Three months after leaving my crew on Shacks and being posted to Operations,
my old crew had been in for briefing for a night 15hr Navex. One of the items on
the checklist was the exchange of coded messages to keep in practice: these were
monitored of course, by Group Headquarters.
The same used to happen on AEW Shacks - especially when the radar went u/s and the crew were forbidden to waste fuel by dumping to landing weight. In addition to sending training coded messages, the radar team, which consisted mainly of navigators who had not actually navigated anything since nav school, would sometimes try their hand at manual air plot or some other archaic WW2 technique that was still taught at Finningly in those days.
During one of these long nights of burning off fuel, the 8 Sqn ops desk received a coded message from the airborne shack which was burning off petrol on a long navex. After decoding the multi group message, the message read "Franklebum (the TACO) has just found Rockall". Not to be outdone, the ops-desk duty crew prepared their own message to send back, and it being a long and quiet night they rang Buchan with the message to pass on: "I have a message of 93 groups for C/S....". Thinking that this would keep the crew quiet for a while, the ops team settled down for a nap. However, just a few minutes later came a reply in NAMAT from the Shack crew, "Unable to decode. Do not hold NAMAT".
On a different theme, No 8 Sqn deployed their Shackletons en-masse to St Mawgan take part in the 1981 "Ocean Safari" exercise where continuous 24 hour orbits were to be maintained for Naval Forces in the SW approaches. Given the Shackleton's slow transit speed, a two hour transit was needed at the height of the exercise. One of the crew captains decided that he would carry out a "tactical transit", radar off, radio silent, at 250ft (and lower). At the briefing the crew were warned to look out for a Soviet Kresta II which was monitoring the exercise.
The crew duly got airborne and were about an hour into the transit when the co-pilot saw something loom onto the horizon. "That'll be the Kresta" said the captain. "Let's go and have a look" and the Shack turned towards the ship which slowly got bigger and bigger. meanwhile, the 1st Navigator, who had been an AEOp in a previous existence, stepped out of his tent to have a look. "Don't think its a cruiser" he said knowledgeably. "Of course it is", said the Captain, just as a couple of F14s intercepted, followed by a Prowler.
The ship got bigger and bigger and took on the unmistakeable silhouette of a USN aircraft carrier which was not involved in the JMC and was surrounded by its escorts. "Perhaps they don't want us to buzz them during flying operations" suggested the nav. Finally the lights turned on and the captain turned away from the now very close ships.
Tuning through some NATO radio frequencies while they beat a hasty(?) retreat, the Shack crew heard the immortal radio call from one of the aircraft which was struggling to maintain formation and refusing to come down any lower:
" I don't know, sir. I think its a Liberator".