At a certain Lincolnshire real bomber station, there came a Tannoy...
"STANDBY FOR BROADACAST, STANDBY FOR BROADCAST - all crews are to report to the Wing Briefing Room at nnnn hrs".
Obviously someone with half a brain then realised that this would be a golden opportunity for the Spetznasties to take out the entire station's crews......
"Err, attention, attention, ignore the previous broadcast......" was followed by:
"The briefing will be delayed by 15 mintes"
At a Phamous Suphpholk Phighter base in pre-HAS days, someone decided that having all the crews in the same crew room might also be a nice target for the Spetznasties. So we were sent to various parts of the squadron to reduce the risk. "If there's a survival scramble, we'll sound the siren"...
My nav and I duly went to our allocated location without delay. We'd only been there for a couple of minutes when the siren went off. In accordance with the brief, we charged out to our mighty warhorse, cranked up and set off for the RW....
"Must be doing well, ******, we're the first in the queue!", I told my nav. Shortly afterwards, up came Sue on the radio:
"Phantom taxying, state your intentions?"
"Taxying as pre-briefed!"
"Stand by!......taxy to the holding point only"
It seems that 'someone' had decided that dispersing everyone around the squadron was fine, but they didn't know whether or not the siren actually worked. So some idiot of a Flt Cdr decided to test it without first having checked that everyone had been warned.....
So we sat at the holding point pondering our next move; however, the anticipated survival scramble
was then ordered, so off we went. But the pre-brief had included assigning holding levels by call-sign rather than take-off sequence. So we had the interesting experience of watching other aircraft climbing up through our hold to their pre-briefed levels.....
