Originally Posted by
CharlieJuliet
Was this accident not the origin of the apocryphal story? The SAR chopper picked up Dim first and then picked up Al who, on entering the chopper, uttered the memorable words: 'Hi Dim how long have you been on choppers?' To be answered with: 'about 5 minutes longer than you you c*** ?'
Nope - Not sure if Dim is on this forum, but I interviewed him for TORNADO (where - should you so desire - you can read the full, gory in parts, details) as he managed to have 2 head-on collisions with a GR1. His 1st mid-air with a Tornado was in July 1984. Head-on over the sea:
http://www.ukserials.com/pdflosses/m...z393_za408.pdf
His actual quote on being picked up by the SAR helicopter was: "Once in the helicopter, I was ordered by the quite forceful doctor to sit in the corner and behave myself while we went to fetch the Tornado crew. As I sat there, I became aware that a spare comms lead was dangling from the bulkhead. Keen to find out what was going on, I plugged it in. Error!. With a helmet still full of water and lots of static, the wiggly-amps took the path of least resistance – straight through what had, until take-off time, been my brain. The perfect end to a perfect sortie. There are a couple of footnotes to this saga. The first involves the reaction of the Tornado pilot (a friend then, but an even better one later, as we pounded the AOC’s Wilton together). I stumbled, regardless of the Doc’s orders, from the helicopter to see how he was, only to be greeted by a look of complete bewilderment (he was not aware at this stage that I had hit another aircraft). Suffice to say that it had something to do with 'how long have you been on helicopters'."
Dim & the Tornado pilot (as he says above) were both 'criticised' for not seeing each other. Rather unfairly when you look at the evidence, and especially when you look at his 2nd head-on with Ian Mclean & Neil Johnson in a Tornado GR1 in Jan 1990:
http://ukserials.com/pdflosses/maas_...z108_za394.pdf
Neil & Ian were lucky to survive and both suffered really horrific leg injuries. Dim miraculously managed to recover his jet minus 3ft of wing, single-engined and flapless. The subsequent BOI established that there was no chance of either pilot seeing each other (AND reacting in time) in the seconds before the accident. All the latest medical evidence showed that the eye/brain/reaction interface was not capable of dealing with the circumstances - which were near identical to Dim's previous collision. So he felt rather vindicated