by James Blatch
The Final Flight
James Blatch
The Final Flight by James Blatch published by Vivid Dog Limited, 4a Church Street, Market Harborough, LE16 7AA, UK.
ISBN: 978-1-8384894-0-3
Copyright © 2021 by James Blatch
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For permissions: [email protected]
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover by Stuart Bache
Contents
Foreword
1966
1. Tuesday 7th June
2. Wednesday 8th June
3. Thursday 9th June
4. Friday 10th June
5. Saturday 11th June
6. Sunday 12th June
7. Monday 13th June
8. Tuesday 14th June
9. Wednesday 15th June
10. Thursday 16th June
11. Friday 17th June
12. Saturday 18th June
13. Sunday 19th June
14. Monday 20th June
15. Tuesday 21st June
16. Wednesday 22nd June
17. Thursday 23rd June
18. Friday 24th June
19. Saturday 25th June
20. Sunday 26th June
21. Monday 27th June
22. Tuesday 28th June
23. Wednesday 29th June
24. Thursday 30th June
25. Friday 1st July
26. Saturday 2nd July
27. Sunday 3rd July
28. Monday 4th July
29. Tuesday 5th July
30. Wednesday 6th July
31. Thursday 7th July
32. Friday 8th July
33. Friday 14th July
34. Monday 5th September
Afterword
Coming soon…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Foreword
It begins with nothing.
A space in the sky, silence on a radio channel.
A turn of the head in a control tower; a first inkling that something, somewhere, is not right.
There could be a range of benign explanations.
But old squadron hands sense death quickly.
Events unfold with their own momentum and a predictable narrative.
Somewhere in the countryside, a puzzled farmer stares at a plume of rising black smoke.
Within an hour of the missed radio call, a man in uniform knocks on the door of a married quarter.
He stands in silence, hoping his presence alone will convey the gravity of his message.
It always does.
Families mourn, but the men in flying coveralls must go back into the air.
They bury their friend, then bury their grief.
Away from public view, serious men with clipboards pore over the debris and piece together the sequence of events.
Arguments and compromise precede the publication of an official document on flimsy government paper.
It invariably contains two words. A final insult to young men who had so much of their lives to live but who died in the blink of an eye on a weekday afternoon.
Pilot error.
1966
1
Tuesday 7th June
The peace of Blethwyn Valley was shattered for thirteen seconds.
The rabbits sensed the man-made thunder first and bolted for their burrows. The sheep, slow to react, scattered only as it arrived overhead, briefly blotting out the June sun. Invisible vortexes sent a buzzard tumbling in the air.
The four engines left a trail of black smoke in the disturbed wake and a deep rumble that quickly faded.
There were no witnesses.
The RAF Avro Vulcan bomber had come and gone on a sleepy weekday in a remote part of Wales.
The Welsh were at work.
And that’s how the men of the Royal Air Force Test Flying Unit liked it.
To be unobserved.
Had there been a witness—maybe a farmer turning his head at the sudden and loud intrusion to his otherwise tranquil surroundings—it’s doubtful he would have noticed anything unusual about this particular flight.
He may have been able to identify the Vulcan, perhaps because of its distinctive delta wing, but it’s less likely he would have spotted the bulge of white casing with a glass-panelled front, nestled under the nose of the bomber.
Although unremarkable in appearance, it was the most secret and significant item of military equipment on the planet.
Inside the white casing, behind the small glass panel, was a laser.
As far as the outside world was concerned, laser was a rudimentary and far from mobile technology.
But then the world doesn’t know what the world doesn’t know, and the men of the TFU were under threat of arrest to keep it that way.
As the Vulcan exited the far end of the valley, the wings rolled left, and the throttles edged up to eighty-five per cent of maximum to sustain the target speed through the turn. The stick eased back, the rudder deflected left—just a smidge—as the nose heaved thirty degrees and the jet rolled out on a new heading.
On board, not a single member of the crew had touched a flying control.
In fact, they were discussing the football.
Chris Milford tried to ignore the navigator’s drone regarding the England squad for the forthcoming World Cup. He didn’t share Steve Bright’s concern that there were too many West Ham players in the side. He understood the point about the Hammers being a pedestrian, unglamorous side that didn’t produce the type of flair players needed to win a World Cup, but Millie had work to do.
He concentrated on inserting a reel of magnetic tape into a brown cardboard sleeve. A simple enough task on the ground, but difficult when your seat is being hauled through the bumpy, low-level air at three hundred and fifty knots.
