Scram! (8 page)

The following night we repeated the process, this time in the dark. Night deck landings are far more unnerving. On the approach to the ship, I had to keep flicking my eyes from the flight instruments to the lights on the ship. It's much harder to judge distance and speed just from a couple of vertical lights on top of the ship and a row of horizontal lights behind the flight-deck officer's head. But at least there's no swooshing water to distract you. Instead of watching the ship roll around, I learnt to keep a steady hover whilst watching the row of flight-deck lights rolling around.

For my first day deck landing I had somehow managed to avoid a nasty effect known as ‘ground resonance'. Wessex were especially prone to this problem. Just because of the slightly lopsided way helicopters hang suspended in the hover, landing almost always involved bouncing from one wheel to the other. Left unchecked this bouncing can degenerate rapidly into ground resonance, an unstable condition that can eventually cause the helicopter to topple
over
. If the bouncing isn't too bad, lowering the full weight of the helicopter onto the deck usually solves the problem. On my subsequent deck landings, I went into ground resonance a few times and we had to lift quickly back up into the air to calm things down. Experienced pilots almost never get into ground resonance. Unfortunately both aircrew and groundcrew knew this. So it was embarrassing when it happened.

Compared to landing, taking off from the little
Green Rover
, or indeed from any ship's flight deck, was a piece of cake. It was much the same procedure in reverse. First I gave a thumbs-up sign to the flight-deck officer. The four groundcrew ran in and removed the strops, moved clear of the disk, then turned and held them up clearly for me to confirm. The flight-deck officer signalled I was clear to launch by holding his bats out again. I didn't want to hang around on a pitching and rolling deck for long after that, pulling in power cleanly and decisively to lift off. As the Wessex continued rising, I cleared to the left and accelerated away from the ship.

After sleeping on the floor of Ascension for two nights, Nick Foster and his team were hugely impressed with the comfort and splendour of the RFA
Fort Austin
. It was as big as a medium-sized cruise chip, with cranes and gantries where cabins might otherwise have been, and it had some of the comforts of a cruise ship. As flight commander, Foster had a cabin to himself, complete with double bed, sea view, ensuite bathroom and even shared use of a steward. The maintainers also thought it was great because they were each assigned two-man cabins. The low point of the trip was undoubtedly when the chief steward was forced to apologise. The normal seven-course sit down dinner would be reduced to a mere five courses, since they
didn't
know how long they would be away. ‘If you're going to go to war,' thought Foster, ‘go to war on an RFA.' It was luxurious compared to the cramped conditions of a Royal Navy warship.

On 9 April, after embarking a 120-strong combined group of SAS and SBS special forces,
Fort Austin
became the first British ship to set off south from Ascension. At first there was a vague notion that
Fort Austin, Endurance
and its two AS12 air-to-surface missile-equipped Wasp helicopters might comprise a sufficient task group to retake South Georgia. Fortunately, in the absence of a Navy warship to act as escort, this unwise idea was vetoed.

Three days out from Ascension,
Fort Austin
met up with
Endurance
in the rough South Atlantic waters. Lieutenant Kim Slowe took off in Yankee Delta to begin the ‘vertrep', vertical replenishment, of eagerly awaited fresh food and stores across to
Endurance
. Unfortunately, part way through the vertrep, a fuel computer malfunction on the Wessex caused one of the engines to run down to idle. Slowe felt the aircraft begin to sink because of the lack of power. To the horror of the hungry
Endurance
onlookers, he was forced to jettison the load into the sea just to stay airborne, and then coolly flew the Wessex on one engine back to
Fort Austin
.

The following night, Nick Foster took off in Yankee Delta to test the repaired aircraft. All seemed as well as it ever does on a night flight over the sea when you can see little or nothing outside and only the dimly lit instruments inside your cockpit. Soon after take-off the computer on the same engine ran down to idle yet again. In the dark night of the South Atlantic, Foster felt the tail of the aircraft start to shake badly. ‘Oh God, I think we've got a tail rotor problem,' he told his crewman. His mind immediately switched to the prospect of ditching into the
sea
. It only lasted a few seconds before he realised that in fact the adrenalin of the situation was making his knees shake. The movement on the pedals was in turn making the tail shake. Rather less coolly, Foster recovered safely on one engine to
Fort Austin
, which was now heading back north to Ascension.

