I missed both the Wardroom film (Capricorn One) and the CCTV film (Cannonball Run), as I was involved in the Operations Room screening Paul Myers, a Sub Lieutenant ATCO from Culdrose who is on board as the Air Safety Cell (Eagle Control) officer for the exercise. He decided he would like to get in and do a few CCAs, and as I am cordially bored by CCAs I was delighted to let him. Predictably enough, he managed them without any problems apart from those caused by the slightly unfamiliar phraseology.
Friday 23rd September 1983
I seem to be spending almost my entire life at the moment slaving away over a hot typewriter. My current project is the retyping of Chapter 18 of Air Department Standing Orders – by no means the most enthralling document held on board – which is almost illegible due to repeated photo-copying on my very old Xerox machine that I used to have in the Air Office. I say used to have, as it was removed from my custody a week or so back, and I am delighted to say that the new version is far too big to fit in the office anywhere, so it has been delivered to Air Operations instead. That is one headache out of the way, as the myriad security checks on this ship seem to centre round anywhere that owns a copier, so I am hoping for a rather easier time of it in the future.
FOF3 himself (Admiral Fitch) arrived on board during the day, and the VIP politician took his leave of us. The ship has now passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, and we are heading broadly east into the Mediterranean, ready for the start of the exercise. The weather is now very much warmer than it has been for the last couple of days, and it really was quite hot when I went out onto the quarterdeck for a post-dinner wander – so warm, in fact, that it was a bit of a relief to get back inside the air-conditioned space.
As far as flying was concerned, I had a relatively quiet day of it, as the Sea Harriers were flying almost all day, which meant that John Lamb was in Flyco rather than me. However, in the evening it all changed, and I went up to Flyco expecting about ninety minutes flying with a couple of Sea Kings doing DIDTACS (Detect, Identify, Destroy Tactics – basically, a vectored attack onto a surface contact, usually of the fast patrol boat variety), to finish at about nine. Once I reached Flyco, though, it very quickly became clear that it had all changed, to say the least.
The DIDTACS finished more or less as planned, but we had to pull one Sea King off-task to act as an escort aircraft for a Wasp helicopter which was carrying a VIP (a Captain from one of the other ships loosely in company with us. We have, by the way, Ariadne, Leander, Resource and Blue Rover in our group, and we are, for the moment and for the very early part of the exercise, the ‘enemy’, with Illustrious acting as a Kiev-class Russian aircraft carrier). Then we were tasked with sending a pair of Sea Kings to Gibraltar to take a compassionate case to the RAF base for onward passage to the United Kingdom – a pair simply because it was a relatively long sea passage, and they could act as mutual SAR aircraft.
They took off at a little after nine, and got a fair distance away from the ship before one of them called ‘Pan’ (an emergency), with a Mains Transmission Chip Caption illuminated. Briefly, the caption is triggered by a short across a magnetic plug situated in the main gearbox. This short is usually caused by a small piece of swarf or other debris, and is in almost 90 per cent of cases of no consequence, but each indication has to be treated as a serious, or potentially serious, event. So, once the last pair of Sea Harriers had recovered on board, we turned the ship and made our best speed towards the helicopters, which were heading back towards us.
As expected, the aircraft landed on with no problem, but we then had to get another helicopter ranged and ready, as the trip to Gibraltar had to go ahead. They finally took off at about ten, and landed at RAF Gibraltar about an hour later, after a trip of about 120 miles, with a very healthy tail wind. For the return trip, obviously, they had an equally substantial head wind, and the situation was in no way helped by the fact that the ship, in order to get into the right position for the Startex (Exercise Start), was making twenty knots directly away from Gibraltar. As a result, they finally landed on at about one thirty in the morning, after a totally uneventful trip. I must say that the idea of launching off into the dark for a trip of well over a hundred miles over the sea in a helicopter isn’t exactly my idea of a fun thing to do, and I think that at times like this the aircrew do really earn their flying pay.
