Sweating the Metal

by Alex Duncan

Crewmen are vital to the craft’s operation. They’re responsible for the loading and unloading of pax and freight, for the attachment and safety of loads on the three hook points under the cab, as well as the safe restraint of all cargo. They are trained to navigate the aircraft when we’re under pressure up front, and to man the two, or sometimes three, weapons that comprise the Chinook’s armament: an M60 machine-gun on the ramp, and an M134 Minigun (also known as a ‘Crowd Pleaser’) on each door. The Minigun is an awesome piece of kit – it is mains operated and fires between 2,000 and 4,000 rounds of 7.62mm per minute from six rotating barrels. Direct Current versions have now been fitted to cabs in Afghanistan so that in the event of a crash-landing they can still fire by drawing power from the battery. These fire around 3,000 rounds a minute – that’s fifty 7.62mm rounds per second! Get hit by a burst and you’ll be pink mist.

  It’s the crewmen’s job to talk the pilot down with height and distance calls, which they do by leaning out the door and the ramp so they have visual contact with the ground. This is particularly important at really dusty landing sites, like you’ll find in Afghanistan, where the dust cloud generated by the rotors’ downwash can completely obscure the pilots’ vision at the most crucial time of the descent. They’re also our eyes on any threats to the aircraft’s safety – be they obstacles, wires and cables, such as you’ll find across our green and pleasant land, or tracer fire, RPGs and small arms fire in a war zone. They’re able to refuel the aircraft, operate and man the winch, and they’re a key link between crew and passengers. In short, they are as important to the safe and efficient operation of the aircraft as the two pilots and it’s at the OCF where that really comes home. It’s the reason why so much of the course is devoted to working as part of a four-man (or woman) crew.

  One of my colleagues on 18 (B) Flight was Hannah Brown, a great pilot and, very quickly, a close friend. We took an instant liking to one another. I thought she was great because there was none of this ‘lumpy-jumper syndrome’. She was straight down the line and never played on the fact that she’s a girl, like some others do. I respected her and, perhaps just as importantly, enjoyed her company – she was good fun.

  At OCF you’re treated like an adult, and there’s a work-hard, play-hard mentality. You feel like a pilot there. When I was first strapped in to the Chinook, I was walking on water: at last I was a front line pilot and I could stick two fingers up to all those people who didn’t think I’d make it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still not the end of the training, so you can’t relax. It’s just you’ve reached a point where your experience engenders a sense of self-belief.

  It was towards the end of the course that I met Alison. Hannah and I had a night sortie as a two-ship and as I walked into the planning room for the Met brief, I saw this drop-dead gorgeous blonde girl. She was standing at the back, dressed in a nicely-fitted, stylish black dress, and I thought, ‘Fuck me, she’s fit!’ I did some asking around and discovered that her name was Alison and she was a guest of the Officer Commanding (OC). She was a senior civil servant at the Cabinet Office and they’d met on a counter-terrorism conference. The OC had invited her and a few colleagues along to the squadron for a flight. They were going to be Hannah’s pax.

  There was a party after our sorties. It was Taranto night, the celebration of a famous WWII raid at Taranto where Royal Navy aircraft sank most of the Italian Fleet. When I walked up to the bar I saw Alison in the corner talking to some friends. She looked absolutely magnificent. I’d never believed in love at first sight before, but I was absolutely, hopelessly smitten now. I knew immediately that she was the girl I was going to marry. We’ve been together ever since.

  There was just one thing I needed to resolve before I graduated from the OCF and it concerned my nickname. When I first arrived I was astonished to meet another ‘Frenchie’. I thought it was a wind-up at first, until we got chatting and I discovered that, like me, he had a French mother and a Scottish father. His real name was Neil McMillan but we muddled along on the course both being known by the same moniker until the instructors decided enough was enough. They said only one of us could graduate with the right to be known as Frenchie, so a French-off was organised with the instructors as umpires.

  On the night concerned, we met in the Mess and undertook a number of events designed to test our ‘Frenchness’. These events involved a duel with baguettes instead of swords and eating cloves of raw garlic and live snails (dug up by other members of the Flight from the garden half an hour before). The night culminated in a quiz where the invigilators went to extreme lengths to ensure our questions were equally difficult. I was asked really ‘tough’ ones like, ‘What is the name of the monument at the Place Charles de Gaulle end of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées?’ while Neil got piss-easy ones such as: ‘Who won the French Open in 1972?’

  There could only be one Frenchie, so given that Neil refused to eat the snails and I answered all of my (ahem) incredibly difficult questions correctly, I was declared the winner. The only thing Neil won was the right to call himself ‘Frock’!

