Several years ago I was down at MPA yet again protecting the Bennies from the threat of invasion
. Predictably our VC10K was declared as a 'war goer' whilst waiting for some spares to be flown down by TriStar. One fine day the hooter went and we were called to readiness. After the F-3s launched, our trusty Landrover valiantly struggled against the headwind as we set off to the jet, before we climbed aboard and declared on-state, war goer.
Listening to the R/T was much fun. Q1 and 2 soon closed on the contact and an excited SOC controller started asking questions: "Are there any markings?" "Yes, mate - it says 'Aerolineas Argentinas' on the side!". Shortly afterwards Q was hauled off and we all reverted to RS boredom.
This was in the very early days of the Internet and with only very slow dial-up connections from our side of the aerodrome. Nevertheless, I had a thought and asked one of the Herk mates, who was a bit of an Internet whizz, "Hey - see if you can find something like aerolineas argentinas dot com and look for some timetables". Mate disappeared into the boss's office and after about 10 min of clicking and muttering, he suddenly yelled "Found it!". So we downloaded the day's schedules, printed them out and faxed them down to the Tic-TOC with our compliments...
About 5 seconds later, the phone rang. It was some Intell weeny - "Where did you find this high value intelligence? We've been trying to get hold of their schedules for weeks. This is all highly classified and shouldn't have been sent by insecure fax!"....
That well-known oxymoron - military intelligence!