Saturday 24th September 1983
A quiet day, with no flying. In fact, the only thing the flight deck was used for today was a tug-of-war contest, which I did not attend as I was knee-deep in a briefing/meeting on Sea Harrier deck operations at the time.
I slept in a little this morning, getting up a little after nine, and I am delighted to say that I have finally finished the rewrite of the chapter I was doing for Air Orders. All I have to do now is get it duplicated and distributed, but that is a mere bagatelle in comparison.
The Wardroom held an RPC (Request Pleasure of Your Company) to welcome FOF3 and his minions this evening, and this was followed by an ‘Italian evening’ with heaps of pasta and spaghetti – excellent food – and the dining room took on a slightly more intimate look with candles instead of fluorescent lights. This was followed by a film evening, and we were treated to Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, a Mel Brookes film with fine cast, including the delightfully-eccentric Marty Feldman. Very funny it was, too, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, there was a mood of gay abandon (the word ‘gay’ is here used in its 1950s sense) about the Wardroom tonight. This is a strange phenomenon, rather akin to ‘Channel Fever’ which occurs on the last night before arrival at a home port and which I have noticed before – a kind of last letting-off of steam before the whole ship starts a major exercise. Tonight will be the last chance to really relax, as flying starts in earnest tomorrow night, and I will certainly be kept out of my scratcher, as the Sea Kings start flying at 1500 and then run a continuous ripple programme. Happy days.
We put the clocks back an hour tonight, to go back to British time, and we will be retarding them a further hour tomorrow morning to go into exercise time (Zulu), so the good thing is that we get an extra hour in bed tonight.
Sunday 25th September 1983
Just as a matter of interest, the exercise route for Illustrious is broadly S-shaped, starting at the Straits of Gibraltar and going on to Athens. We route along the northern edge of the Mediterranean, passing to the north of the Balearic Islands, carry on to the east past Corsica, then head south for the Straits of Messina through the Tyrrhenian Sea and finally sweep to the south of the Greek mainland before altering to the north-east through the Kikladhes for Athens itself. Not, in fact, that we are really very much aware of exactly where we are, as the ship will at all times attempt to remain well out of sight of land, and one bit of the Mediterranean looks quite remarkably like any other bit, in my experience.
I didn’t see much of today, as I was in bed all afternoon, getting my body clock geared to the concept of sleeping by day and working by night, which is what I anticipate the routine will be for the next week or so. I went on watch in Flyco at about eight this evening, to watch over the activities of the Sea Kings, which were Rippling 2 throughout the night. What made things slightly more interesting than normal was that we were in a restricted Emcon (Emission Control) state, which meant that we couldn’t transmit on radios or radar, so all instructions had to be given by light signals of one sort or another.
This policy had the result, just before midnight, of losing one of the helicopters. Not having the slightest idea where he was, at his programmed recovery time we swung the ship into wind and put on all the appropriate lights, but no sign of him. Enquiries from me to the Air Director revealed that he was no wiser than I was.
Then the aircraft called, requesting ‘red top’ – the red occulting masthead lights – which we had already switched on. Still no sign of him, so I broke radio silence on my frequency and transmitted so that the aircraft could obtain a D/F bearing. He finally arrived about twenty minutes late (with only about ten minute
s of flying time left to tanks dry), complaining that the particular bit of sea we were in was ‘wall to wall ships’ and that he had visited about a dozen while looking for us.
Of course, his task was not assisted by the fact that we are pretending to be a merchant ship anyway, and are showing only the normal civilian navigation lights, in order to fool the enemy.
This policy not only fooled the enemy. It also fooled our friends, as during the night we were ‘sunk’ by Leander, a frigate purporting to be on our side, and one of our Sea Kings was blasted out of the sky by the equally ‘friendly’ frigate Ariadne. A good evening, one way and another.
