Joint Force Harrier

by Adrian Orchard

  Mouldy and Bernard worked hard taking a talk-on to a single compound in the Green Zone, simply because for some time they couldn’t see it. They eventually acquired it only because the mortar rounds had lit a small fire in one corner of it. Mastiff wanted an airburst 300 yards from his position but because it was such a vague target he wanted a mark first. He explained that the choppers were getting closer, so the Harrier pilots needed to get on with it. He was very conscious of the danger-close nature of it all and wanted Type One control.

  ‘I tipped in for the mark,’ Bernard said, ‘and banged out flares all the way down the dive, but then I had to abort the attack because the JTAC couldn’t see me. As I reset, Mastiff told us they were going to have to pull back in their vehicles, because they were taking too much incoming fire for the QRF to land there.

  ‘I tipped in for the second attack and emptied the flare bucket down in the dive. This time Mastiff saw me and cleared me in hot, but as I pressed the pickle button I saw another compound with an even smaller fire in some trees way short of the intended target. Sure enough, Mastiff said they went long – we’d first identified the wrong compound. Then I called tally on the right target, but at that moment the QRF arrived on the scene. They weren’t on our frequency, so we couldn’t de-conflict the engagement and the boys on the ground had to withdraw. We provided top cover for their withdrawal, but by that time we were approaching bingo fuel.’

  You can set your own ‘bingo’ – low-level – fuel at a higher figure than the minimum, which we did all the time, because when you reached that state you could then decide whether to stay on task or go. But the aircraft has its own sets of warnings, and when the fuel level gets really low these will come on and stay on.

  The warning appears in two stages: steady and then flashing when fuel is critically low. When both lights come on steadily, it means you’re down to about 750lb each side, which is enough for about 100 miles of flight. Double flashing bingo lights mean 250lb a side. At the best possible burn rate, and with about 50lb a side always unusable, that equates to about eight minutes of flying time left. At a high power setting, for example in the climb, that reduces to maybe three or four minutes, and this means a landing is impossible because you can’t get the aircraft down from high level in that time and land safely.

  ‘Then Fenners and Gandalf arrived as Devil Five Seven and Five Eight to provide RIP,’ Bernard continued. This pair who provided ‘Relief in Place’ for their two fellow pilots were Rob Fenwick, a Royal Marine major and one of only three RM Harrier pilots, and Lieutenant Nathan Gray, known as Nath when he wasn’t Gandalf.

  Bernard and Mouldy stayed a bit longer to talk them on to Mastiff and get them visual with the helos, and then started a bingo recovery to Kandahar. They’d planned to leave and get back with 1,200lb of fuel, not 1,600, as they were on a TIC, but the talk-on with Fenners had taken a little longer than they’d hoped, and Bernard estimated he was going to get to the overhead at Kandahar with only about 1,000lb. He didn’t think that would be a problem, as he was going to start his descent at twenty miles, which would bring him back up to around 1,200.

  But as soon as they checked in with Trumpcard, about sixty miles from the airfield, they were asked if they could do an air-to-air refuelling for a major TIC that was in progress, because there were no other assets available. Mouldy said the only way they could attempt it would be if the tanker could meet them on the way to Kandahar, and explained that they couldn’t deviate from their course.

  A few minutes later Shell Nine One, a USAF Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker fitted with a Multi-Point Refuelling System, appeared in a sixty-degree turn and rolled out right in front of them. They had to sacrifice some fuel to climb the extra 1,000 feet and close the mile to the tanker. Refuelling from an MPRS is tricky at the best of times, because the drogue is close to the ends of the wings, and the chicks always get buffeted by the wingtip vortices.

  ‘Mouldy asked me what my fuel was in clear,’ Bernard said, ‘and I lied a little bit about that – sorry. But he knew I had to have less fuel than him because of the attacks I’d carried out.’

  ‘When he told me what he had,’ Mouldy chimed in, ‘I said he had just one chance to do this, and only if the tanker would clear him for a direct contact from one mile astern. The tanker crew agreed to this and Bernard made the plug of his life – quite outstanding. We kept on trucking towards Kandahar till I plugged in, and then the tanker started to drag us towards the Baghran Valley at the far north end of Helmand Province.’

