A few ancient memories
Like others I can remember lots of tales from exercises
RAF Wyton 1978: Two guards on taxiway barrier duty under ‘Air Raid Black’ armed with pick axe handle when a car pulls up, a voice calls the two guards over and asked are they aware of the state of the station, we are under NBC conditions was the answer given. Next question was “where is your helmet and NBC suit”, both pulled out a bit of paper, it turned out that the person in the car was the CO and was not amused and wanted to know if they were being insubordinate, when it was explained and corroborated at a later time that we have never had suits or helmets he was not happy as nobody had told him.
18 Sqd: deployed on exercise, gets the taceval BDR inject, the only bit of helicopter we had to use was of some small helicopter with small winglets on the tail boom. The metal almost fag paper thin attached to the framework with tucker pop rivets, BDR (expert, fixed wing only) punches a hole through the skin and asks what are you going to do, answer “ put a speed tape patch over it” expert announces that we have failed the BDR inject as the correct course of action was a large slab plate attached with a double row of jo-bolts (as per fixed wing BDR repairs to wing structure) IAW the ‘formula’ in the BDR manual, When it was pointed out what would happen to a helicopter if it was repaired in this way he was not convinced, we asked him how we would repair blade damage his answer again was slap a patch on with double row of jo-bolts as per the ‘formula’, at this point we gave up and accepted our failure.
18 Sqd again: deployed, in a farmers field somewhere in Germany at night when a couple of Health & Safety personnel turned up in the evening and promptly informed us all that climbing onto the top of a Chinook was dangerous as it comes under ‘Working at Height’. Questions were asked and their response was that we had to attach a wire rope between the two heads and then get some safety harnesses and then attach them to the wire rope and there we were all safe and sound. When they were asked how do we get up to attach the wire rope and then attach the slings to it, their response was well you climb up the side and walk along the top and then when it is attached you are then safe, we then asked what happens when we scramble, it was at this point they realised what a stupid idea it all was and left.
18 Sqd again deployed and we had our annual army support for training practice who used to man one sangar, sat in the ops truck at night when the officer comes in holding his hand over one eye, I asked if he needed medical attention and his response was "thank you, but no I am just maintaining my night vision" after his coffee he went out with his other eye covered, fell down the last two steps and still declined medical attention.
27 Sqd, Marham: We occasionally had some trainee officers from Cranwell who supplemented the guard shift, it was quite amusing as in the crew room between shifts you heard them saying things like "this is great fun" and "pity we are not here longer" and they could not understand why the groundcrew were so cheesed off with guarding.