A Gulf Story (Part 7)

I’m not going to go into too many details of the mission itself, but ‘Dhahran Annie’ her crew, Colin and Chris and other crews and their jets taking part in, other than it was a 7 jet package (1 x 4 jet & 1 x 3 jet formation) it would normally have been 8 jets, but I think that one of the crews and a jet were stuck at another airbase where they’d had to land with a problem on a previous mission? Their target had been the airfield at Jalibah South East in Southern Iraq each delivering 5 x 1000lbs from a ballistic loft attack profile. Our job was to provide the machines for these guys carry the war forward, then to recover them and prepare them to go and do it again, the mechanics of which were not so much different to our job in peacetime, but as I explained in the last episode, what was different was the emotions of having our mates taking our jets into hostile territory! One very good friend recently commented that waiting for their jet to return could be likened to a father waiting for his daughter to return from her first date!

We had planned and trained for a completely different type of war than the one we now found ourselves involved in, we had also been kitted out for a different one too! The military had apparently sold off it’s stocks of desert combat uniforms, so before deployment, we were issued the most appropriate stuff that they had in stock, which was actually tropical uniform. We coined a phrase; Trained in Britain, to fight in Europe, kitted out for the Jungle, and sent to the Desert! Back at our base in West Germany we were all ‘Cold War’ warriors, most of us were convinced that only if East/West relations ever actually deteriorated from ‘shit’ to ‘fuck’ would our ‘Twin Man, Twin Fan, Swing Wing Arrows of Death go to war! The war we trained and prepared for didn’t really have a planned happy ending, the last phase of our frequent ‘war games’ back in Germany, alway ended up with us launching jets carrying packages with about 32 times the explosive power of the one the made the Mayor of Hiroshima look up from his cornflakes. Tornados just didn’t go to war until Armageddon and even then certainly not painted pink! The SAS had the motto ‘Who Dares Wins’ ours was more of a ‘Who Cares Who Wins’ and I think that most of us realised that if our jets actually made it back from nuking a target in Eastern Europe, there wouldn’t be much left of us or our air base! But, here we were in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and our jets had ‘called in’ and were in the circuit with their ‘dunlops dangling’ ready to land. All 7 jets were inbound and there was a feeling of elation to know that everyone was returning from the mission safely.

I just have to jump ahead from January 20th and this particular mission, as today being January 24th is the 30th anniversary of the first combat loss that we suffered at Dhahran, I mentioned it in a previous post how ‘Budgie’ and Bob were missing and presumed to have been killed, but in fact were POWs in Iraq. I can still remember the feeling on this particular day, we were walking out to meet the returning jets, when Matt, our own squadron’s operations clerk, pulled up by me in his pick-up truck and said “Charlie! We’ve lost one, there’s a jet missing” These are dreaded words, I can imagine the same feelings go through everyone in the system, when this news breaks, in the Operations Room, back at the hotel, wherever you are? Anyway, I said to myself “my jet’s coming back safely today!” And it did, but that’s another story!

Back to the day in question, we waved Dhahran Annie into its parking position, stopped it, chocked it, I plugged in my headset, quick word with Colin, I checked some indications on a maintenance panel that we monitored and gave the all clear to shut-down the engines. Terry, the mechanic that I was working with passed me some safety pins to fit, there are lots of these, some are to stop underwing stores, such as the large external ‘drop’ tanks for the fuel and the pods that contain the electronic countermeasures, jamming equipment and decoy chaff and flares being inadvertently jettisoned on the ground and others to stop the landing gear from being retracted while the jet is sat on it’s wheels. I usually took a couple of cold cans of pop out to give to the returning crew, but today I’d either forgotten or hadn’t had time? Anyway Terry put the steps up for Colin and Chris to get out of the jet and we just had a brief chat, the jet was working fine, nothing to be written in the F700, which is an aircraft’s log book and records all the activities performed on it as well as a running total of flight hours and landings thats done. It wasn’t unusual for crews to want to get away from the jet and into the crew minibus with the other guys from their formation and get back to the operations building to debrief the mission and relax and decompress after a 3hr 35min mission with probably an hour in the jet pre-flight. Sometimes, crews wanted to have a chat, even tell you just what they’d bombed the shit out of! But this was still early in the war, Tornado losses were mounting and my view was that if they clearly want to get away, don’t hold them up trying to get something out of them! If they want to talk, let them spit it out! Anyway Colin and Chris, who were then and still are now, good friends of mine were into the crew bus heading back to be just in time for tea and medals! I was just about to start the ‘After-Flight’ servicing, this is basically a post flight inspection of the jet, look at things, waggle things, sometimes kick things, basically check that everything is still where it should be and in the same condition as it was before it had flown. Terry was doing ‘downstairs’ meaning everything that could be done from ground level, such as checking the tyres, brakes, filling up the engine oil tanks and generally looking for any damage or leaks. I was doing ‘upstairs’ this meant checking both the driver’s and navigator’s cockpits, making sure that all the ejection seat safety pins had been fitted by the crew, all the switches were in the ‘safe’ or ‘off’ positions, tidying up the seat harnesses and then walking along the top surfaces of the fuselage and wing looking for any signs of damage. But before I had started my inspection, one of the armourers from a weapon load team that had arrived to reset the 5 ejector release units that the 1000lbs bombs had been dropped from, had noticed some damage on the back of one of the underwing fuel tank fins and as he pointed it out to me, I couldn’t help notice a ragged hole at the top of the jet’s rudder, that at the rear of the Tornado’s huge fin, or more correctly, it’s vertical stabiliser. This was clearly what we call ‘Battle Damage’ and it was the first time a Tornado had come back from a mission displaying signs of it!

