[QUOTE=Rapscallion]The civi pilot involved was certainly very lucky!
Though I suspect he didn't realise quite how lucky until the F-3 crew debriefed him about the possible consequences for no comms & non-compliant aircraft stumbling around in CAS...
Very well done to the Leeming boys
Rapscallion I think the poor guy had more to worry about than the fact that he wasn't talking to anyone! I was the civil radar controller at the start of this incident. The co-incident loss of comms and transponder followed by the primary only contact taking a turn off the heading made me nervous immediately and we got D+D involved straight away. So far as I gathered( I was v. busy at the time) the mil. decided not to intercept on security grounds,however used the services of the F3 that was just starting it's sortie.
The F3 crew did a brilliant job in helping the BE20 get on the deck, because there was a very real possibility given the circumstances and the blanket of cloud over the country, that it would run out of fuel before the pilot found a hole in the cloud. Because Mode C was lost and I had no level information on radar I had to give some of the civil crews in the sector some pretty big reroutes around the contact but as everyone understood the gravity of the situation there were no complaints. Also stopped departures at various times from PK ,PF and PH to allow the F3 crew a free run of the airspace to try and get the BE20 to formate on them,which proved difficult because of the performance differential. From the original intercept by the F3 crew to getting these folk on the ground safely took over an hour of hard work from everyone involved-not least the pilot of the BE20 himself! It was one of those days at work where the best that can be said about it was that no-one died.Once again a hearty thanks to the F3 crew and to my colleagues at ScotMil for a successful outcome to a nasty incident.