Wings (40 page)

The Sidewinder was already a quarter of a century old, but its brilliantly simple and adaptable design meant that it was capable of endless refinements and it remains in service to this day, the
most effective heat-seeking missile in aviation history. The Shars were equipped with the improved ‘Lima’ variant, which had an ‘all-aspect’ capability allowing it to be
fired from any position, even head-on, while still managing to manoeuvre behind the victim to home in on its jet pipe.

Thomas was the first to pick up a contact: two thin blips on his screen showing the Mirages ten degrees high and seventeen miles distant. He took over from the
Glamorgan
controller, in
the same way as his Fighter Boy forbears would have done from the section controller once they had sighted ‘bandits’ forty-two years before. He decided to approach the Mirages head-on.
Barton steered to the left, so as to swing round behind them. This was a manoeuvre they had practised repeatedly. Everything was unfolding in instruction-manual fashion. The only question was
whether the Argentinians would turn away. But no, on they came, closing on the Sea Harriers at a rate of a mile every three seconds.

At four miles the lead Mirage showed as a tiny dot on the Head-Up Display, projected on his windscreen, framed by the four arms of the radar-acquisition cross. Thomas switched on his missile.
The signal that the Sidewinder had locked onto the
heat of the target engine was a low electronic growl, but none came. The Argentinian pilots seemed to have throttled back to
reduce their heat signature and stymie a head-on shot. Thomas began to worry that the Argentinian racing towards him may by now have locked his own radar-guided missiles onto him. Just as he
flashed below the delta wings of the oncoming Mirages two trails of smoke streaked past his cockpit.

He pulled his Shar round to the right to make another approach. Now Barton was approaching the pair from the side. One was trailing the other, apparently oblivious to the danger he was in. The
electronic signal told Barton his missile was primed. He pressed the firing button and called the NATO launch signal – ‘Fox Two away.’

According to Ward’s account, based on his debrief of his men, ‘the missile thundered off the rails like an express train and left a brilliant white smoke trail as it curved up
towards the heavens, chasing after the Mirage, which was now making for the stars, very nose-high. Paul was mesmerized as the angry missile closed with its target. As the Sidewinder made intercept,
the Argentine jet exploded in a vivid ball of yellow flame. It broke its back as the missile exploded and then disintegrated, before its remains twisted their way down to the cloud and the sea
below.’
⁴

Steve Thomas was now in pursuit of his own Mirage and managed to get his Sidewinder on target just as his quarry disappeared into the cloud below. He could not confirm a definite kill, but it
seemed a probable. In fact, the missile had proximity-fused near the aircraft, which managed to limp to
Stanley airfield, only to be shot down by ‘friendly’
anti-aircraft fire. The pair headed back to
Invincible
and ‘it was quite definitely a hero’s welcome when the two landed back on board’.
⁵
There was more good news from
Hermes
. Flight Lieutenant ‘Bertie’ Penfold, an RAF pilot attached to 800 Squadron, had downed a Dagger which had been
taking part in an attack on HMS
Glamorgan
and HMS
Arrow
off Port Stanley. In the early evening, 801 Squadron claimed another victim when Lieutenant Alan Curtis shot down one of a
group of three Canberra bombers over the sea.

The score at the end of the first day of air combat was four Argentinian aircraft shot down and four aircrew killed. There were no British losses. The pattern was set for the remainder of the
war. Argentinian fighters did not manage to shoot down any of their British opponents. The six Sea Harriers and three GR3s lost were brought down by gun or missile fire or were lost as the result
of accidents.

This lack of success was not due to any failure of resolve or skill on the part of the Argentinian pilots, who still managed to inflict devastating damage on the British fleet, despite being
armed with unguided and incorrectly fused bombs. Their courage was magnificently in evidence on Friday, 21 May 1982, when the Task Force at last went ashore. I watched from the deck of the P&O
liner
Canberrra
, which had been pressed into service as a troop ship, as Skyhawks and Daggers flashed into San Carlos water at what seemed like mast-height, pursued by missiles twisting up
from the navy ships moored around us. Among the attackers that day was Captain Hector Sanchez,
the Skyhawk pilot who survived the battle which opens this book, when Commander
David Morgan downed two of his comrades. Like most of those who were involved in it, he fought his war in the air without hatred.

