Throbbing Javelin

[NutherA2]

Thanks for the photographs; they have triggered all sorts of memories.

In 1964 60 Sqn’s establishment was increased to give us a total of something like 26 aircraft and 36 crews, I believe we were then the largest squadron in the RAF. The aircraft were a mixture of FAW9 and 9R, the usual fit for the latter model was to carry 2 Firestreaks and 2 x 230 gallon underwing tanks, which enabled us to lengthen our low level sorties by about 30 minutes, so extending the range of our border patrols from the Kuching and Labuan detachments.

S (XH908) was one of the 9R and my logbook shows I flew it on a “combat air patrol” from Labuan on 22 Feb 65. At this time IIRC the responsibility for the Borneo detachments was shared between 60 & 64 Sqn. During the first half of 1965, 64 took over the whole Borneo task while 60 had responsibility for the air defence of Singapore and mainland Malaya. There was an exchange of airframes between the squadrons so that 64 had all the 9R aircraft and XH908 must have been one of the fleet transferred, as by June my logbook shows a different airframe number (XH779) as S. From MPN11’s photo S must have reverted to 60 Sqn later, probably when 64 disbanded,


The IAF (QRA?) arrangements at Tengah were something of a one-off. Gombak wanted a 5 minute state, but this would have meant the crews being in cockpit and was ruled out because of the ambient temperature. Manning the alert states from the air conditioned crewroom was required, but ordinarily this meant holding the duty at Alert 10, which was deemed to be too slow; after something of an auction we were tasked with maintaining Alert 7 from the crewroom. As the flight line was so close both to the crewroom and the 36 threshold, there was never a problem in achieving the scramble time, even when the crews were sleeping when the order was given. It may be worth noting the at the height of Confrontation we had up to 12 aircraft on alert, some on 7 minutes and the rest on 30.