After a successful struggle, he scribbled a serial number on the cardboard and dipped into a pocket on his flying coveralls to pull out a small notepad. Millie adjusted the light that hung down on a pipe from the panel in front of him and added the tape serial number to a list. He had to pause as the jet rose and fell, weaving its way through the Welsh hills.
Alongside the serial number, he noted the date, flight number and time. He paused, casting his eye up the list of previous entries, noting the accumulation of flying hours.
So far, so good for project Guiding Light.
Millie tucked the notebook back into his pocket and turned his attention to the switches, dials and readouts in front of him.
Sitting in a well below the cockpit, facing backwards, he studied the converted navigator radar station.
The Guiding Light panel sparkled orange, electronically generated numbers pulsing as they changed in a rhythm directly linked to the aircraft’s proximity to the ground in feet.
Millie scrutinised the numbers.
The digits 307 flicked over to 312 and a moment later 305.
They had asked Guiding Light to fly the jet as close to, but not below, three hundred feet. It was doing a good job of the task.
Millie relaxed into his chair, but kept his eyes on the numbers.
He was still getting used to the marvel of it all. Somewhere behind the panel, electronics connected the laser’s range-finding data to the Vulcan autopilot.
Two pieces of tech
nology in direct communication. Millie hoped they didn’t fall out with each other.
To Millie’s relief, the pilot Brian Hill interrupted Steve Bright’s football monologue with a clipped question over the intercom.
“How many more tapes?”
Millie pulled his oxygen mask over his face.
“That was the last one. I’m out now.”
“OK, we’ll stay at low-level until we get to the estuary as planned,” Hill replied.
With the recorder no longer capturing data from the laser, Millie wondered why they would continue at low-level. But he remained silent on the matter. It would only be a few minutes and he would continue to keep his human eyes on the orange digits.
Millie’s hand went up to a small black rotary dial beneath the main height readout. He rotated it, checking the distance to the ground at eleven pre-defined positions around the nose of the Vulcan.
In fact the system scanned twenty-seven separate positions sweeping from thirty degrees left and eighty degrees down all the way across to the same position on the right, taking in the view up to forty degrees above the nose.
The design engineer at DF Blackton once told him they began by mimicking how much a pilot’s eyes absorbed from the picture in front of him, and then worked to improve on that.
Millie noted the twelve hundred feet or so of space to their left and imagined the rocky side of a Welsh hill. He turned the dial back to the number one position, more or less straight down.
Two hundred and sixty-one feet to the unforgiving ground beneath them.
“Do you ever take your eyes off those numbers?”
Millie glanced across to Steve Bright and shrugged.
“Our lives in the hands of a stream of digits fed to a computer with this aircraft’s flaky electrical system? Yes, I like to keep an eye on them.”
Millie tried to be an amiable crewmate, but it was no secret he no longer enjoyed these trips. Squashed into a flying dungeon with the ever present threat of a sudden end to everything.
He looked back at Brighty; the nav looked bored. A consequence of his job being replaced by a flying computer.
“Hungry?”
Brighty perked up as Millie passed over a sandwich from his flight case.
He unlatched his seat, swivelled it around to face the empty middle position and stretched his legs. They ached from being squeezed under the workstation.
With his oxygen mask dangling under his chin, he muttered to himself, “This is a young man’s game.” But his words were lost in the perpetual roar as the jet thundered its way across Wales.
He looked up the short ladder to the cockpit, where Brian Hill craned his neck, looking down toward him.
“Getting ready for your afternoon nap, Millie?”
Millie smiled and pulled his mask across his face so his words would be heard on the intercom.
“Would be lovely. Try and fly smoothly.”
Hill laughed and turned back.
A third voice piped up on the loop. Rob May, the youngest among them.
“We’re not here for smoothness, my old friend.”
Millie noted the briskness of Rob’s words; the co-pilot was technically in command of the aircraft, although much of the decision making had been ceded to Guiding Light.
Hill drew the curtain back across to cut out the light glare from the windshield, allowing Millie and Bright to see their dials and displays clearly.
Millie turned his chair back to the workstation and again kept a close eye on the height data as it ticked over.
The numbers pulsed, updating every three quarters of a second. It was hypnotic and Millie had to fight the urge to close his eyes.
He tried to think of the technology behind the figures. He was told by a boffin at DF Blackton that the computer made decisions forty-seven times a second.
Forty-seven times a second.
That sounded like indecision to him.
Millie reached forward and turned the small black dial. Position two showed 1,021 feet, position three showed 314 feet. They were hugging a valley, just three hundred feet from one side.