  ‘While we were plugged in,’ Bernard said, ‘Mouldy chopped to Trumpcard in the green to get the details of the TIC while I stayed on the boom frequency, and even wrote down the stuff while he was in the basket, which was pretty cool.’

  ‘That’s why he’s the Senior Pilot,’ I said.

  While Mouldy was off frequency, the Shell crew explained that they’d been on their way home, which fortunately took them right across the Harriers’ return to base track, but had been told to swing by and give the two aircraft every last drop they could spare. Bernard managed to coax an extra 1,000lb from them after they stopped flowing fuel, which brought him up to 6,000lb, pretty much in line with Mouldy.

  ‘The moment we unplugged,’ he explained, ‘Mouldy told me that the ground callsign Mastiff Zero Six was in a hell of a state. They had two A-10s already on station, but the Warthogs had Winchestered themselves – they’d fired everything they had – and were remaining as the on-scene commander just waiting for our arrival. And Mastiff reckoned there were so many Taliban facing them that they were about to be overrun any minute.’

  The Harriers left the tanker and steamed in there as fast as they could. They arrived above the A-10s and the American pilots started talking them on to the JTAC, Mastiff Zero Six. It turned out the troops had been conducting an advance to contact down the valley and had run into a Taliban unit later estimated at between 300 and 350 strong. The JTAC was so exhausted by the time the Harriers arrived he was pretty much unable to speak at all except to clear them in hot.

  All the talk-on, de-confliction and target marking was performed by an FAC(A) – forward air controller (airborne) – qualified A-10 pilot with the callsign Hawg, with final clearance from the Mastiff Zero Six. Also on station was a Predator, and he was continuously lasing the Taliban units. It had been bloody busy out there as the Harriers held position in the overhead, listening to Hawg sort out all the information before giving him the fighter check-in and starting the talk-on.

  ‘The first thing the A-10 pilot said was, “Hey, fellas, these guys are in a whole world of trouble down there. They’re firing all kinds of arty and mortars at the Taliban, but if they stop they’ll be overrun. I haven’t got a clue what the max-ord or gun target lines are. Are you happy to continue?”

  ‘Well, obviously we said we were, so he gave us a five-line and the Predator driver said he was going to lase the target for us.’

  A ‘five-line’ is simply an abbreviated version of the standard nine-line brief given to a pilot by the FAC or JTAC.

  The de-confliction plan required the Harriers to hold on one side of the river while the A-10s would hold on the other, because it might be necessary to tip in one of the Warthogs for white phosphorus marking, or get some smoke laid down by mortars on the ground.

  ‘This was already pissing our fuel over the side by making us turn up our own arses in the overhead, and by this point I was sweating bullets,’ Bernard muttered. ‘This had already been my first TIC support sortie, my first engagement, and the tightest I had ever considered pushing the fuel before the pressure plug to end all plugs.

  ‘And now there we were, once again approaching bingo fuel, 120 miles away from Kandahar Airfield, listening to a terrified and out-of-breath JTAC screaming over the noise of belt-fed machine-gun fire as we started to attack. I didn’t bugger about, just ran in and dropped the five-forty airburst on to the Predator laser spot as soon as everyone was happy for the engagement.’

  Bernard se
t up to re-attack straight away with the operational pod of rockets, but the bingo warner was already going off in his ear. He’d reset Sangin bingo off the tanker, not realizing how far away they were, and he knew that this had to be his last attack as the fuel was now too tight to push it any more.

  ‘Down in the dive, at the exact moment that I pickled I got four hashes on the screen and nothing happened. I let go of the WRB and mashed down on it again but got the same four hashes. But the SMS page still showed the operational pod.’

  The SMS page was the interface with the stores management system, the computer that controlled weapons mode, selection and release.

