I have to confess I was already demob happy before Saddam invaded Kuwait. I was, post resettlement on the edge of staying in, I was having a conversation with a Sergeant Dick Powell, he very nearly convinced me at the last minute to head over to the General Office at Portreath and say I'd changed my mind. I didn't, certainly not because of Desert Shield as it was at that time, but because I' made a decision to take the Bull by the Horns and leave. By the way, does anyone on pprune have any experience of serving on 19 Sqn at the time, they made a little known detachment to Akrotiri at the time, I understand to in anticipation of the conflict spilling over.

FB

Yes. The GR1s had Mode 4 IFF.

I was in Akrotiri for Granby, deployed from Wildenrath ATC. I recall 19 Sqn was deployed there for the Air Defence of Cyprus. They got up to all sorts of shenanigans...

...indeed. I think they got a wee bit frustrated at not being allowed to go any further east!

Cheers for the confirmation, Peter

GRANBY



On 18 Jan 1991 I was in the ‘Brass nut’ in Keflevic with the rest of the crew from 2 sqn NAB Geilenkirchen nearing the end of a 2 year tour learning to fly the AWACs before returning to join 8 squadron which was just forming at Waddington.

We had arrived in Iceland that day on a routine deployment. The American news on TV started to show amazing pictures of the opening bombardment in Iraq.

Thinking that we were well out of the way we continued to enjoy the delights of Kef in January - minus 3 with sleet and a howling gale!

At about 10pm the captain - a great guy from Holland whose previous tour had been flying Dutch F5s- came rushing in to say that early next morning we were to RTB Geilenkirchen ASAP- pick up some war kit and proceed to Preveza in Greece which we did and duly arrived at about 9 PM.



The following evening we were at F290 over southern Turkey controlling the next massive airstrikes on Iraq - air refuelling at midnight at F190 ( lower than normal for us ) in the cloud tops which was quite tricky as there was a lot of turbulence ,the refuelling box was pretty small - which meant a lot of turning and every 10 mins we had to break off to allow higher priority fast jets to top up.

Also the tankers being at war had all their lights switched off! The boom operators tactic of keeping the boom low until the last second also was quite hairy.

Luckily my Dutch hero had no problem at all and didn’t even break sweat!



On our int brief the pessimistic American blond had told us that they had no idea where the large numbers of Iraqi fighters - MIG 29s,MIG 25s etc had disappeared to and thought that they might be operating from the motorways which were only about 50 miles south of us! We would not see them approaching as they would be in the blank area beneath our radar.



The other worry was that an airway was operating about 50 miles North of our orbit and a cunning tactic that concerned us was a that clever MIG pilot would formate under an airliner and then undetected attack a big juicy target (us) from short range when it would be too late to evade!



Sure enough about 3 hours later the back end reported a ‘double’ radar contact on the airway!

After about a minutes discussion on what to do the captain made his decision - wing over/ gear down/ airbrakes out rapid descent!

The Boeing 707 has a reputation of being able to descend very rapidly (as proved by a crew who had unintentionally stalled in the orbit a short time before) and we hit safety altitude at about F100 over the Turkish mountains in what seemed seconds later!



Lessons learned:



Air power is VERY flexible.

The Allied Air Power demo was MASSIVE

The B707 is/was a great aircraft.

Always take some spare kit with you on deployment !

Did my first Op Granby mission in the good old Tri motor 13 Aug 1990, did not get a medal as only did 6 sorties in the Air War.
Mole Man

That's odd, mole man :
The Gulf War medal was awarded for:
Teachers, god-botherers and sundry sun bathers in Cyprus were entitled and you weren't? Surely some mistake??

From middle of August 1990 through to early April 1991 totalled 183 days "in theatre". Early days/weeks busy but safe but got "interesting" from early January 1991 through until end of February 1991.

I feel quite humble listening to these tales of derring -do. A bit of a theme for my whole career really.

Just before it all kicked off I was sat in a war canoe about 200 miles out in the Atlantic, as part of our final operational workup, waiting to get bounced by a whole stack of Buccaneers. When they all got cancelled, I thought "well, I know where they are all going". We carried on our workup and were in our final briefing at a secret base somewhere in England, when someone came in and said, "its all over!". One ship went east and we went west. A month or two later, we were the only Grey Funnel line in the West Atlantic, so we were ordered to go to New York for the Victory parade.

