Pressing on regardless for the Wingco's AFC
Seeing mention of the old song took me back a bit to just the sort of event that inspired it.
In the early 70's, life on 6Sqn was fairly idyllic. Based at Coningsby, flying about 30hrs month of DFGA on the F4M, it was a grown up Hunter squadron in atmosphere. Go in about 8'ish; check the UK Wx and then launch off somewhere suitable for low level simulated strikes. (Formal Met Brief was only attended by people who weren't flying.) Loads of great detachments. Apart from the two obligatory one month dets at Deci, there were many European visits and occasional weekend a/c to Bruggen. On top of this were the six week visits to Singapore and on one occasion on to Hong Kong. This involved most of the UK tanker force to get 6 a/c out there. (On the OCU course, I recall Mike Flynn's AAR briefing "It's like taking a running f*ck at a rolling doughnut....") Life was one long party.
We thought it was too good to last and indeed, that proved to be the case. The Magic Flying Circus was about to come to town.
The Wheels determined that by employing the Lepus flare, we would be able to carry out self-illuminated sea and ground attack. Joy was unconfined in the ranks.
Initial work-up was on illuminated ranges such as Theddlethorpe and Wainfleet and led in the initial instance to such exchanges as: Pilot "What's our dive angle now?" in a high pitched voice, followed by, Nav "We haven't got any dive angle".
As may be imagined, adrenaline flow was in inverse proportion to beer flow on a summer night. The only upside was the late start the next day.
Weapons employed were 20' freefall, 15' retard, and Sneb. All of this from an academic pattern.
Subsequent self-illuminated was practiced on Jurby, Salisbury Plain and Otterburn, eventually leading up to groups of 5 a/c. These comprised a leader with 3 flares on each inboard pylon, No 2 with 3 flares left side and Sneb on the right with bombs on the centre. The remaining 3 a/c had weapons on all three pylons. Outer pylons had SF tanks. Route was flown at 420kts 500' agl using radar prediction maps and worked OK if the height keeping was reasonably accurate.
The game was to make a 4G pull at a predetermined radar range from the target, releasing flares at 30, 35 and 40 degrees pitch angle. Immediate overbank and pull to kill the climb, reverse the turn, identify the target, reselect switches for weapon selected to drop, and dive on in. Thrilling stuff on a poor vis night with frequent ghosted flares in the orange goldfish bowl. Aircraft were in 2 mile radar trail and recovered in sequence onto an agreed heading and repeated the procedure until the flares were expended. Well, theoretically anyway. Trying to get the 5 a/c back into the correct sequence was a real challenge since the dive headings had probably been far from that briefed.
The really worrying thing that added to the excitement, was the increasingly common event of total attitude instrument failure in the F4M. The a/c theoretically had 3 independent systems, Inertial, AJB7 and MD1. On no occasion that I'm aware of, were the faults replicated on engineering investigation.
Anyway, during a 2 week det in the Ionian Sea attacking NATO boats, a further, and fatal incident occurred at Bruggen on GCA at night in cloud. The pilot was pulling back harder and harder to maintain wings level whilst in reality the a/c was banking. Pedal shaker, loss of control.......The pilot's canopy killed the Nav during the ejection sequence.
Pilots Union pressure got us off any more night attacks whilst investigation took place. Four nights of revelry in Naples ensued.
The night GA continued. The Squadron was assigned to Allied Command Europe as a specialist squadron. The boss got an MBE not an AFC and I went to the Navy.
Anyhow, that's how I remember it.
Last edited by blaireau; 5th July 2004 at 03:21.