Joint Force Harrier

by Adrian Orchard

  ‘And we weren’t the only assets in the air, either,’ Williamson added. ‘We’d been told there was a Predator flying about. That was being piloted from the States as usual, but he was on our frequency and trying to pinpoint the exact location of the Taliban attackers. And as well as the UAV, there was a British Apache attack chopper there as well, trying to do the same thing.’

  ‘It was total bloody chaos, boss,’ Jacobs said. ‘Five speaking units all on the same frequency, one getting the shit kicked out of him by the Taliban machine-guns while the other four of us tried to work out just where the insurgents were holed up so we could take them out. Plus we were trying keep out of the way of the UAV and the Apache. It was really fierce, really confused, and this guy on the ground was getting more and more alarmed.’

  As he described the incident I began to appreciate the problems they’d faced. The multiple speaking units, all on the same radio frequency, had generated continuous, urgent and pretty chaotic radio talk, but through it all the voice of the man on the ground was getting increasingly stressed and frightened. And his message was quite clear: if somebody didn’t shut down the Taliban’s heavy machine-guns, the patrol was going to get ripped apart. It was as simple as that.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jacobs continued, ‘we finally worked out where the Taliban were firing from. It was a typical walled compound, and at least one of the heavy machine-guns was in the building at one end of it. My Harrier had the 1,000-pounders, and we reckoned those were the most appropriate weapons. We positively identified the target, briefed the UAV pilot and the Apache about our intentions so they could get the hell out of our way, and told the guy on the ground to get his head down. I selected the PGM, aimed the laser at the target building and we started the attack run.’

  The procedure was simple enough. The pilot ensures he has a positive identification of the target, aims his laser designator at it and then releases his Precision Guided Munition, which is guided by the laser. The laser energy bounces off the target, and all the way through the bomb’s flight the pilot steers the weapon by using his tracking ability to maintain the laser’s lock on the target.

  ‘I had a good lock, weapon release was fine, and the bomb hit right on the money. Straight in through the roof, a big bang inside the building and, as far as I could see, no damage outside it, or no significant collateral damage anyway. And it worked, because the American radio operator called us up immediately. He said that the machine-gun had stopped firing, but then the other one started up again, from the far end of the compound, and they were taking heavy small-arms fire as well from the same location. And they’d seen a bunch of men running towards that end of the compound as well, so it looked as if we’d only done half the job and the patrol was still pinned down.

  ‘That wasn’t a problem, as far as I could see. We all knew where the first weapon had landed – the hole in the roof of the building was difficult to miss – so I just confirmed with this guy that they were taking heavy fire from the opposite end of the same compound. That positively identified the target. The Rules of Engagement were satisfied, as far as I was concerned, so I broadcast that I’d drop another weapon – another 1,000-pounder – on the new target. Then Ted had to break off because he was close to bingo fuel.’

  ‘Yes,’ Williamson confirmed, ‘but the tanker wasn’t that far away, so I detached and punched up to it. I knew Buzz could handle the second attack run. I was only really a spectator on this one.’

  ‘Anyway, Ted hauled his Harrier up into a climb and I swung round in a circle for another attack run. I put the laser on the target, selected the second weapon and started the run-in. I confirmed I had a good laser lock, dropped the weapon and started to turn away as usual.’

  Jacobs felt and heard the normal sequence of responses following weapon release. The aircraft shuddered as the bomb fell away, and almost immediately the radalt warning went off because it fixed on the falling bomb. He heard a tone, a beep as the weapon detached, and then the higher-pitched beep beep beep from the radalt – the normal sequence of sounds that told him the bomb had separated from the aeroplane.

  The weapon was on its way down. Its flight time was about twenty-five seconds from the moment of release to the moment of impact, because of the range to the target and height of the aircraft. Turning his Harrier away from the target was standard procedure, a safety precaution, so that he was paralleling the path of the weapon, but obviously Jacobs kept the laser designator locked on to the target as the bomb fell.

  ‘Then the Apache pilot made a call that changed everything,’ he said. ‘He radioed that he’d just seen a woman and three children running away from the compound, right where the bomb was heading.

  ‘The mathematics were easy. There was no way those four civilians were going to be able to outrun the bomb. Unless I did something, they were going to die – by my hand. It’s all right to talk about accidental deaths, Rules of Engagement and collateral damage, but it’s a hell of a lot different when you’re sitting in the cockpit of a Harrier, and you know that a woman and three kids are about to be blown to pieces because of something you’ve done.’

  And then it was a countdown.

  Fifteen seconds to impact.

  ‘Immediately I asked the Apache pilot to confirm what he’d just said.’

  Twelve seconds.

  ‘He replied: “Confirmed. One woman and three children running from the compound.” ’

  Ten seconds.

  ‘Nothing I could do was going to stop the weapon exploding – that wasn’t in any doubt – and the only option I had left was to try to miss the innocent civilians. “Where can I put the bomb?” I asked.’

  Eight seconds.

  ‘ “North. Put it to the north,” the Apache pilot instructed.

  ‘I knew it was going to be bloody close. I reached down to the laser designator and started slewing it. I watched as the laser spot tracked slowly across the roof of the compound.’

