Many, many thanks for your recollections of ULAS Bulldogs XX552 and XX553, and your questions and comments.
RLE, ha, yes! Thanks for reminding me of the parachute teepee survival exercise. Later in life, I had a similar experience in the desert where we were instructed to form a heap of bodies in the middle of the shelter to ward off the sub-zero overnight temperatures. Going to the khazi (a.k.a. hole in the ground) early the following morning gave new meaning to the expression "holy crap!"
Evalu8ter/Beags, sadly no solo dogfighting over Didcot in my day either. Plenty of dual tail chasing at the end of a trip, though, for those studes who didn't have to reach for the sick bag. I think the instructors would arrange to "meet" over the power station on their way back to Abingdon. Talking of tail chasing, I was on an IF trip in XX548 with my regular instructor, the "Reverend", climbing up through cloud. As we broke the cloud tops, we saw smoke trails in the distance to our right and then ... whoosh ... two tail chasing F111s crossed our nose. There was that calm, droll "I have control" and the Reverend executed an abrupt emergency break to avoid their wake turbulence. Irate protests to Upper Heyford and Lakenheath went unanswered as I recall.
Nutloose, many thanks for the article and video. Thanks to your research, I discovered that XX547, ULAS '05', also entered service with the Armed Forces of Malta as AS0124 in 2001. The AFM donated the aircraft to the Malta College of Arts, Science, and Technology in 2020 as a ground instructional airframe for their aircraft maintenance program. So another happy ending for a ULAS Bulldog from the mid-1980s fleet. That makes nine-out-of-ten still in "service".
