A few more Wing Nut dits:
The time he decided that he had to lead from the front and do a full sortie in AR5; it was nothing to do with leading, he was just a rubber fetishist! The sortie was to be done in a T2 as rubber, Wingnut and GR1s did not go together! Donned in all his gear he insisted on doing the pre-flight (after all he would have to do so in a single-seater, right?!) which resulted in a beak-to-beak with the pitot tube! Stunned, he then noticed that he did not have his watch - not that timing was ever one of his strong points! Despite the efforts of (JP: here comes another clue!) yours truly (I was the captain and in tears of laughter in the back seat at this stage!) to persuade him otherwise, as we were already late for the range etc, he insisted on going back and doffing and donning all over again! You can imagine the rest!
Or the time that his whole squadron, with the aid of the ever-accomodating staff at Fortes Village (Sardinia), avoided him for most of an evening. We even had guys in the pool breathing through straws! But we were evntually let down by an ex-Lightning pilot (surprisingly not JP!) whose lookout was unsurprisingly piss poor!
Or the day during a Bruggen exericse when he seemed to attach himself, via his gazzy bag lanyard, to various items of furniture in the squadron hard. More amazingly, he managed to do the same when the squadron was 'evacuated' to 20 Sqn!
Or the time we went to some USAFE Eifel base for a TFM. Some sorry sod (senior JP, Welsh surname, dark hair, subsequently discovered God!) got another 31 short straw (little did said officer know how we made that happen!) and had to share a room with Wing Nut! Never did a man look so scared! Especially when, one afternoon, said JP entered the room to find his leader stretching himself...bollock naked.....in the window......the window that overlooked the O Club and associated leisure buildings!
Or the time that one of the deputy flight commanders (the flight commanders were always on leave/courses for some reason!) blew up at Wing Nut as he tried, once again, to rearrange the flying programme. The language may have been a little more flowery, but conveyed the general message: 'if you can do it better, then you take over the desk; I am off to the coffee bar!'
Or the time he was set up for a fight with Gonzo at a Happy Hour in the bar! The intro he was 'persuaded' to use was to regurgitate the line made famous by an ex-Canberra pilot, QFI and subsequent Jaguar display pilot (who probably never did find the alpha gauge or the PTR switches!) along the lines of: 'there are too many Gonzos in the world!' Listening, for once, to the brief, Wing Nut: stormed across the bar; pushed Gonzo on the shoulder with such force that he fell to the floor; and recited rather loudly the lines he had so carefully learned! Then he looked back across the hushed and, frankly, stunned bar with the chessiest of grins to claim the accolades from his boys! You guessed it; they were dots on the horizon! But the sight of Gonzo's face as he was forcefully evicted from yet another arse-licking conversation with the Staish, and especially as it had been visited upopn him by the person he probably hated most in the world, was one to remember!
And then there were the Friday afternoon 'Execs' meetings! The only 'Exec', by loose definition, that ever attended was Wing Nut. The flight commanders were, as already stated, always on leave/courses; the SEngO always had a blanket-stackers meeting to attend, and at least one of the deputy flight commanders was always airborne! So, Execs usually consisted of Wing Nut, the Squinto/Adj and Newt (who, of course, used the opportunity to write the Q list!); SOG used to like to attend too because of his vitally important, and tour-long, role in raising funds for the Bruggen Bowl or some equally worthy cause!
And this is just the tip of the Wing Nut yarns iceberg! So many stories; he is a legend in his own bathtub (JP: another cryptic clue!).