Originally Posted by
LOMCEVAK
28 Dec 1990, 4 hours in a Tornado GR1A on the final trial sortie of the ‘Gulf Pack 2’ upgrade of the recce systems. Monstrous turbulence when trying to tank, the low level was mainly IMC. ‘Amber’ on recovery for an ILS to land. It all seemed quite normal at the time. The next day the aircraft was flown into theatre. I have to say that the flying at Boscombe during the build up to Op Granby was one of the really great periods of my career.
I agree Lom. All sorts of fascinating flying and challenging issues. One of the major issues was that, although the RAF in UK had effectively shut down for 3 weeks over Christmas and New Year (at station level), we were still trying to keep up with testing the UORs that were flying off the shelves. On this day 30 years ago I flew the first GR1 trial sortie with the stand-alone GPS fitted, using Heathrow and Gatwick as diversions. We spent all of the sortie above cloud and were pretty much lost for most of it (apart from Yeovilton TACAN, which they had kindly left on for us) because of a software glitch in the patch designed to accommodate the GPS fix. I'd never gone off-map so fast! It took 3 days to rewrite the software - the second sortie was much better, and the software was released to the front line on the 8th. There was a lot of excellent work went on behind the scenes!