Tornado/Jag mid-air 17/06/1987
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Tornado/Jag mid-air 17/06/1987
Good morning gentlemen,
I wonder if anyone might be able to help? I'm looking to contact John Head, the nav from ZA493 involved in the midair 17/06/87. I have a very old Squadron Print he kindly signed for me at Fairford some years after. Unfortunately the signature has faded (biro!) and I'd like to replace it.
Kind regards
Andy
I wonder if anyone might be able to help? I'm looking to contact John Head, the nav from ZA493 involved in the midair 17/06/87. I have a very old Squadron Print he kindly signed for me at Fairford some years after. Unfortunately the signature has faded (biro!) and I'd like to replace it.
Kind regards
Andy
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Does this help?
http://www.pprune.org/military-aviat...r1a-xz116.html
http://www.pprune.org/military-aviat...r1a-xz116.html
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I remember seeing the pictures of the severed Jaguar forward fuselage / cockpit area - a rather sobering image for anyone routinely flying FJ aircraft at low-level. If I remember correctly, the terrain, geometry and dynamics precluded any possibility of a see-and-avoid manoeuvre by anyone involved.
Was this accident not the origin of the apocryphal story? The SAR chopper picked up Dim first and then picked up Al who, on entering the chopper, uttered the memorable words: 'Hi Dim how long have you been on choppers?' To be answered with: 'about 5 minutes longer than you you c*** ?'
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If its the same accident I don't think that Al ended up in the sea, at least his kneepad ended up in a hedge in Norfolk. He told me this many years later as we were starting out on our first flight together in a light aircraft which we shared. He did confirm the helicopter meeting too.
Al was definitely overland, hence he was picked up second. I remember us asking the house band at a hotel in Vegas to play for Lord xxx of Sheringham; we told them he had ploughed a lot of money into land in North Norfolk,
Was this accident not the origin of the apocryphal story? The SAR chopper picked up Dim first and then picked up Al who, on entering the chopper, uttered the memorable words: 'Hi Dim how long have you been on choppers?' To be answered with: 'about 5 minutes longer than you you c*** ?'
http://www.ukserials.com/pdflosses/m...z393_za408.pdf
His actual quote on being picked up by the SAR helicopter was: "Once in the helicopter, I was ordered by the quite forceful doctor to sit in the corner and behave myself while we went to fetch the Tornado crew. As I sat there, I became aware that a spare comms lead was dangling from the bulkhead. Keen to find out what was going on, I plugged it in. Error!. With a helmet still full of water and lots of static, the wiggly-amps took the path of least resistance – straight through what had, until take-off time, been my brain. The perfect end to a perfect sortie. There are a couple of footnotes to this saga. The first involves the reaction of the Tornado pilot (a friend then, but an even better one later, as we pounded the AOC’s Wilton together). I stumbled, regardless of the Doc’s orders, from the helicopter to see how he was, only to be greeted by a look of complete bewilderment (he was not aware at this stage that I had hit another aircraft). Suffice to say that it had something to do with 'how long have you been on helicopters'."
Dim & the Tornado pilot (as he says above) were both 'criticised' for not seeing each other. Rather unfairly when you look at the evidence, and especially when you look at his 2nd head-on with Ian Mclean & Neil Johnson in a Tornado GR1 in Jan 1990:
http://ukserials.com/pdflosses/maas_...z108_za394.pdf
Neil & Ian were lucky to survive and both suffered really horrific leg injuries. Dim miraculously managed to recover his jet minus 3ft of wing, single-engined and flapless. The subsequent BOI established that there was no chance of either pilot seeing each other (AND reacting in time) in the seconds before the accident. All the latest medical evidence showed that the eye/brain/reaction interface was not capable of dealing with the circumstances - which were near identical to Dim's previous collision. So he felt rather vindicated
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I had the pleasure of flying with Neil C the Lake District Tornado pilot after he joined our airline. He never mentioned the accident until one day we were visiting the museum at Addison Texas on a layover. Looking at the cockpit of a Phantom must have brought back the memories- he was still very sorry about the loss of the Jag pilot but reckoned they had no chance to avoid each other.
http://www.ukserials.com/pdflosses/m...0919_xx114.pdf
(Full details and stories in a certain book.... etc etc - you get the picture!)