  Six seconds.

  ‘In the first couple of seconds I’d only managed to move it a few feet, and there was a long way to go to the edge of the roof and the boundary wall, so I slowly increased the rate I was moving it, and just hoped the weapon was still locked on.’

  The way Jacobs told it made it sound easy, but the reality was that he’d had to use an incredibly delicate touch. If he tried to move the laser designator too fast, the bomb would lose contact with the reflected laser energy and just carry on its original course. But if he moved it too slowly, the weapon would detonate inside the compound and, in either case, the explosion would probably kill the woman and children.

  Four seconds.

  ‘The laser spot was still on the roof, but getting closer to the edge. I’d been guessing the bomb’s flight time, and hoping like hell I’d underestimated it. I increased the rate of movement of the spot as much as I dared, slewing it closer to the edge of the roof and the outside of the compound.’

  Two seconds.

  ‘I got the laser spot to the edge of the roof and dragged it just over the edge of the compound, got it over the wall. And about half a second later the bomb exploded in the open field just to the north – I’d actually overestimated the flight time by about one second. There was a hell of a bang, but it was just outside the compound and I hoped the walls would have shielded the four civilians from the blast.

  ‘The moment it went off, I called the Apache pilot again, because he was low and close enough to see what had happened and I wasn’t. “Don’t tell me that they’re all dead,” I said.

  ‘ “Negative, negative,” he replied. “They’re alive. They stopped when it exploded, but they’re running again now. Running south, away from the compound.” ’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I said. I’d been on the edge of my seat just hearing him recount it. But I was delighted. It was an excellent example of clear thinking, sheer professionalism and amazingly close coordination between the airmen involved. The moment the crew of the Apache identified the problem, they told the Harr
ier pilot, who was the only one who could do anything about it. Lieutenant Jacobs had immediately asked the only question that mattered: where should he divert the bomb to save the woman and children? And with eight seconds to spare, he calmly altered the weapon’s trajectory just enough to achieve his objective. It was, by any criteria, an extraordinary piece of flying.

  And now there were just days to go before we handed over to 1 (F) Squadron RAF and headed for home. We’d ridden our luck – I didn’t like to think about those occasions when my pilots had landed their aircraft on fumes, or had pulled off amazing feats of airmanship in supporting the guys on the ground – and we’d been tested.

  Provided nothing went wrong now, I knew we could climb aboard the trooping flight back to Brize Norton with our heads held high. But as the days and hours counted down, the possibility of some kind of sting in the tail loomed ever larger in my imagining.

  But if, as a squadron, 800 NAS had delivered in spades, my own contribution still seemed to have fallen rather short of what I’d hoped for.

  I’d helped shepherd a patrol past some Afghans burning tyres. I’d flown my Harrier, bristling with weapons, and provided top cover for a bustling market-place. And when I was one of a pair of aircraft that actually got involved in a shooting incident, I always seemed to be carrying the wrong weapons for the job.

  The final straw came was when I was just about to take over the GCAS ground alert from the other guys. I was actually signing out my aeroplane when the scramble bell went. Before the other pilot and I could get outside to the pan and climb into the Harriers, the two pilots that we were relieving climbed into the cockpits and fired up the engines, leaving us nothing to do but wave goodbye.

  They went off and delivered a whole bunch of ordnance on various targets and our subsequent period of ground alert, predictably enough, was completely free of any action at all.

  After that the amount of flak I had to endure was enormous. ‘Oh, so you just dawdled out to your aircraft? I suppose you just ambled down to the takeover so that you didn’t have to go out and do the GCAS?’

  I should have been able to ignore it completely, but as I started getting kitted up for my last – and in fact the squadron’s last – flight in theatre, I couldn’t help but hope I might be able to drop something. If nothing else, it might shut the rest of them up before we climbed on to the Hercules to start the journey home.

  In the end, it all came down to that last sortie.

  24

  Briefed, kitted up, the aircraft signed out and ready for the off, I walked across to the Harrier to start my checks.

  I looked inside the engine intakes, checked the glass dome that shields the front of the laser spot tracker, and the little puffer jets that stabilised the Harrier in the hover, then moved on to the weapons hanging under the wings.

  These included laser-guided bombs, and I checked that they were securely mounted, that the control fins were working, that the laser head wasn’t broken and that the correct laser code had been entered. Each bomb had a specific code that was linked to the frequency of the laser designator on the aircraft carrying it. Without a code the weapon could follow any laser beam it acquired, with potentially catastrophic results. So we had a specific bomb code issued, which was entered on every weapon. Perhaps the most important check was to ensure that the tail arming vane, which spins to physically arm the bomb, wasn’t spinning and in fact couldn’t spin. It needed to remain locked in place until released when the bomb separates from the aircraft.

  The CRV-7 rocket pods were easier to check, because they’re just closed pods fitted with a frangible nose-cone that stays in place until the rockets are fired.

  At the back of the aircraft I checked that the expendables – the very comprehensive suite of self-defence flares – were properly seated at the bottom of the fuselage, and also in the rail mounting on the undercarriage that fitted flush with the bottom of the wing.