  ‘After listening to the JTAC and his predicament for thirty minutes I no longer cared about the consequences. I just wanted to get the rockets off. I tipped in again and this time everything looked like it should work. As I approached the release point I heard Hoggy – Lieutenant Adam Hogg – and Flatters check in as Knife Five Three and Five Four. They’d been scrambled to help out on this TIC.

  ‘I pickled, the rockets fired and I immediately radioed the JTAC. “Mastiff Zero Six, Devil Five Five, you’ve got Knife Five Three flight in the overhead, and they’ve got the same load out as us, but we seriously need to go.” ’

  Mastiff acknowledged. The two Harriers climbed up to 29,000 feet and Bernard worked out that he should make it back to base OK with the fuel he had but, as he levelled at twenty-nine he got double flashing bingos, and at that moment he knew there was no way he was going to be able to reach Kandahar. For some reason it seemed that the fuel level was so low that it wouldn’t flow at that altitude when he pulled the power back. As long as the engine was at full power there was enough fuel tank air pressure to push it all through, but of course he couldn’t stay at full power.

  The Harrier’s fuel tanks are pressurized by tapping a little air flow from the engine, and what Bernard was telling me suggested that he had so little fuel in them that the air pressure wasn’t enough to push it through the large tanks unless the engine was running at almost full power, which of course then drank the scarce fuel faster. It was Hobson’s Choice.

  ‘I screamed like a girl to Mouldy, and started looking for somewhere to jump out as we began to descend. When I got down to 19,000 the starboard fuel light went out but the port stayed on. It eventually dawned on me that I had refuelled asymmetrically on the tanker and so all of my remaining fuel was in the right-hand set of tanks. Really, really embarrassing.’

  But at that point Bernard had stopped panicking and done what he should have done in the first place. As the good book says, ‘he carried out the appropriate actions in accordance with the Flight Reference Cards’. Translated into English, that just means he looked up what he was supposed to do, then did it. And as he transferred fuel into the correct tanks, at a stroke his fuel crisis was over. It didn’t make him feel much better. ‘It felt more like I should be filling out a Human Factors Occurrence Report,’ he admitted, ‘explaining that I was a fucking idiot who shouldn’t be allowed up in a Cessna trainer unsupervised, far less sent into combat in a Harrier.’

  Bernard and Mouldy landed back at Kandahar, shut down the two jets and drove back to Ops in silence. Which is when they stumbled across me. Probably the last person Bernard fancied confessing to.

  But for all the drama on that occasion, tanking was something we got very used to carrying out. From a practical point of view, the length of our sorties depended on the number of times we were able to refuel, so a six-hour sortie would see us at the tanker twice.

  If there was a lot of activity planned for the A-10s and F-15s out of Kabul, the tankers would be positioned on one of the northerly tracks. But the reality was that there was always a lot of action down to the south, in the Kandahar area, so the tankers were invariably prepared to move south, and there was almost always one we could get to if we needed to refuel in an emergency.

  Night-time tanking is ‘sporty’, to put it mildly, and any form of tanking really concentrates the mind. It’s a bit like driving a car up to the rear of a truck that’s doing seventy miles an hour and getting close enough behind and to one side of it so that the car’s driver can open his window, place his hand on the back of the truck and then hold it in that position for five minutes.

  On the GR7 Harrier, the refuelling probe is located above the left-hand engine intake and is normally folded flat. To refuel, we raise the probe so that it stands above the intake, and in this position the tip of it is just about visible in our peripheral vision. The tanker is a modified airliner, travelling at maybe 300 knots indicated airspeed – which is over 450mph over the ground because of the altitude we’re flying at, between 20,000 and 27,000 feet – and it trails a hose behind it, on the end of which is a basket perhaps two feet in diameter.

  This basket has little vanes on it to give it some aerodynamic stability and keep it straight. Our closing speed is only three or four miles an hour faster than the tanker, and the intention is to fly the probe into the centre of the basket so that it plugs in properly to the geo-lock and the fuel starts flowing. Then we hold that position for some five to seven minutes while the Harrier’s tanks fill. Once we’ve taken on sufficient fuel, we disconnect and drop away below the tanker and return to our tasking.