Meanwhile, in the North Atlantic, Jack Lomas and Oily Knight were heading south with their Wessex gunships on RFA
Resource
. Having been the first to embark up in Scotland, it soon became apparent that they had departed in haste: for the AS12 missiles to be effective, the M260 missile sight in the left seat of each aircraft needed to be recalibrated. Fortunately, a few days later,
Resource
was sailing past the Dorset coast: Lomas and Knight returned back to Yeovilton for the necessary adjustments and rejoined the ship on the same day. The two gunships carried out a successful test-firing of four missiles just before arrival in Ascension.

Like Nick Foster in
Fort Austin
, Jack Lomas was going to war in style.
Resource
was essentially an ammunition ship. In other words, a giant bomb. Soon after heading off, the ship's captain told Lomas about his approach to action stations. ‘There's two ways we can play this, Jack,' he said. ‘We can be totally pucker, strip down the wardroom, close the bar, and take it all terribly seriously like
Hermes
. Or we can be sensible. We are sitting on 27,000 tons of high explosive. If an Exocet missile gets us, the next bang you hear will be your arse going through your head. You won't need a lifejacket. You'll need a parachute.'

The bar stayed open. Throughout the journey south, the Wessex team lived and dined like kings. This provided an irresistible opportunity for one-upmanship to Oily Knight. It was already a depressingly murky day when
Knight
flew across to the aircraft carrier
Hermes
in search of spares. After shutting down on the huge deck behind a row of Sea Harriers, he headed towards the little door at the foot of the superstructure and went below decks.

He was appalled by the cramped conditions he met on board the aircraft carrier. There were bodies asleep on camp beds along the corridors. Lunch on board appeared little short of dumplings and some sort of gruel. Returning to
Resource
, he typed up a ‘typical' dinner menu, embellished ever so slightly with lobster, foie gras, steak and salmon, cheese, biscuits and liqueurs, washed down with port. The menu was then despatched to a ‘friend' on the
junglie
Sea King squadron on
Hermes
. Knight knew that morale was already low. He was delighted to hear that on receipt of his menu it had now plummeted below the floor. Taking the piss was all part of the game, according to Knight. Thankfully for the rest of us, his moment of comeuppance lay ahead.

A typical Wessex ‘flight' comprised a couple of helicopters, aircrew and engineers, stuck on the back end of an auxiliary ship. Communication with the outside world was limited or difficult. Keeping up to date with events in South Georgia and the Falklands meant an almost total reliance on the BBC World Service news, transmitted over HF radio. Keeping in touch with the squadron hierarchy back at Yeovilton, let alone other flights dotted around the growing British fleet now heading south, was nigh on impossible apart from the odd few words on a signal. Flight commanders held a considerable degree of autonomy and responsibility as a result, relying on the ingenuity and experience of the entire flight to resolve unforeseen issues.

One such issue for Lomas and his team involved the flotation canisters that were normally plugged into the hub of each main wheel on the Wessex. These canisters
contained
a giant balloon that fired off, just like an airbag, in the event of a ditching at sea. The priority was not so much to save the aircraft but to keep the aircraft afloat long enough to improve the odds of escape for aircrew and passengers. The previous summer off the coast of the USA, a Wessex flown by Lieutenant Phil Doyne-Ditmas had suffered a tail rotor failure and ditched into the sea. Although only one ‘flot can' fired, causing the aircraft to flip upside down under water, all of the crew and passengers managed to escape. The problem for Lomas was that it was impossible to fit the flot cans as well as the 2-inch rocket platform. Without a commanding officer or senior pilot to talk to, Lomas flew across to
Fearless
to talk to former boss Tim Stanning. ‘What the hell am I supposed to do, Tim? Our rocketry kit has been aligned. But it doesn't seem a terribly sensible idea to be flying around the Bay of Biscay over water without flot cans.'

Stanning's reply was straightforward. ‘You're a gunship. Keep it that way.' Sometimes it was good to have another experienced
junglie
around.