  Knowing this was my last sortie this time round made me more focused than ever on getting everything right. Once in the cockpit I completed all my pre-start checks. I selected my navigation equipment, which had been aligning, put it into navigation mode to avoid losing all that information, and then checked all the other switches and controls.

  Then I was ready to start the engine. I closed the canopy as a form of protection, looked at the guy outside and signalled to him that I was ready to start. Normally, this is the familiar ‘wind-up’ signal but, because the aircraft was still connected to external power, instead I gave him an ‘unplug’ signal which instructed him to disconnect the external power from the aircraft.

  The maintainer walked to the back of the aircraft, removed the external power cable and replaced the cover on the fuselage. Then he made a final check around the aircraft that everything was correct, and looked at me. He gave me the signal to start the engine by putting his hand over his head and waving his fingers.

  I reached across to the engine start panel on the right-hand side. There’s a small silver vertical knob there, no more than about an inch in height. I lifted this up and pushed it forward, and a magnetic hold-on relay locked it into place. That automatically started the engine sequence.

  Behind my head was a small gas-turbine generator whose sole purpose in life at that point is to start the engine, and almost immediately I could hear it spooling up. Once it fired up, it started a clutching mechanism that began turning the main engine, and spooled up the engine to a point where it was spinning sufficiently fast that I could start adding fuel by easing the throttle forward.

  The igniters had been clicking away in the background all the time. The atomized fuel being sprayed into the engine ignited, and the Pegasus began to accelerate to a self-sustaining speed.

  At that point the little starter engine behind my head stopped and shut itself down automatically. It took about twenty seconds from initiation of the start sequence to the main engine becoming self-sustaining. All the power came back online as the generators started running, and I began working my way through a whole sequence of after-start checks. Around the jet, heat pouring out of the big Pegasus engine’s four nozzles rippled in the air. The aircraft was coming to life.

  On the TV screen I brought up the Built In Test pages, which warned of any automatically selected systems and, more importantly, if they had failed or not. Then I did the Auto BIT check. This is a single soft key that forces most systems to go down and then go into an automatic self-test mode. This includes radios, the laser spot tracker, IFF, FLIR (Forward-Looking Infrared) and other electronic systems.

  These tests take up to about three minutes. While they were being carried out I made a sequence of checks on the automatic stabilization system, which caused the controls to move on their own. The flaps moved to their pre-set positions, and once I’d completed that I switched back to the BIT page to see if it indicated any faults that needed rectifying. If necessary, the jet’s computer systems allowed me to go in deeper and try to fix any problems, but none had been picked up. Time to make the ‘go/no go’ decision. Was the aircraft fit to go flying? No snags. The mission was on.

  I did a force check-in using the back radio: ‘Recoil Four Five, check.’

  ‘Recoil Four Six,’ Dunc Mason responded, and then listened as I contacted our Ops section. I pressed the RT button and said: ‘Spitfire, Recoil Four Five. Any words?’

  That call to our local command structure requested the final release for the mission, asking whether or not they had any last-minute instructions for us. The Ops people might have some advance warning of a TIC or other incident somewhere, through the chat window system.

  In the Ops room one of the computers was linked to a facility, almost like a chatroom, that included networked links to personnel all over the theatre, displayed in a mosaic of windows. This allowed the people at Crowbar – the Command and Control authority based at Camp Bastion, who were effectively the tactical air traffic controllers – Spitfire and everywhere else in the system all the way up to the C
AOC staff in Al Udeid Airbase in Qatar, to see the war unfolding in front of them as it related to different parts of the operational area. Staff could zoom in any window and see details of a developing incident. It was a very flexible and extremely useful system.

  This time there was nothing known, because Spitfire just said: ‘Negative. You’re clear to push.’

  ‘Push’ simply meant ‘push away from my frequency and listen out on the new frequency’, and in this case we’d switch to air traffic.

  Kandahar is, in theory at least, a civilian airfield, and civilian procedures apply, including getting Air Traffic Information Service information before calling air traffic control for taxi clearance, so that’s what we did. We both dialled the ATIS frequency and copied the current information, then switched to ATC.

  ‘Recoil, push stud one.’

  Once we’d switched I called the controller.

  ‘Kandahar Ground, Recoil Four Five. Flight of two Harriers. Request taxi with Delta.’

  That meant we’d copied the current ATIS information – in this case information Delta – and the controller acknowledged.

  ‘Recoil Four Five clear to taxi. Enter runway zero five at Delta Two.’

  Entering the runway at an intermediate point like this was quite common, because the taxiway was often stuffed full of helicopters, particularly in the evening and overnight, and C-17s were always manoeuvring around the airfield. The furthest end of the runway was known as Echo, so in this case we’d enter the runway at Delta Two, taxi all the way down to Echo, then turn round there and take off.

  Finally I passed the controller our outbound headings and departure sectors – there were eight sectors around Kandahar – for our tactical departure. These were always decided by the pilots, and when two aircraft were getting airborne one after the other, the second one would always take a different sector, as a precaution against any insurgents spotting one aircraft leaving and trying to hit the second with a missile if it followed the same course.