Flying phobias in aircrew

[Ali Qadoo]

I'm not sure whether I'd elevate it to the realms of 'phobia', but I can certainly confess to getting severly twitched over the years by repeated attempts on my life... trouble is, the people responsible were supposed to be on the same side.

After two tours on the F-4 I got my dream posting - instructor at Chivenor. It was a fantasitc tour and looking back there was never one incident that stood out, but there were occasions where I erred on the wrong side of letting Bloggs sort out a problem of his own making. This inevitably led to a very hurried "I have control", a bad case of sixpence half-a-crown and a mental note to intervene earlier next time things went pear-shaped.

The worst ones were during the early air combat sorties where Bloggs would end up nose-high, inverted, out of SA, faced with rapidly diminishing knots and nose authority, with the other aircraft stationary in the canopy and getting bigger by the second. These are the ones that still wake me up sweating in the night.

Towards the end of the tour I was conscious of a bad case of "the twitch" and found myself intervening far too early when anything didn't look right. It made me a less effective instructor and didn't help the studes' confidence.

I'd completely forgotton about the problem until I was on an exchange tour and ended up in the back seat of the two-sticker, teaching combat to convexees. The twitch came back to such an extent that I was only happy flying the single seater and in formations containing blokes I trusted. Needless to say, I didn't mention it, but to this day, every time I get on an aircraft (pax only these days), I'm still convinced (wrongly, obviously) that the people at the pointy end will try to kill me.

In the light of what people are having to put up with in the sandpit, this might sound pathetic, but the accumulation of "Christ, that was close" events over the years added up to a feeling that after a great 19 years flying Auntie Betty's aeroplanes I'd pushed my luck far enough and it was time to try something else for a living.