I loathed the 'armour plated black bin liner' mentality and the silly black-out nonsense, but enjoyed the increased pace of flying. Except when scrambled to an AD CAP from Wattisham to find no targets had been arranged - on 3 consecutive flights!
At a certain fighter station in Suphpholk, the Stn Cdr had obviously been watching
Dad's Army as he ordained that all windows were to have those tape crosses to prevent blast fragments. Well, that might have worked on old wartime 3 x 3 pane windows using gummed paper tape, but he even made ATC put tape crosses on the big plate glass windows in local.... Of course the Fg Offs' union blacked out everything they could find, including the Stn Cdr's car - cue sense of humour failure.
The TACEVAL umpires took one look and reported that the silly crosses were a flight safety hazard at the ATC tower and useless everywhere else. But the best bit was that it took an expensive professional window cleaning team to clear the sticky adhesive residue from non-WW2 bodge tape....
TACEVALs - always a way for Stn Cdrs to demonstrate the height of their absurdity.
Then there was the Battle of Burford when the less-than-tame auxiliary rock squadron spotted a TACEVAL car being filled up at a local petrol station and gave chase, finally cornering the occupants in the middle of the night in Burford having loosed off a few SLR blanks at them....