  Apparently, Alison arrived quite late in the evening only to find a very drunk boyfriend wearing some dodgy silk pants (where they came from, I’ve no idea) and a beret.

  I was so delighted to have earned my name back that I ordered a badge with ‘Frenchie L’Original’ over a Tricolour which, for some reason, really wound Neil up! To this day, I’ve no idea why . . .

  After that, I sailed through my final handling check and passed my night-flying qualification. That marked the end of the OCF for me. There was the obligatory giant piss-up and that was it. Actually, no it wasn’t; not quite! I still wasn’t combat ready – and my wings? Let’s just say they were now half sewn on!

  4

  ALL AT SEA

  I was posted to ‘A’ Flight, 18 Squadron on graduating the OCF, and although I wasn’t yet combat ready, my status felt permanent at last. I’d been at RAF Odiham long enough that I was pretty much in step with its daily rhythm. I knew my way around, knew most of the key personnel in the Squadron – and also at 27 Squadron, which was located just across the base. Hannah had gone to 27 Sqn, so although we were no longer part of the same unit, our paths crossed pretty regularly.

  My first sortie as an 18 Sqn pilot was on February 4th 2004, with Paul ‘Windy’ Millar, a Qualified Helicopter Instructor (QHI) on the squadron. It was pretty much a belt-and-braces assessment to ensure that the OCF had done what it was supposed to and dropped me off the conveyor belt a fully-fledged, limited combat ready Chinook pilot. Also, Windy wanted to get an idea of my ability. Even with the OCF firmly behind me, there were still checks to pass – that’s one aspect of flying that never stops. The day you think you can stop learning is the day you have to stop flying.

  In May, the Squadron deployed aboard HMS Ocean, the Royal Navy’s sole helicopter carrier. We were sailing across the Atlantic to support the Royal Marines on Exercise Aurora in the US. It was my first experience of an operational exercise and where I got my Aircraft Carrier tick. That was, to date, some of the most difficult flying I’ve done. There’s a saying among pilots that the three best things in life are a good landing, a good orgasm and a good bowel movement, and a night-time carrier landing is one of the few opportunities in life to experience all three at the same time.

  You’re in the middle of the Atlantic, you’re not using NVGs, and you take off from this absolutely enormous aircraft carrier which, when you’re on it, feels like a city at sea. It’s got light everywhere; you feel like it’s visible for miles. Taking off is easy. You simply come into the hover, slide the aircraft off to the side until you’re above the water, turn the tail and disappear into the night; although even that was, er . . . interesting. There was no ambient light other than what was on the ship; there was no moon – just the inky blackness of the Atlantic Ocean forty foot below me, promising almost certain death. It’s a disconcerting experience for a pilot.

  The circuit is 400ft and it’s not like I had to fl
y a long way out. So I climbed up, levelled off, turned left. You think you’ve got the correct wind; the ship is going in one direction so in theory it’s easy. I looked down and across to get a visual on the massive ship and . . . What the fuck? From one mile out, and at just 400ft, it’s like someone has turned all the lights off and left a single 40 watt bulb burning in the middle of the ocean. That’s what I had to aim for.

  The hardest thing by far is when you make your final turn – you have to turn, descend and, at the same time, reduce your forward speed. But at 400ft, descending at 1,000ft per minute, you’re going to hit the water in twenty-five seconds if you misjudge it. Initially, you probably wouldn’t even notice because there’s no demarcation between the sky and the water because it’s so dark – until you felt the impact, that is, and sank to the deep. You can’t see the water; everything’s black apart from this single 40 watt bulb in the middle of the ocean.

  To make life a little more interesting, you approach the ship on a bearing of Red 165, the way they do it in the Royal Navy. Red 165? What the fuck’s that? You won’t get the Navy using a compass for navigation to the ship; that’d be far too easy. No, they have this fucked-up system where Red represents left, 0–180 and Green represents right, also 0–180. So Red 165 should give you the angle to the ship. The idea is to come alongside it, hover next to it until you match your speed. Get the rearmost line on the deck under your arse, and move across. Look for the forward line in front of the cab, and . . . down! It sounds easy when you say it. It wasn’t.