Even though the Royal Navy had been flying Wessex helicopters at sea for seventeen years, there were always situations that tested the initiative and creativity of the crew. Some procedures were made up on the hoof. One of the key threats the Wessex was thought likely to face, should the task force see action, came from fixed-wing aircraft. With his background as a Helicopter Warfare Instructor (HWI), Lomas and his team decided to turn the attack capabilities of the Wessex into defence. Instead of firing the rockets downwards onto a ground target, what would happen if they were pointed upwards at an incoming jet?

Lomas, Knight and their two other pilots, Sub-Lieutenants Richard ‘Noddy' Morton and Steve ‘Wannafight' Judd,
had
a fantastic time experimenting with flying past the ship at low level, raising the aircraft nose slightly, and firing off pairs of rockets. The rockets were designed to explode either on impact or after a period of time. Making notes after each firing, the crews soon worked out that they could get the rockets to explode fairly reliably a couple of miles away at about 500 feet. Although the likelihood of actually hitting an attacking jet was zero – it was bad enough trying to hit a stationary tank – it might make the pilot's eyes water. And it was good for morale.

Chapter 4

Not a ‘first tourist' day: 21 April 1982

THE SAS NEVER
do things the easy way. Inserting a troop onto the top of the remote and inhospitable Fortuna Glacier in appalling weather was always going to push the survival skills of Britain's finest to the limit. And that was assuming the 845 Squadron Wessex pilots could get them up there in the first place
.

The most challenging element of an ambitious mission plan was to send the helicopters up there in close formation at night. As if the plan wasn't tough enough already, a practice formation session confirmed that night-time was not the time to do it. The SAS plan launched in daylight marked the beginning of Operation Paraquat to take back South Georgia
.

Two weeks after the initial Argentine occupation of South Georgia and the Falklands, the whole venture remained in the realm of a good April Fools' joke. Many people still thought it would turn out to be just a bit of fun. Before long the politicians would get their act together
and
everyone could come home again. It was about to become very clear indeed that this was not to be the case.

Like Hector Heathcote, Mike Tidd was also in Northern Ireland when it all kicked off on Friday 2 April. He was surprised and disappointed not to get a phone call from Yeovilton asking him to get back fast. Eager not to miss out on the fun, he phoned in to Yeovilton. ‘Wait a few days and see how things pan out,' said Booth.

A few days later, Tidd was taxiing his Wessex in to dispersal at Aldergrove after a long day flying in South Armagh. In front of him stood the grinning face of Lieutenant Ray Colborne (known to all as ‘Uncle Ray'), who was holding up a brown travel bag. After the rotors stopped turning, Colborne wandered over and handed Tidd the bag, telling him, ‘You're off, my son! See that British Airways Tristar on the other side of the airfield? Best you get changed. You're in the jump seat.' The rest of Tidd's team were already on their way, having been replaced by Colborne, two other experienced Wessex pilots, and three of the new baby
junglies
, including me.

Now dressed in civilian clothes and perched between the Tristar's two British Airways pilots, Tidd looked down at the Irish Sea 30,000 feet below. Suddenly a cold sweat came over him. He realised he could feel his loaded 9mm pistol still hanging in its holster inside his bomber jacket. Heathrow security were unlikely to take kindly to a loaded weapon passing through their airport with no paperwork, especially coming from Belfast. On arrival he collected his flying kit bag and, thinking fast, grabbed a policeman. ‘Excuse me, old chap, I'm on my way to the Falklands and I've got a lot of kit. Any chance of some help?' The unwitting policeman then led the armed Tidd all the way through customs and safely out the other side.

On the morning of Tuesday 6 April, Tiddles and his
newly
formed Wessex flight of Ian Georgeson, Sub-Lieutenant Andy ‘Boy' Berryman, and RAF exchange pilot Flight Lieutenant Andy ‘Pullthrough' Pulford, were the second team to arrive on Ascension. Two days later, they were assisting Nick Foster's flight, lifting stores and troops out to
Fort Austin
. On 11 April, the flight embarked on RFA
Tidespring
, a large oiler, destined to head off with the warships
Antrim
and
Plymouth
for South Georgia. After collecting a few more stores from the returning
Fort Austin
en route, the group continued south to rendezvous with HMS
Endurance
.