Tuesday 1st May 1984
I returned to Flyco at about 0430, and I was finally relieved at about 0630, after which I retired gratefully to bed, emerging at around 1500 – the best night’s/day’s sleep I’ve had for a while, in fact. Back to Flyco to relieve Mickey Brock just after 1600, and then finally back up there for the night at 1930.
It should really have been quite a quiet night, because the Sea Kings reverted to Alert 60, their normal Cruising watch Alert state, but the bad news was that they have recently suffered a good deal of unserviceabilities, and that meant that check test flights were the order of the day (or rather night), and so it was all rather bitty and unsatisfactory, leaping up and down the stairs throughout the period.
Wednesday 2nd May 1984
Quite a bouncy sort of day today, with some quite heavy rolls as the ship turned across the sea for launching and recovery operations with aircraft. In fact, it felt a lot worse below decks than it did if you were actually watching from the Bridge or Flyco, and the sea itself was not too rough, just with a fairly long swell. I think the main cause of the poor handling is in fact the engine change, which is still going on (the one being changed, by the way, is PIG, which stands for Port Inner Gas-turbine, the others being POG (Port Outer Gas-turbine); SIG (Starboard Inner Gas-turbine) and SOG (Starboard Outer Gas-turbine), which at least lends a touch of humour to the proceedings), because we are very limited as to how quickly we are able to turn the ship, and it seems to roll far more if you turn slowly than if you turn quickly. We hope the engine change will be complete before the start of the next exercise.
A quiet day again, with a bare minimum of flying, and a generally fairly relaxed attitude all round. An early chop for me as well, as we wrapped up the Sea King flying programme at around midnight, giving me the opportunity to grab some sleep if I had wanted. I stayed awake, in fact, as I’ve now got into the routine and if I start sleeping at night I won’t be able to sleep during the day.
Thursday 3rd May 1984
Not a nice day, mainly because I seemed to have succumbed to the ship’s resident lurgi, and I’ve been coughing and sneezing and choking and generally feeling pretty miserable. I got up in early afternoon, and in fact felt rather better for having done so, though still far from fit, and spent an hour or so in Flyco, giving Mickey Brock a bit of a break. While up there I was cheered up to see a small school of whales (more like a class, really) about three miles away. We first of all just saw the spray from their exhalations, but through the binoculars it was just possible to see their dorsal fins and backs as they surfaced to breath. I think they were probably pilot whales, but they were too far away to identify them positively.
Then in the evening I controlled the Sea Harriers via the LSO sight (Landing Safety Officer) for the final three night recoveries – a very significant step forward this, as it’s the first time I’ve been able to winkle Mickey Brock out of the seat, and it was entirely due to Commander (Air), as he thought it was a good idea. As I did, as the LSO talkdown is really just a kind of visual GOA (Ground Controlled Approach), which I have been doing since 1973. The phraseology is slightly different, but that’s all.
With flying finishing with the recovery of the last Sea Harrier on board, and the Sea Kings reverting to Alert 60, I retired gratefully to the Wardroom to watch Private Benjamin, which is a quite entertaining film. And then a swift walk round the ship, as I was also Air Officer of the Day, and so to bed.
Friday 4th May 1984
ENDEX, thankfully, and we now have a weekend with virtually nothing to do, apart from a mere handful of HDS sorties and the like. Just as well, really, as I’m still very much in the ‘death warmed up’ state, and in fact I spent the entire morning in bed, only arising at lunchtime. I’m on the mend, but it’s a slow process.
The ship is lurking somewhere off Gibraltar at the moment, and we were able to get papers and mail on board today – our first contact with the real world for some time – and I think that there will be further opportunities over the weekend to land mail, even if we don’t receive any more.
Not a lot of flying today; just the HDS sorties, which were carried out by the Wessex 5 (called ‘Floyd’ for no readily apparent reason) from RFA Resource, and a series of photographs of the ship’s funnel smoke taken by one of our Sea Kings. The reason for this latter, slightly strange, exercise is that we have received a directive to do so by MoD, as part of some trial they are conducting, and it was combined with the full-power trials of the PIG which is now installed and working correctly.
