I'd just got my jaws around a large G&T at home when the Boss rang to tell me that I was 'vulnerable for recall' for the Gulf. I'd been at the UAS long enough to have passed my B1, had my first summer camp and block leave and was just starting the 'pre-Trappers' week' work-up session at Abingdon. In 1990, the RAF had the luxury of aircrew in various QFI posts or on ground tours. ![]() Glad to know that you bought those beers for Max and Nige, mate! Hi MrB - shame you couldn't make TBs last week, there was quite a gathering, as Tengah Type will no doubt confirm. I still do the occasional schedule to Bahrain with the current employer, and landing at Muharraq still brings back memories of the sights, sounds and smells of that time! One's morale takes a a bit of hit when a crew is missing on one's first soirée! My first sortie of the War was providing out-and-back AAR for the formation that included the Peters/Nichol crew. Didn't know either of them very well before that get-together in the bar, but there was so much camaraderie amongst the crews and others that evening, and the greater than normal inter-mingling of squadron personnel was noticeable. Shall raise a glass shortly to those who were lost.īeags, just prior to all the squadrons leaving Marham for places various in the Gulf, there was a big Happy Hour in the OM and the very last 2 beers I bought that evening, recorded in my bar book, were for Nigel and Max. So when the display lit up showing you 87 miles out and closing rapidly, we were all very relieved! My records are equally sketchy, but we'd been briefed to select A/A TACAN on at RV2 -15 minutes. ![]() But I assessed that no-one would have been coming the other way on OLIVE TRAIL! I was flying ZA141, the first VC10K2 in service, but it had recently been fitted with Sky Guardian and a half-decent PFM, so at least anything with radar would have shown up.Īlthough we'd been allocated a tanker combine frequency, it was 116.7MHz and therefore outside our VHF radio frequency range - hence all comms on Red 4! The same sort of basic error as the lack of a force-wide QNH in the early days, which the air box in Riyadh hadn't NB'd. There was no point in passing the information to PONCA as he would have needed to find a General to approve it. We'd been told that, for deconfliction, we HAD to stick to our assigned AAR levels (much lower than normal due to your weight with JP233s and the temperature), but had I done so we'd have been in cloud and couldn't have refuelled you - so I had to find the nearest level where AAR was JUST possible, whilst informing the rest of the cell. Mission 4452 was our mission line in the ATO. I was indeed Polaris 52A, with 52B and 54 in cell behind. Well, 67Wing, 'tis a small world thanks to PPRuNe! Max had been the nav plotter on my first Vulcan crew 14 years earlier and we'd spoken only a few days before he was killed. In particular, RIP Max Collier, 27 Sqn, killed in action with Nige Elsdon the following night whilst attacking Shaibah. ![]() Has anything been planned either by the RAF or the meeja to commemorate the start of Gulf War One - or are they all rather embarrassed that the Middle East is still in turmoil despite all the sacrifices and events of the past 25 years? Then back to flying some aeros in my Bulldog at ULAS a couple of days later, before some leave once I'd regained currency. So back we came via a Palermo nightstop to a flypast at Brize on March 13th. That and some of the Saudi drivers on the local roads!Īfter being scrambled from bed to support some F-14s and GR1As, I was making a cup of tea for the rest of the crew in the galley when we heard that the cease fire had been declared. That was the first of 38 such sorties I did the only threats we really faced at KKIA were the Scuds thrown in our direction and the ever-present risk of mid-air collision, given the number of jets in theatre. Pretty small beer when compared with the Tornado mates' experiences. As luck would have it, both our hoses stuck out, so a flapless landing on absolute minimum fuel was the finale to our first war sortie. Then waited on Lemon Post towline, planning to balance out the fuel across our 3 tankers - but the tanker with all the spare fuel couldn't trail the centreline hose, so we had to make do with what we had.ĭozens of black shadows of other formations went past at deconflicted levels, then back came the Tornados, thankfully - after some post-attack AAR they went back to Muharraq whilst we headed back to KKIA. Weather at the refuelling level was pretty dire, but we found a level which worked and released the Tornados on time. ![]() It will be 25 years ago tonight that I took off from KKIA just after midnight, leading 3 VC10K tankers to RV with 8 Tornados from Muharraq on their way to attack Talil.
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