Any Phantom stories out there?

[Ali Qadoo]

Was I scared? You bet I was

I've never had to eject - came close a couple of times - and the general consensus amongst the C Flight junta was that when it came to yellow and black time, it would be better to be faced with a snap decision with all the captions on, donks not working and controls ditto, rather than having to do a premeditated ejection. A bit like ripping off a plaster rather than removing it slowly, leg hair by leg hair.

So, as you can imagine, the prospect of jumping out and parking a perfectly serviceable F-4 in the warm blue waters off Stanley in the dark wasn't that appealing. The sequence of events that put us in this unpleasant predicament reads a bit like one of those "I learnt about flying from that" articles, except there was no one really to blame, just plain old bad luck.

As for night flying (sooner be in the bar), just like a seagull, you had to throw rocks to get me airborne in the dark. Rocks duly thrown, the Oreillyman and I got airborne for a fairly standard 1v1 night PIs trip against the Shetland Pilot and Big Al, accompanied by a Fat Albert tanker. Night tanking stats duly gathered, the Albert crew headed for home, leaving us to do our last few splits before heading down the slope ourselves. As things turned out we were slightly fatter for fuel than the other F-4 so, as per SOPs, they landed first.

Now, to this day, I don't know how the Shetland Pilot managed it, but his aircraft ended up tangled with the cable on rwy 27 (the strip at Stanley, for those not familiar with it, was short and made of slippery metal planking so we always took the approach end wire) and so we were told to hold off. So far, so undramatic, but after five minutes the runway was still black, and then another five became another ten, and to make matters worse the weather started doing the usual Falklands blue TAFing yellow routine. In daylight there'd have been no problem, we'd have diverted to Mount Pleasant, but in those days it wasn't open at night and to prevent the Argies paying an uninvited nocturnal visit, the runway was always covered with parked vehicles. So to resume our predicament: runway black, low fuel caption on, no scope for getting the Albert airborne again to keep us topped up, nearest div in Chile. Bugger!

The fuel situation began to get critical - the F-4 uses about 700 lbs to do a visual circuit - and we were now down to about 1,000 lbs and orbiting at 600 ft just to stay in sight of the ground. We'd already declared an emergency (PAN at this stage I think) and had requested an approach into the downwind wire, but air traffic kept saying no, vehicles etc on the runway, keep orbiting. Upgrading to a mayday didn't seem to impress them either, so with about 800lbs remaining I decided that given the choice between a warm, comfy cockpit and ejecting into a rough sea at night, we'd have to chance our arm. With the tower controller yelling at us to go around and treating us to a firework display of red flares, we took the 09 approach end wire with about 500 lbs indicated - just enough to bolt if we'd missed the cable.

The first pint in the coastel bar didn't touch the sides that night.