A good evening as far as entertainment was concerned as well, with part one of the David Attenborough series The Living Planet on the CCTV system, followed by Time Bandits as the Wardroom evening video, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Saturday 5th May 1984
Although the exercise has terminated, today was relatively busy on the flight deck, with a whole load of HDS/Vertrep sorties being carried out by the Wessex 5 from Resource. The trouble with going to Palma is that we are not allowed to go to Gibraltar as well, as apparently the Spanish would consider that to be a snub, and we’re not allowed to fly our Sea Kings ashore there for the same reasons. So, poor old Floyd had a very full day, only finishing at about 1500, when his last passenger (our friendly Admiral – FOF2) climbed out. I took Flyco from 1300 until the end of flying, as Mickey Brock was involved in the tug-of-war on the flight deck in the afternoon. Yes, Saturday afternoon was also Sports Day! The sort of proceedings, in fact, that I’d far rather watch from the air-conditioned comfort of Flyco than actually get out there and take part in, thank you very much.
A pleasant evening followed, with a ‘Mediterranean Night’ as far as the fodder went, featuring a different dish from each of a variety of Mediterranean countries, and then we had the second part of The Living Planet before watching Octopussy on the Wardroom video system. This was a fairly typical Bond film which I had not previously seen – it had a minimum of plot, and a maximum of gadgets and exotic locations, and was, as all the Bond films are, highly enjoyable.
Sunday 6th May 1984
A quiet day, with only a couple of HDS flights from Gibraltar to us courtesy of the Resource Wessex. The rest of the day (and a beautiful warm and windless day it was) passed in that kind of soporific state of near-sleep which follows a too-large meal on a hot day. Very pleasant, and the only excitement was the horse-racing on the flight deck.
This latter activity is typically Royal Navy, and consists of a series of races up the flight deck, the forward progress of each ‘horse’ being governed by rolling two huge dice – one gives the number of the horse, the other the number of places it is to move. Each ‘horse’ is a person, of course, ranging from Heads of Department down to Able Seamen, and all enter the spirit of the thing, wearing different colours for each ‘stable’ and so on.
And a good deal of money changes hands, too, as you compete with others to ‘buy’ a horse before the race. If the horse wins, the lucky owner gets 60 per cent of all the money spent on buying horses before the race; the second placed owner gets 30 per cent, and the remaining 10 per cent goes to charity. All good fun.
Monday 7th May 1984
STARTEX for exercise ‘Distant Hammer 84’, though the whole thing still has to gather much of its momentum, and so today was a bit on the disjointed side. Most of the early part of the day was given over to weapon firing serials, featuring the Vulcan/Phalanx CIWS mountings; both being in action against aircraft-towed Rushton targets. One of the odd difficulties about engaging this type of target with that type of weapon is that the target is really too frail – the shells for the CIWS are of depleted uranium, and are extremely hard and heavy, designed to smash an incoming missile or aircraft to a pulp. Against a light metal and wood target they are relatively ineffective, passing straight through and continuing on to expend their energy in the sea some miles away. However, both systems worked, and both hit the target, which is all that really matters.
Then we leapt into a Casex w
ith a couple of submarines – Sea Devil (an American nuclear job) and a small British O- or P-class diesel submarine – which continued throughout the night, so I took over in Flyco at about 1930 and remained there for the following twelve hours. As it was only a Ripple 2, it wasn’t terribly busy, but the flying course and the ship’s course were, as usual, exactly opposed to each other, so every launch and recovery was a major evolution, especially as we not only had several warships in company (Sirius and Danae (RN Leander-class frigates); Shetland (one of the new RN patrol vessels); Carabinieri (Italian frigate) and Furor (an American frigate), as well as a number of auxiliaries, including the old faithful Resource), but also were in the middle of extensive small fishing fleets and a considerable amount of commercial shipping.
