we went below our usual minimum of 250ft! When we were all happy we instructed the tank commander to deploy his smoke canisters. These were explosively ejected in a circular pattern around the tank, landing at a radius of about 30ft. We turned in for our attack and, sure enough, we could not see the Chieftain, either visually or on the FLIR. Any tracking device would have been useless and as there was virtually no wind the tank remained hidden until well after we had passed over it.