There are several different basic trades for the mechanics and technicians, but those who’s trade is either Airframes or Electrics are trained in something known as Battle Damage Repair. Incidentally, Airframe guys are called ‘Riggers’ (my basic trade was a Rigger) and Electricians are called ‘Dog Fuckers’ I’m just going to leave it at that for now! Back in Germany, during our war games, one of the ‘Umpires’ would turn up to test our Aircraft Battle Damage Repair (ABDR) skills, this usually entailed an old scrap aeroplane on our squadron site, the umpire would stick a pick axe through the side of this poor old jet (on our squadron, an old 1960s Lightning interceptor) make sure he’d also ripped through a loom of electrical wiring, and then tell you to get on and repair it! Now most good riggers can do sheet metal repairs to pretty high standards, but not all have had a great deal of experience at it, I actually had as I’d spent sometime on a unit specialising in complex structural repairs. But there were a few fundamental differences between normal repairs and Battle Damage Repairs; Basically, get it done fast! Assess the damage, (see if you need to drag a dog fucker away from his coffee to repair any wiring) select a repair type, select some suitable metal and nail, sorry rivet a patch over the hole! No surface preperation, not too much concern about aerodynamic finish and no painting it afterwards! Sometimes you are given simulated battle damage on some control surface or landing gear door mechanism, I’d actually repaired a gear door on our old Lightning with a section of Broom Handle once during a war game, it worked a treat and we got full points on the scoresheet for the exercise.

But here at Dhahran it had been decided that we would have dedicated ABDR guys, these were riggers who all had plenty of experience doing normal full quality repairs, so that in the event that their skills were required, it wouldn’t be a ‘Bodge it, Scarper & Hide’ “warranty expires once you sign for the jet” and “it’ll do a trip, but don’t quote me” repair that was good for launching a survival scramble in a nuclear Armageddon scenario! So the word got out that we had some minor damage (as we were to discover a few days later, when we saw what major damage was!) The ABDR Team arrived with their trolley containing all the power tools, such as drills, saws, rivet guns and sheets of aluminium, steel, titanium as well as tubing and pipes to repair any damaged hydraulic lines. We also had TV film crews and the journos from the newspapers descend upon our parking slot.

I noticed that the ABDR Team leader was preparing to get himself in the limelight and go and point out the hole in Dhahran Annie’s rudder! He had chosen a length of hydraulic pipe from his tool kit to use as a pointer and was about to mount the steps to get on top of MY jet! “Er, excuse me mate! Where do you think that you’re going?” ABDR fella replied, that he was going to indicate to the film and camera crews the shrapnel hole on the rudder of DA “I’m very sorry but this is my jet and I haven’t yet made it safe! I’ll come and tell you when it’s clear for you to get up there! It won’t be long though and in the meantime, can I borrow your stick please?” I bathed in limelight, my 15 minutes of fame! Mam and Dad, mates from school all recognised me, despite being cunningly disguised as Baldrick the multiple Slug Balancer!

Just to be extra cheeky, I waited till the guys had completed a very neat little bonded sheet metal repair with a composite filler as a core, then I pinched all the pieces of metal from Dhahran Annie’s rudder skin, that they had cut out to facilitate the repair. I gave these little pieces to Colin and Chris as souvenirs that I know they both still have 30 years later. The rest is history.

To be continued............