‘I have nothing against the British,’ he told Maxi Gainza in 1989. ‘We shot at one another, but we were both doing our job and I respect them for it.’
⁶
Later he would meet Morgan to share a drink and exchange memories, in much the same way that RAF and Luftwaffe veterans of the Battle of Britain had met to
shake hands and reminisce. Such human encounters belonged to an era that had already passed. The Falklands conflict saw the end of the tradition established over the trenches of the Western Front
when men matched their machines and their flying skills in mortal combat. Inexorably, technology was coming to dominate the practice of aerial warfare and a future beckoned in which human beings
would play an ever-diminishing part.

In the late summer of 2008 soldiers of the Parachute Regiment led an operation to clear the way for the delivery of a generator turbine needed to boost electricity supplies to
southern Afghanistan. They were tasked with securing the route along which the convoy carrying the machinery would be driven. The last stretch of the journey to the hydro-electric station at the
Kajaki Dam in Helmand Province was bandit country, a web of irrigation ditches, fields and compounds, thick with insurgents. Several hundred Paras were moved into the area. Even so, air power was
essential if the ground was to be secured. The operation that followed provided a demonstration of the nature of aerial warfare in an age where highly advanced technological societies clash with a
primitive enemy.

On the morning of 30 August 2008 the convoy had safely crossed the desert and mountains and was ready to move onto the rock-strewn, dusty track that led through the cultivated area to its final
destination. The night before it had seemed
that an attempt by the Paras to secure a ceasefire with the local Taliban by means of bribery might succeed. When they arrived at
an agreed rendezvous to formalize the deal, however, there was no sign of the rebels. The deal was off.

The commanding officer of 3 Para, Lieutenant Colonel Huw Williams, still felt that a show of force might persuade the insurgents to lie low. At his request, a fighter-bomber made an
ear-splitting pass at 250 feet over the lush fields, dotted with baked mud compounds.

The demonstration had little effect. When the soldiers moved off down the road, they soon came under attack. Artillery, rocket and mortar fire was called down on the Taliban positions. Despite
the bombardment, spasmodic shots still sounded from one compound. It was time to call in the air force. Accompanying the soldiers was an RAF officer, Flight Lieutenant Adam Freedman, a slim, lively
Londoner, who was serving as a Joint Tactical Air Controller. His job was to call in the locations of enemy positions so they could be dealt with by bombs or missiles, delivered by fast jets or
helicopters.

Freedman relayed the co-ordinates over the radio. A few minutes later a 500 lb satellite-guided bomb erupted on the insurgent position, followed minutes later by another. The shooting stopped.
Of the American B-1 Lancer that had dropped the bombs there was no sign. It was flying far too high to be seen by the naked eye, let alone be threatened by any weapon to be found in the
Taliban’s armoury.

The RAF does not feature much in the iconography of the Afghan war. It is the army which seems to be doing all the
work. The public imagination is dominated by images of
lines of patrolling troops moving cautiously through mud-walled villages and the rattle of firefights in maize fields. Air power is unseen and perhaps unappreciated. Without it, however, the army
could not function. As the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Stephen Dalton, pointed out, the patrolling soldiers on the TV news are totally reliant on air power, ‘depending on situational
awareness provided by unseen and unheard surveillance aircraft, the assurance of firepower support from on-call fighter aircraft and unmanned systems over the horizon; the mobility and resupply
capability provided by tactical air transport’. As they gingerly put one boot in front of the other, constantly bracing for the boom and blast of an exploding IED, they will also be
‘bolstered by the knowledge that, if necessary, medical evacuation helicopters are on hand to ensure that battle casualties will be delivered to first-class hospital care within the critical
“golden hour”’.
¹

In two respects the super-sophisticated aircraft are fulfilling the same function as their wire-and-canvas forbears of nearly a century before – providing accurate information about the
battlefield and firepower in support of their comrades on the ground. But others are relatively new, particularly the reliance the army now places on the air force to get them to and from the
battlefield, and to transport them around it and supply them during operations.