As we sailed up the Hudson River, the commentator was telling everyone that we had not actually been to the Gulf and every sailor onboard was moaning and saying 'Shhhhhh!'.

In the best traditions of Service banter, we sent lots of postcards to colleagues, with the words 'Cheers easy' to those ships who were there, including the team on Gloucester who shot down the C-201 that was thrown at the Missouri.

We found ourselves in Kuwait in 1992, looking at all the damage and speaking with many of the locals about their experiences and those of the unfortunate Palestinians and Phillipinos. They were very grateful for all of your brave efforts.

My Granby was inglorious but not boring. HQ RAFG remained very interested [nosey, even] although a large chunk of our assets were deployed. Air Staff briefings were daily, and attendance escalated such that Sir Sandy decreed only Wg Cdrs and above "place smells like a zoo".
Our little Met cell had some mysterious extra comms equipment moved in, and three of us were to man it if push came to shove. There had to be a password to get into it, and we chose "umbrella" but the received wisdom was to have a miss-spelled version.
Thus DCMetO or Met 1 cracked his head under his desk as I wandered in and asked politely if he was sheltering from a scud. "I've forgotten the password, and its written under my desk!"
There are lots of ways of miss-spelling umbrella.
We never did use the gismo in anger..

At a small transport base in Southern England, those pilots departing for warmer climes were instructed to report to the guardroom to draw and sign for their gun - sorry, weapon - and 6 bullets - sorry, rounds. On landing at various warm airfields, we were often encouraged by the Army to carry out target practice on their ranges and to scoop up replacement bullets - sorry, rounds - in whatever quantities we required. When about to repatriate to Blighty, it was traditional to poop off ones bullets - sorry, rounds - at a suitable target somewhere in case one was diverted to somewhere in Southern England whose welcome committee might not appreciate the presence of guns - sorry, weapons - and live bullets - sorry, rounds - despite the Government of the day passing legislation to authorise this activity.
A particular RN aviator had diligently disposed of his ammunition before returning to said small base in Southern England. His presence was required at the Guardroom to sign in his gun; having done so, he was asked for the return of his 6x9mm rounds. "I've fired them", he replied. This precipitated great consternation among the Admin and Regiment "jam stealers" in the small transport base in Southern England, but eventually they realised that, although not the case in UK, we had been fighting a live ammo war in a warmer place and were fully entitled to have discharged our weapons in pursuit of peace, but it took a while!
cheers
mcdhu

Equally inglorious at HQ RAFG was the fact that, whilst many were involved with work in support of the deployed force, others had begun to grapple with the planning of a rundown of the Command following the fall of The Wall, 'Options for Change' and the eagerly awaited 'Peace Dividend.'

It was my second tour there, after a break of many years. The run-down was indeed sad, but works and bricks and the many charities and facilities kept the place from getting morbid or too run down. The big nasty change was amalgamating the Mess to let the other services in. Churchill Mess tone definitely went down. An Oktoberfest was marred by disgraceful behaviour. Apart from collecting our duty frees we more or less stopped attending. Glad to leave in 1996..

This day 30 years ago, up at 5am for another "fun" day. This time at Dharhan, fellow chap in tears as he just "broke down". Once into matters at hand, some form of "normality" restored him after a short time. Brought home to us though, "what are we here for and why?" Will let others form their opinions/views on that.

30 years ago today - sitting writing Flight Reference Cards for kit we need to deploy with next week. Tomorrow, I need to write training course for the rest of the guys that are going to use the same kit in anger.

Funny, it all seemed par for the course then, just like doing flight trials out of Boscombe Down and OLF'ing round Wales between Christmas and New Year was "perfectly normal.

Today, we are stuck at home unable to see our grandchildren because of an invisible enemy that is all around us.

Oh for the days when it was so straightforward and you knew where the bad guys were - sausage side with guns and SAMs!

28 Dec 1990, 4 hours in a Tornado GR1A on the final trial sortie of the ‘Gulf Pack 2’ upgrade of the recce systems. Monstrous turbulence when trying to tank, the low level was mainly IMC. ‘Amber’ on recovery for an ILS to land. It all seemed quite normal at the time. The next day the aircraft was flown into theatre. I have to say that the flying at Boscombe during the build up to Op Granby was one of the really great periods of my career.