The computer was showing them what good tactical flying looked like.
He rotated it back to position one. Nine hundred and fourteen feet directly below them.
Nine hundred and fourteen feet. Really?
Suddenly Millie was lifted in his seat.
He felt the aircraft plummeting.
Must be trying to get back to three hundred feet above the ground.
He called into the intercom. “Why are we so high?”
“We’re not,” Rob May’s clipped voice responded.
The aircraft continued down.
Millie grabbed the desk to steady himself.
“What?” he shouted, urgently needing clarification. If they weren’t really at nine hundred feet but the jet thought they were, it would try and descend into the…
“What’s happening, Rob?” Millie shouted. He glanced at Steve Bright, who also held on to the desk.
Millie’s eyes darted back to the range reading.
803.
“What’s going on, Rob? How high are we, for god’s sake?”
He needed to know what the picture looked like outside.
“Rob?”
Eventually, Rob replied. “About one hundred feet.”
Millie looked back at the reading.
749.
“Talk to me, Millie.”
“Christ, it’s gone wrong. Cancel. CANCEL.”
They were under instruction not to intervene with Guiding Light unless absolutely necessary. But surely they were about to die unless they took control?
Sweat dripped from Millie’s forehead. Why was Guiding Light suddenly blind? Why was the laser looking straight through solid rock?
In the back, they felt a lurch as the autopilot disengaged.
Millie sensed the angle change as the nose raised, but he knew the momentum of the heavy aircraft was still downward.
He looked over his shoulder and stared up into the cockpit; the curtain wasn’t fixed and in the g-force it rippled open.
Millie saw Brian Hill’s hands gripping his ejection handle.
“Oh, shit.”
Ejection was only an option for the two pilots. Millie and Steve Bright had no chance of getting out alive at this height.
He closed his eyes and braced for death.
The aircraft continued to sink.
Is this it?
He thought of Georgina, beautiful Georgina. And Charlie. Where was he right now? In a maths lecture, probably. Oblivious to the enormity of the moment.
The aircraft shuddered.
It was almost imperceptible, but the plane’s momentum switched from a descending path to a climbing one.
He opened his eyes and looked around again, in time to see Hill release his grip on the yellow-and-black handle.
Hill pointed forward and shouted. “Trees.”
The aircraft rolled right and Millie was pinned to his seat as the engines surged to full throttle and Rob May threw them into a spectacular powered, turning climb.
Vibrations rumbled through the fuselage from the howling engines, the aircraft groaning and creaking under the stress.
Millie groaned under the sudden g-force.
He continued to hold on to the desk.
They held the gravity-defying manoeuvre for a few seconds, until the wings levelled.
Millie let out a long breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding in.
He looked across at Steve Bright, the nav’s eyes bulging wide above his mask.
The throttles eased back and the aircraft settled.
It seemed like a full minute before anyone spoke.
Eventually, the silence was broken by the normally unflappable Brian Hill.
“Jesus Christ.”
Millie’s eyes rested on the tape data recorder.
It was switched off and empty. Whatever just happened, it had happened after he’d stopped rec
ording the height readings from Guiding Light.
He realised he needed to write down the readings he’d seen with his own eyes, but he couldn’t move.
Too much adrenaline in his system.
He settled his breathing and fished out a pencil to scribble down what he could recall.
The system had taken them to within a whisker of a catastrophic crash. The all-singing, all-dancing laser had seen straight through solid earth and told the onboard computer to descend.
How it had happened was beyond him, in every sense.
It was someone else’s problem now. Someone back at DF Blackton in Cambridge.
Back to the drawing board with this one.
He added a note to the end of his description of the event.
Guiding Light evaluation suspended.
Wing Commander Mark Kilton struggled with the acetate sheet. The image in the overhead projector was either upside down or back to front, and now it was out of focus and too large to fit the screen.
The tall and wide American lieutenant general took his seat at the table. “You fly jets better than you operate a projector, Kilton?”
Kilton offered Eugene Leivers III a thin smile and gave up with the projector. He took his own seat at the repurposed dining room table that had somehow found its way into the side office he’d commandeered for the meeting in the station headquarters building.
Paint peeled from the walls of the 1930s construction and the unseasonable heat of an English June made life uncomfortable for the five men in the room.
Leivers removed his jacket, replete with three rows of medal ribbons, and hung it on the back of his chair. He made a dismissive gesture with his hand toward the white screen intended to display Kilton’s diagrams, and spoke with a Louisianan drawl.