Nothing astonishing here, but the tale of a fun night’s work. Southern QRA, secret base in Lincolnshire, world’s phinest phighter. Around supper time there was a lot of activity on telebrief with the Neat Allocator clearly quite phired up, but no mention of a P time. However, the Tanker at Marham was brought to a higher state of readiness and eventually launched. We assumed that Northern Q would get the trade and we’d get the middle of the night no-notice scramble to go and replace them. But the whole of the north was heading towards Red making us the better option.
Q2 Nav was a phounder member of the Slug Club (his previous tour on a secret phighter base in Scotland) and, as such refused to leave his arm chair unless absolutely compelled to when the call of nature was so urgent that he has no choice. We even had to bring his meal to him. That meant that when we were brought to cockpit ready, he had a seriously bright PHULL caption on. I think his words to me as we ran to the jets were something along the lines of, “If you go u/s I’m going to explode and make life very unpleasant for you when you get back.”
Both jets were held at cockpit for a good 30 minutes with a phairly confused picture coming from Neat. Eventually, my
Originally Posted by Beagle
very old, hugely experienced and highly skilled nav
and I were launched, but Q2 held at cockpit as a ready back up – obviously something big going on. Before we chopped to Tower, we asked Q2N how he was doing.
“Too late.” He replied.
Anyway. Transited to the secret play area many north of the maximum range of the radios, Tacan, etc, and joined up with the Tanker (who, you will recall has been way ahead of us through all this) and philled to phull. (I need to drop the ph thing now, it’s too hard to type). We set about building a picture with the aid of Pole Star and it appeared that we had not one, but two Zombies, fairly well split in range. At this point the Tanker mate declared that he’s ex F4 and adopted the callsign ‘02’.
“I’ll take the eastern one, you take the other, then we’ll swap and transfer some fuel when we meet in the middle.”
Seemed like a good plan to us. He took vectors from Pole Star, and closed on the eastern Zombie in his Victor “KF1”. We reported two Bear F in the west and ‘02’ reported two Bear F in the east. So my second live intercept is FOUR Foxtrots! Outstanding!
Our plan of swapping targets and fuel worked well through most of the night, thanks to the help and supplies of the world’s biggest interceptor and a fighter-minded Tanker mate, who also kept our INAS in the correct hemisphere. The Q2 crew who had finally been stood down to RS10 were slightly perplexed to hear on Telebrief that Q1 had idented 2 Foxtrots and so had Q2????
Any ex-F4 Tanker guys care to ‘fess up?