Monday 26th September 1983
And so on throughout the night. We had no more ‘lost’ helicopters, but at about six in the morning one of the Sea Kings returned with a Pan call with a rough-running engine, which raised the interest level substantially. He had put the offending motor into manual (the engine revolutions, and hence power developed, are controlled by a computer, one for each engine, and as this computer also relies on feedback from the engine itself, it was thought wisest to disconnect it, just in case it decided to run down the engine at an embarrassing moment – like just before landing, for example). All ended happily, with the aircraft landing on deck quite safely, and I went off to bed, once I had been relieved by John Lamb.
A quiet day, from my point of view. I got up at about four in the afternoon, to discover that there was no planned flying until midnight, so after dinner I retired to the Guest Room and watched Mr David Essex in Stardust, which was quite a reasonable film, though palling a bit towards the end.
Tuesday 27th September 1983
And at midnight we started again, with the Sea Kings Rippling 2 doing surface search and surveillance, and with the Sea Harriers at Alert 15 just in case. All went very smoothly, and we did in fact launch the Sea Harriers at about three, one to go on CAP, and the other to act as a flare-dropper, turning night into day with his Lepus flares. This meant that we got John Lamb reluctantly out of bed, so that I could go down into the Operations Room to do the CCA recoveries. That brief bit of excitement over, things reverted to normal: Commander (Air) ceased running round Flyco in small circles, and calm was slowly restored. John Lamb reappeared at around seven thirty and after doing a bit of paperwork in the Air Office, I hit the hay again.
Up again in the late afternoon, and back down to the Air Office to go through signals and so on. Not very exciting. After a swift dinner at 1845, I went back up to Flyco for the night’s heady excitement of Rippling 2 Sea Kings on surface search.
It turned out that it had not been a very good day for the ship, as a young chief petty officer on 814 Squadron had been found dead of natural causes – a heart attack – in his cabin just after lunch. He was only forty-four, and that, of course, makes everything so much worse. Very sad.
Wednesday 28th September 1983
And so on throughout the night, with a helicopter landing and launch about once every three hours, and only two Alert Sea Harrier launches to relieve the monotony. The good news, I suppose, is that at least I am now empowered with doing the launch by myself, but I still can’t do the recovery, as Commander (Air) insists that John Lamb does that. So we had to get him up for both flights, which can’t have improved his sleep pattern any – I think he’s getting as tired of doing Harrier recoveries as I am of not doing them.
Further excitement this morning, just before I was relieved by John Lamb for the day’s flying, when one of the 814 NAS Sea Kings managed to drop £80,000 worth of Wasp engine into the sea, never to be recovered. We’re still not entirely sure what really happened, but everything appeared normal in the lift from the deck of Illustrious (the engine was in a cradle and inside a cargo net, to which was attached a strop, which in turn was attached to the SACRU (lifting equipment) on the Sea King), but the load simply fell into the sea about a hundred yards from Illustrious.
There will, no doubt, be a ship’s investigation, so I wrote down all the salient facts as soon as I was relieved by John Lamb, and then typed out a statement as soon as I got up this afternoon – it is essential to get everything down on paper as soon as possible after any sort of incident, otherwise things get forgotten or altered in your memory.
Contrary to popular belief, the worst storms at sea very often occur in the shallow seas, rather than the deep oceans, and this fact was borne out in a moderately dramatic fashion by the Wardroom piano, which leapt out of its stowage during heavy weather this morning, completed a somersault and then inflicted a certain degree of grievous bodily harm on the coffee table. At this stage we are not at all certain whether the damage is terminal, and the piano is respectfully covered by a sheet and lashed securely in the starboard Wardroom passageway.
A quiet day, for a change. Exercise ‘Display Determination’ is, like Gaul (and forgive the classical allusion, inspired largely by the fact that I have recently been renewing my acquaintance with Asterix the Gaul), divided into three parts, and today saw the end of Phase One. We ceased flying, and our involvement in the exercise, at 1200, for a period of twenty hours, and this unexpected leisure permitted me to rise a little after lunch, and have a more or less normal day.
I watched the Wardroom evening film – Peter O’Toole and Donald Pleasance in Power Play – which was very enjoyable, but in order not to disrupt my sleeping patterns entirely, I stayed up until about 0500. Having more or less got used to sleeping by day and working by night, the last thing I want to do is to have to start all over again.
