Hi Pontius,
Our intrepid SHAR driver couldn’t find Mum - I think due to a nav kit failure. Need Mogwi or someone to pitch in with what Suds was faced with. He settled for a landing on a freighter when the square search for Mum proved fruitless.
Sometimes we had to practice EMCON procedures - which I think Suds was doing but again not sure - I and two buddies were operating under EMCON one day - no radios and no radar within a certain distance of Mum. We used to get her position as an offset from a reference point over UHF then put Systems to stand by and come inbound. We’d been up on a sweep and had tanked, so Mum could have been anywhere! We got a completely duff offset, were out of gas on arrival - faced with empty sea - and (after a great call from lead ‘Has anyone got any ideas?’ Which Mum replied to with ‘Zip Lip’!!!!) We set off to try to land on a big merchant man we’d seen on the way in. As we streamed to land number 3 sensibly took a wide pattern and somehow saw Mum in the gloop. We all got back - shaking/ smiling etc with no fuel whatsoever.
Had to go straight to FlyCo so the grown ups could shout at us for breaking radio silence.
Very nearly 3 folk having a group swim somewhere in the Med!
Good times!