  Now while this may demand a little concentration in broad daylight, at night, in turbulent air, maybe a little adverse weather and doing the whole thing wearing night-vision goggles, the refuelling operation can get more interesting. In a sphincter-tightening kind of way.

  I was still reflecting on what Bernard and Mouldy had told me about their sortie when, tired out, I crawled into bed that night. I was aware of a number of aircraft incidents and accidents that involved a succession of problems, insignificant in themselves, but which, taken cumulatively, had resulted in the loss of an aircraft, and in some cases the death of the pilot as well.

  The story Bernard had told struck an immediate chord. If the talk-on at Sangin had taken any longer; if the Shell tanker had been empty, or too far away to carry out the refuel; if Bernard had made a pig’s ear of plugging into the tanker; if he hadn’t realized he’d refuelled asymmetrically, I could now have been looking at a crashed Harrier and, quite possibly, a missing or even dead pilot. Certainly if Bernard had ejected, and been found by the Taliban before we got a rescue chopper out to him, he would certainly have been killed, probably very painfully.

  But it hadn’t happened that way. And I knew Bernard, on his first combat tour, would chalk the whole episode down to experience and ironically be a better pilot for it.

  We simply couldn’t afford to lose a Harrier – the propaganda victory that would hand to the Taliban, who would immediately claim to have shot it down, would be overwhelming – and I certainly wasn’t prepared to lose a pilot. That really would validate the doubts that had been conveyed to me about the suitability and viability of 800 NAS operating in Afghanistan.

  As I drifted off I wondered if I really had done everything I could to head off problems at the pass. I tried to put the thought to one side and get to sleep.

  12

  We had received intelligence that a coalition convoy was very likely to be attacked by a suicide bomber, who was driving around the area in a VBIED, a vehicle-borne IED – a car or truck stuffed with explosives, just looking for a coalition target.

  The two main routes near Kandahar were Highway One and Highway Four – the second runs down to the Pakistan border – and whenever we were flying in those areas we would always try to follow the roads fairly closely, in what we called ‘highway patrol’. There’s a balance to be struck between risk and effect, but we could put down a lot of noise and still remain outside the threat envelope of most missile systems.

  The lifelines of the coalition forces were the roads, because the bulk of our regular supplies arrived at Kandahar by road convoy. If a group of Taliban was busy laying an IED by the side of the road, or digging in a few mines, the chances were that they’d stop and scatter if they heard an aircraft
approaching.

  Road convoys in Afghanistan were always escorted by heavily armed troops and armoured vehicles. With Neil Bing as my wing-man, I’d been tasked to provide top cover. From the cockpits of our two Harriers we could provide detailed surveillance of the route the convoy was having to take to get to their main internal FOB, only about a mile away – sixty seconds on a motorway, but possibly a whole lifetime in Afghanistan – on the other side of a fairly densely packed residential area, an ideal hunting ground for the Taliban.

  Cruising overhead, we’d been in contact with the troops on the ground for a while and were nervous on their behalf, although there was nothing we could do to help them apart from visually checking their route through the village. The risk of collateral damage would have prevented us dropping weapons there even if they did come under attack.

  What struck both of us was the very rapid speech of the men on the radio – in a tense situation, most people talk a lot faster than normal – and the sheer naked fear in their voices, fear that reflected the knowledge that their convoy was almost certainly going to become a target.

  And suddenly their fears seemed to be justified. Down on the ground below us, we could see a car or a small truck, getting closer and closer to the convoy. It was driving systematically through the residential area, and it looked to us like the driver was probably carrying out a search for something. And in the circumstances it was more likely that he was looking for the coalition convoy rather than just, say, an address to deliver some goods.

  ‘Recoil Four Seven. Heads-up. We can see a vehicle moving towards you. It’s zigzagged its way through the residential area and now, as you come up through the centre of the area, it’s coming in at ninety degrees down the next street on your right-hand side. Its range is about two hundred yards … One hundred and fifty … One hundred. You’ll see it any second now.’