The attack aspect of military flying is no longer the domain of men alone. In 1992 the Government announced that women would be allowed to fly jet aircraft and two years
later a woman pilot, Flight Lieutenant Jo Salter, joined 617 Squadron, the illustrious Dambusters, taking part in operations to enforce the no-fly zones over Iraq.

In the conflicts Britain has been engaged in recently, flying fast jets has become a progressively less dangerous experience, at least as far as the threat from enemy fire is concerned. At the
time of writing, twenty-one RAF personnel have died in Afghanistan since 2006. Some were killed by roadside bombs. Most were the victims of a crash when an elderly Nimrod fell out of the sky during
a reconnaissance mission as a result of mechanical failure. None of the deaths was caused by an aircraft being brought down by enemy bullets or missiles – though that possibility always
remains.

By the end of the twentieth century the insulation of the jet jockey from not just the battlefield but the world was almost complete. Flight Lieutenant John Nichol, a navigator who began his
service in the Cold War era, always found it difficult to answer the question ‘What’s it like flying in a Tornado?’ because ‘It’s like nothing else. In the grey,
pre-dawn drizzle you clamber up into your big, ugly, mechanical monster, snuggle down into your seat and snap shut the canopy. Now you are in a different world, enclosed, autonomous, completely
shut off from the outside, with a beautiful, cosy, electronic whine in the background.’

Nichol was based in Germany and on his morning flight he would look down through gaps in the cloud to see ‘the rest of the world coming to life, waking up and going to work. Lines of cars
in traffic jams stretch out below you, their lights on,
wipers too probably, the drivers smoking, getting frustrated, checking their watches, listening to the bad news on the
radio and a miserable weather report. And you have escaped their drudgery and trudgery and cannot but feel sorry for the poor bastards, while you are high in the blue, in heaven with an electronic
whine. It is hard sometimes not to feel superior. This is why some fast jet jocks, especially single-seater pilots, develop unmatchable egos and feelings of godlike supremacy.’
²

In January 1991 Nichol and his pilot Flight Lieutenant John Peters were brought down to earth during a low-level daylight raid in the opening phase of Operation Desert Storm. They were operating
alongside US Air Force and Navy jets against targets in southern Iraq. Their objective was the Ar Rumaylah Air Base in the desert west of Basra, which was strongly defended by anti-aircraft
batteries and Soviet-made SAM-3 and SAM-6 surface-to-air missile sites. The pair were struck by a succession of catastrophes. First, the Tornado’s bombs failed to release over the target.
They managed to shake them free and were heading for home, when they were hit by a SAM. The Tornado was in flames from stem to stern and there was nothing for it but to eject.

‘We both hauled up on the handles between our legs,’ wrote Peters. ‘There was a faint mechanical thud through the seats. Automatically, straps whipped around me, drawing my
arms and legs firmly in against the seat frame to prevent ejection injury.’

For a few agonizing seconds, nothing happened. Then, ‘the rockets fired. A giant grabbed us by the shoulders and ripped
us upwards at thirty times the force of
gravity . . . rag dolls tossed high into the air: a massive noise from the seat rocket motors, a deafening wind rush, a sensation of tumbling over and over in space. The slipstream was crushing,
even through the flying kit, 400 miles per hour strong . . . there was a feeling of falling, endlessly falling, somersaulting end over end, then the drogue gun fired out a small stabilizing
parachute, to stop the whirling through the air. Immediately, as the seat became upright, the main parachute deployed. There was a jarring “crack” as the canopy snapped open, a massive
jerk as it caught the weight . . . the seat cut free automatically, falling away to earth. I opened my eyes. I was hanging under the blessed silk of the parachute . . . floating down into the
deathly silence of enemy territory.’
³