Thursday 29th September 1983
Up at nine-ish, I pottered about during the morning in the Air Office, and then went back to bed after an early lunch, getting up again at seven and eating a hasty meal before reporting to Flyco for another night of thrills and spills.
Actually, a quiet night, until about four, when things got very busy indeed. Things have changed quite dramatically since we started this exercise – the Americans have withdrawn almost entirely, due to the still unstable situation in the Lebanon; the Greeks have just pulled out (I gather because they are miffed at Margaret Thatcher), and so that really more or less leaves the Royal Navy steaming about in all directions with little or no opposition. Mind you, on past form, that still won’t stop one of the frigates sinking us…
Anyway, Hermes decided that she wanted some ASW assistance (she is some distance from us, and now on the same side), and so we re-tasked the 814 NAS Sea Kings to alter their flying from Passive ASW (used for hunting nuclear submarines, which are noisy but fast) to Active ASW, using the 195 dunking sonar (in the search for conventional submarines, which are very quiet and slow).
This altered things in several ways. First of all, as the Sea Kings obviously have
to hover in order to carry out dunking sonar exercises, they have to launch with a slightly lower fuel load than if they are involved in Passive operations; instead of a four-hour sortie, the maximum they can manage is about three hours. However, in this case they decided to fly four-hour sorties, but with a break for refuelling in the middle. They also started Rippling 3 rather than 2, so the number of deck movements was effectively doubled, and, as Sod’s Law and the script would have it, they all seemed to come back to the ship at the same time, and at the very moment when the Sea Harriers were going to launch, so it was quite an interesting (if that’s the word) night.
Friday 30th September 1983
Another day in bed, and another night up with a difference, as we stopped flying just after midnight, the aircraft reverting to Alert. Unfortunately, they all started flying again at about 0400, so all that the break meant was that I could retire to the relative comfort of my cabin to read, rather than read by torchlight on the chair in Flyco – a small, but significant, improvement.
Saturday 1st October 1983
After having been relieved early (just after 0400) by John Lamb, I retired gratefully to bed, thus missing an interesting (read exciting) day. By the time I appeared in Flyco
at around 1600, it was
all over bar the shouting, and I think John was quite relieved to see me.
On deck, an 814 Sea King was just completing a fairly bizarre series of manoeuvres, culminating with a landing on 5 spot. However, this was no emergency, just Phil Shaw, Senior Pilot of 814 NAS, celebrating the completion of his 6,000th hour in the air.
Rather more exciting was the loss of (yet another) Sea Harrier, though again, like the ‘Alraigo Incident’, this had a happy ending. Basically, one of our Harriers was some distance away from the ship on patrol, when it suffered a major failure of its navigation equipment – initial reports suggested that it had a compass error of 90 degrees, but that has not yet been confirmed – and was forced to land in Italy, at Crotone Airfield, on the eastern tip of the country. Apparently, once the navigation problem was discovered, all radars on the ship were switched on, and although the aircraft was not sighted on the radar, our D/F (Direction Finding) equipment did indicate along which radial the aircraft was.
The pilot was then passed a bearing for the ship, along which he was invited to fly – not too surprisingly, he declined the offer (not knowing how far down the bearing he would have to fly before reaching the ship) and decided instead to remain over land and dropped the aircraft neatly onto the ground at Crotone, which was acting as a diversion airfield for us.
In order to recover the aircraft, the ship headed at best speed towards the coast near Crotone, and we then flew the Commanding Officer of 800 NAS (Lt Cdr Hamilton) ashore by Sea King to fly it back, the original pilot returning to us by Sea King. This seemed a prudent move, as the aircraft had very little remaining fuel in the tanks, and was not able to be refuelled by the Italians, as they lacked the appropriate pressure-fuelling equipment. The aircraft landed on quite safely, though with only a couple of minutes’ worth of fuel in the tanks.
H.M.S. Illustrious Page 9