Coincidentally, just yesterday I chanced across a photo of the very aircraft that used to carry my name on its cowling. It was a sad sight because it was taken just after it had been crashed (thankfully a few years after my tour flying it).
It made me remember one of the best RAF friends I ever had who died in a crash in the same type. Then I recalled that I lost at least one colleague to aviation accidents for every year of my so called peacetime/Cold War service, some before I’d even finished training, including more good friends and better people than I. Three of them died on operations on my first wedding anniversary, a few weeks after I joined my first squadron. I always remember them on every anniversary. I realised from early on how fickle a business this aviation thing can be, especially military aviation, even when bullets and bombs aren’t being slung about.
I’m very fortunate that in almost half a century of aviation that despite a few near misses I didn’t actually suffer any accidents and was never the cause of aircraft damage apart from a minor blade tip strike found after we’d operated into a jungle landing site in a thunderstorm, picking up some people who desperately needed to be picked up and a minor “frange” of the frangible skid fairing of a Gazelle helicopter when my student tried to apply full aft cyclic instead of full collective during the final “cushion” of his engine off landing.
My thoughts are with all those many who were not so lucky, in peacetime and in war.