Was on Op Jena (originally called Op Typhus but the Sqn Ldr in charge of the Flight objected and his boss agreed), one of several adjuncts to Granby; during the build up we certainly appreciated all the fantastic work that was being done on our behalf by people in various HQs. Our Chinooks received their intake particle separators/ sand filters just in time, the M134 procurement (which even included a GE expert coming out to the FOB to oversee the installation of equipment sourced from a "third party...!") worked really well, the Robertson tanks were exactly what was needed and GPS was an absolute godsend. Many hours studying the almanac to ensure visibility of the right number of satellites at the planned 'fix' timings really paid off - but we still used all the other DR tools as we couldn't really rely on the 'new' technology. The HQs also listened when we showed them that the RWR mod installed on deployment wasn't up to the task (way too many false returns) and quickly enabled re-fitment of the old Vulcan kit until the new stuff could be re-programmed. You even have to commend the ability of the system to manufacture and distribute the huge stocks of 2-colour desert DPM clothing. OK, it didn't take into account the experience of the Omanis (who'd rejected the original 4-colour desert DPM in favour of a modified version, owing to the unfortunate propensity for that original to virtually glow-in-the-dark even without the need for IR or other night-vision devices) but it was better than nothing.

The response from those back home stayed really good when build-up turned to dust-up. When it became apparent that the NAPS/ anti-anthrax and whooping cough innocs were doing more harm than good our in-theatre medic and the Regimental doc took the necessary action and gave excellent advice (thanks Brian!). When it became clear that the winter conditions were among the worst on record, boxes of cold-weather/Arctic kit started appearing (some of the sand-coloured windproof jackets were manufactured in 1942 and had bone buttons...); a Chinook with no side windows fitted, front door open and ramp down doing 120kts in OATs below zero is not a comfortable place to be, so the extra layers were really welcome. I only gave up the Canadian parka last year, and the high-altitude gauntlets are still in a box upstairs for use in really bitter conditions.

We felt very looked-after, and it made a huge difference. As did the wonderful surge in BFPO mail, both from families and from complete strangers. BZ to those who stayed behind but still made it all happen.

Indeed! Upstairs at KKIA the postal folk had pinned up dozens of letters from total strangers which were a delight to read. We also had quite a few (mustn't-call-it-Christmas) cakes. But Mr Kipling not only made exceedingly good mince pies, but effing thousands of them - we had walls of them in the tanker QRA hotel annex. If we had visitors we'd offer them as many boxes as they could carry with them!

RAF catering was very good. So good that the Army banned its troops from using it as otherwise their own cooks wouldn't have any work to do.

I'd gone back to do some Sky Guardian and HaveQuick 2 work during a 2 week break, as well as some fighter evasion stuff in the VC10K simulator. We didn't have fill-gun loading of MWODs for the HQ2, so the codes all had to be loaded manually, which was a complete faff. When the security people heard that the MWOD codes had been freely photocopied for distribution they nearly fainted. Not that we really had any option; few crews seemed to understand HaveQuick or be bothered to learn about it - but fortunately we never experienced comms jamming, so didn't really need to use it.

Regarding Mode4, it worked just fine as far as were concerned in the VC10K. But were still required to do periodic Mode 1 and Mode 3 code changing - no clever automatic device required, just a cheap Muharraq souk watch pressed against the headset ear piece which beeped at the required interval!

I had somehow ticked the "No hotels but plenty of sand" box on my Granby application, so ended up in a more canvas and guy rope dominated environment. One of the few treats was the mail run with the "blueys" from total strangers. They were mostly thoughtful and comforting, and we were all encouraged to start pen-pal relationships. I couldn't believe some of the troops were writing to these red-hot nymphomaniacs (at least on paper!) who were responding with some orthopedically challenging suggestions requiring lashings of lubricant and safe words, whereas I managed to get delightful 72 year old retired sheep farmer from Derbyshire, who loved to make fruit cakes (not a euphemism!) for her grandchildren. I'm sure it was better for my moral compass, but I still feel like I missed out on part of my education.