Courtney, you old rascal - I should have remembered what a wind-up artist you could be!
You know, we could have offered the QRA interceptors a better service if we'd sat down at Leuchars and talked things through at some point. For example, we could have HF-phonepatched Leuchars Ops for base colour state, aids and recovery state and updated you with a pre-formatted message - plus present position relative to wherever you liked and the spot wind. But nobody thought of such things back then. However, after observing one tanker crew's poor effort to intercept a Bear, the Stn Cdr (not The Scottish Officer
) advised that we should work out some turn keys. So I did - using a BBC Master and a bit of R = TAS squared / g tan AoB. This led to the RV tables which are still in use in ATP-56B today, some 25+ years later!
Vulcan exercises could be amusing! Because I was at Bawtry for my 'captaincy board' (listening to staff officers discussing whether brown or white gloves were appropriate for some event or other before I went in to see The Man...
), our crew wasn't deployed on the Strike Force Dispersal exercise. But I heard a familiar roar-of-four in the distance as, on a normal training trip, they'd wired Finningley, our SFD aerodrome. A voice came on the R/T to advise them that 'Operation Muddy Waters' was in effect - which meant nothing to them....apart from assuming that they were in the deep and smelly!
Now, the person (a Flt Cdr - it had to be!) who'd made this transmission was the same person who'd forgotten to issue the amended HF frequencies for the 'go' message when the stream of Vulcans reached their exercise 'go' point. Hearing nothing, they all went into holding patterns whilst Midland Radar tried to sort out the ensuing chaos....
Having done OK at my captaincy board, I was feeling quite cheeful when I met the rest of the team back at Sunny Scampton. They told me the story, so I advised the captain to say that "Operation Muddy Waters" was an operational term used to alert crews when security has been breached and that under no circumstances should they go beyond the 'go' point. Which is precisely what, when asked, he innocently told the Flt Cdr who'd been responsible for the utter cock-up....
No wonder I never made it beyond Spec Aircrew Sqn Ldr....