Quite fun.
First thing in the morning everything started turning to worms, with Sea Kings coming back broken, just in time to foul up the first Sea Harrier launch of the day, and the Resource Wessex not turning up in time to pick up our Admiral (a crime in the RN rather akin to throwing-up over the Queen), which meant pulling a Sea King off task to do the trip instead (while banging off angry signals at Resource to indicate Imperial displeasure). In fact, I was rather pleased to be able to hand over to Mickey Brock and get the hell out of it all.
Tuesday 8th May 1984
I stayed abed until about 1400, staggered down to the office and got things sorted out there, and then up to Flyco, to find, to my great delight, that flying was finishing at 2000, so I had only about an hour in the chair. At this rate, this exercise is hardly going to be any more taxing than the last one, which is obviously good news.
The early finish meant a very relaxed evening – I was able to watch most of The Living Planet, and then retired in comfort to the Wardroom to be highly amused by the video for the evening; Trinity Is Still My Name. This film I had never heard of, but it is the second of two (there may in fact be other sequels) films featuring a pair of brothers – Trinity and Bambino – in spoof spaghetti Westerns. I thoroughly enjoyed this film, and I would very much like to see the other one.
Wednesday 9th May 1984
This exercise really is turning out to be almost uncannily quiet, though the absence of Sea Harrier flying today has nothing at all to do with the exercise itself. Early this morning a signal was received on board concerning an STI (Serious Technical Instruction) about the Sea Harrier air-ducting system. This is a most important part of the aircraft’s flight-control system, which ducts hot air to the extremities – the wingtips, tail-plane, etc – which stabilise the Harrier and make it easier to control in the hover, and apparently Yeovilton have recently discovered that one of the stainless steel bolts holding the network of pipes together had failed on one of their Harriers. So, all have been grounded until these have been replaced.
The only snag about doing that is that we have exactly no bolts on the ship – and we’ve counted them twice – and so we will have to wait until we can get some flown out to the ship from the United Kingdom. Unless, that is, a local decision is taken to fly the aircraft anyway, after an inspection of the bolts. We shall see.
A fairly short night in Flyco, though rather longer than I’ve grown used to of late. Flying started at 2100, which meant that I had to get up there by about 2030, with a pair of Sea Kings going off for active ASW, and they were followed at 2200 by another pair for OTHT (Over the Horizon Targetting). There were no problems, except that when the final pair recovered at 0145 the wind was such that we had to steam north to be within limits, but we couldn’t, because the sea to the north was full of ships (we suspect Orange, and hence enemy, ships), and so we steamed south and recovered both aircraft for aft-facing landings.
And no sooner had we done that than the sky was full of flares, dropped by an American probe aircraft. He was the harbinger, as it were, and we were then visited by a brace of A6s, which proceeded to drop bombs behind us, despite having been specifically instructed not to. The Americans do seem to have a rather cavalier attitude to things at times. We were quite happy to be bombed, or for them to bomb our wake, to be specific, but we had the 182 (noise-making seducer of torpedoes) streamed, and we were quite keen not to have that bombed. However, no damage was done, fortunately.
Thursday 10th May 1984
The ‘fair1y short night in Flyco’, as advertised above, came to a fairly abrupt end at around 0330, when the powers that be decided to start flying the helicopters on a Ripple 2 basis, which didn’t exactly over-joy me. It all proved fairly painless, in fact, but it was a great relief when Mickey Brock finally turned up to relieve me at around 0730, and I was able to retire gratefully to bed.
A late start in Flyco, with the Ripple 3 programme starting at 2330, which meant that my presence was required from 2300, and it then continued without any breaks, or any problems, more to the point, until I was relieved in the morning. The only real difficulty was that the ship was very restricted in what it could do, as we were not only trying to maintain a very high speed of advance, but also we were passing very close to Sardinia, and that meant that we were unable to manoeuvre as we would have liked. It all made for some interesting landing and take-off directions.
