I flew the VC10K carrying the international press for this event, with Ray F Knowles (RIP) as co-pilot. I was ordered to keep the whole thing confidential and not even to tell the squadron boss - so the only people who were 'in on it' were the crew, my flight commander and 'Melons', the rather delightful station POC with MoD
PR. I did rather too good a job as the station commander only found out the day beforehand out that the Director of
PR was intending to come! Fortunately he changed his mind as he had something of a reputation... And if I'd told the boss, he'd have pinched the trip anyway!
We RV'd with the F3s over the North Sea and led them off to the inbound MiG 29s. The F3s wanted to do rather more than the original brief, but the intercept went fine and we headed off towards the UK with the TV crews and aviation journos taking turns on the flight deck to get their photos for the evening news and publications various, despite one F3 which didn't follow the brief and kept getting in our way.
The weather was such that the planned descent over land wasn't possible as a complete formation, so we had to let the F3 and MiG 29 formation do their own thing, whilst we followed at a discrete distance amused by the chaos caused by the F3 leader plunging down with the formation through the Daventry sector amongst the airline traffic.
We caught up with them as they ran in towards Farnborough, then broke off to fly back to Brize. Shortly after we left, an RAE Canberra flew over as though on a practice diversion; in fact it was taking IR photos to assess the fuel on board the Mig 29s. Throughout the week the spooks recorded the MiG fuel uplift, trying to get an overall assessment of the MiG 29 fuel burn. But the good old Sovs frustrated that by doing their final refuelling from their accompanying Antonov. Nice one Boris!