Friday 11th May 1984
The good news on the Sea Harrier front was that the special stainless steel bolts were received from the United Kingdom yesterday, and have now been fitted as instructed, so the puff-jets are once again fighting fit and fully operational, which they duly celebrated by flying for a good part of the day, and by doing ground runs on the flight deck more or less directly above my cabin. I still slept through it, though.
The Ripple 3 programme started at 2200, but still hadn’t been established by the time Mickey Brock relieved me at 0530, due to a long run of unserviceabilities – the second aircraft due off went U/S on deck, and the third one took off four times during the night, but returned to the deck within a couple of minutes with the same problem each time. It couldn’t raise its undercarriage, which is no big deal in itself, but, because of the very complex electrics on the Sea King, this failure had rather deeper implications involving generators and so on, and hence the last time I saw that aircraft it was being ignominiously pushed down into the shed. Apart from the unserviceabilities, a quiet, and pleasantly calm, night.
Saturday 12th May 1984
Because I had benefitted from a (relatively) short night in Flyco, I went back up there for a couple of hours in the afternoon to give Mickey Brock a break, then returned to the fray at about 2000. The planned Ripple 3 became a Ripple 2 as aircraft were pulled out of the flying programme for maintenance, and by the time I left Flyco, it was looking as if a Ripple 1 was quite on the cards. 814 NAS are having a lot of trouble with serviceability at the moment.
A very quiet night, though, with a flat calm sea, almost no wind, and a virtually full moon – it was really quite pleasant sitting up there, for a change. We’re in the Ionian Sea at the moment, between Italy and Greece (more or less where the after aircraft lift fell apart last year), and we are intending to remain in this general area until virtually the end of the exercise.
Sunday 13th May 1984
You’d never think it was a Sunday. A full day of flying was followed, as inexorably as night follows day, by a full night of flying, Rippling 3 throughout. Another lovely night from the point of view of the weather, but with remarkably little else to recommend it.
Monday 14th May 1984
The hoped-for Ripple 3 programme had degenerated to little more than a Ripple 1 when I took over in Flyco at about 1950, but by dint of a lot of work down in the shed, and a few ground runs on deck, our full programme was restored by 2300. And just as well, too, as the Sea Kings were fortunate enough to detect a European (read Russian) SSK (a nuclear powered hunter-killer submarine) which passed very close to one of the passive sonar buoys, and some really good acoustic readings (’grams’) were obtained. All good intelligence stuff, and potentially quite valuable.
The weather was not all that sharp, with the atmosphe
ric pressure falling steadily, and the sea state and wind both gradually increasing, but not too bad a night for all that. The biggest irritation was my Flyco frequency (Channel 1, 290.0 MHz), which some genius on the staff had also nominated as ASW Helo Control Primary. This meant that throughout the night I could hardly get a word in edgeways for the constant rabbitting-away by a bunch of Italians, both pilots and controllers. Eventually I instructed Air Operations and the Air Director that I wasn’t going to play on Channel 1 anymore, and if anyone wanted to talk to me, they would find me listening on Channel 3 instead (our secondary talk-down frequency). After that, no more nig-nogs; no more problems.
Tuesday 15th May 1984
An entertaining (if that’s the word I want) night, one way and another. I relieved Mickey Brock quite late in Flyco, at about 2100, as the last of the Sea Harriers recovered then – they had spent most of the day away from the ship, doing cross-deck operations with the USS Saratoga (a medium sized attack carrier – the size of a small Midlands industrial town, as opposed to a large attack carrier, which would be the size of a large Midlands industrial town – carrying about 5,000 people, and about six or seven times larger than Illustrious). They reputedly enjoyed themselves over there, watching the various launches and recoveries, and, no doubt, also interested the Americans who do not, normally, use V/STOL aircraft at sea.
H.M.S. Illustrious Page 25