  The Squadron’s part in the exercise lasted over a month, so it was about six weeks since Alison and I had last seen one another. That was hard; we spoke every day but I must have spent a month’s salary on phone cards. HMS Ocean docked in Jacksonville, Florida and we got a week’s leave, so I’d arranged for her to fly out and join me. That’s when I asked her to marry me. She said yes. She’s the most military-focused civilian I’ve ever met. Personally, she’s all the woman I’ve ever wanted, and professionally, I’ve never known anyone like her. She’s got real leadership skills, having worked her way up to a senior role in the Cabinet Office briefing Tony Blair and other ministers. She’d clearly impressed a few people because while I was struggling to fly on instruments and worrying about my fledgling career as a pilot, she received an MBE for her work on the Afghanistan Campaign in the wake of 9/11.

  Things ramped up pretty quickly after our return from HMS Ocean. I did some taskings in Northern Ireland and not long after Christmas 2004, the Squadron went to Iraq, which was my first operational deployment. It was a two-month Det and, to be honest, not a great deal happened. It was like flying a big green taxi; I spent most of my time just ferrying men and equipment around. Aside from a single mission where there was a very remote chance of coming under contact, it was all pretty low-key. The accommodation was first class, nothing like the basic facilities in Afghanistan. We had a bar and a swimming pool and we got to fly. It was Iraq, so in theory it was dangerous, but the flying was good. We’d come back in the evening, go for a swim, have one or two beers in the bar . . . how bad could it be? I thought that was what all operational deployments would be like, but how wrong I was . . .

  After a period of leave, I returned to Odiham for some routine flying. It was all about gaining more experience on as many different mission profiles as possible. Then, on June 20th 2005, after a big work up where I practised all the skills that are required of a Chinook captain, I was declared combat ready. It was all about being able to demonstrate captaincy, satisfy the boss that I could take the aircraft on a shitty night, fly across the UK, do the job and come back safely.

  Of course, the real pleasure for me was my wings. They were properly sown in now and that was it; they couldn’t take them away from me. Not now. Finally, in June 2005 – almost five years after starting on the journey – I could at last call myself a pilot in the Royal Air Force. I was in!

  We’d been tasked to return to Iraq again shortly after I was declared combat ready. In the event though, we were stood down to allow the Merlins to take over in theatre. Shortly afterwards we got the news that we had been earmarked to go to Afghanistan in April 2006, so everything that followed was about us preparing for that.

  Some of the guys on the Squadron had been to Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 as part of the operation to oust the Taliban from power, but the landscape was significantly different then. Sangin, Musa Qala, Kajaki – they were meaningless names to us in 2005. There was no back story, no history or association with any particular place. Camp Bastion didn’t exist. Also, there’d been just a single British soldier killed in combat operations. Our worries weren’t so much focused on the enemy, but on flying the aircraft in an environment in which its performance was a complete unknown.

  One of my best experiences of flying came when I did a short detachment to the Falkland Islands in November and December 2005. I was flying with Aaron Stewart, who’d become a good friend while I was on 18 Squadron. He earned himself the sobriquet of ‘Tourette’s’ due to his incredible ability to swear prolifically whenever he gets angry. His vocabulary of swear-words is absolutely extraordinary and he delivers them like a Minigun on a high rate of fire! The two of us did some really good flying in some incredibly testing weather, which took both us and the aircraft to the absolute limits of performance. You really only ever see weather like that in the Falkland Islands.

  On one particular sortie, we were supposed to be picking up a JCB as an underslung load and putting it on HMCS Brandon, a Canadian Navy ship. We thought it was going to be one of those mini JCBs but it turned out to be the full monty, which weighed about eight tonnes. When we finally got it hooked up and I pulled pitch to lift, we had just a 3% margin in power – right at the limit of the Chinook’s capabilities.

  Still, at least we couldn’t see the effect that the load had on our cab, which isn’t the case when you’re flying in a two-ship formation and you’re both carrying massive underslung loads. You can actually see the other cab ‘bow’ in the middle as the load exerts downforce on the airframe. It’s stressed to such a degree that small waves ripple across the metal skin, in much the same way they’d move across the skin on your arms if you were lifting heavy weights. The cabs are worked so hard they’re literally ‘sweating the metal’.

  It’s funny how your mind adapts, almost without you noticing. The first time I flew a Chinook I was amazed at its power, but everything has a limit. Once the engines exceed maximum power or temperature, they’ll either blow up or the NR will drop, as they won’t be able to provide the energy required to maintain it at 100%. If that happens, the cab will drop like a stone.

  This time, all I had to do was finesse the aircraft over the deck of the ship and gently place the JCB on the deck. Easy, right?

  Well, as easy at it can be when you’re hovering a 99ft long helicopter with only 3% torque in hand, an eight-tonne JCB acting as a pendulum under the aircraft, and two rotor discs spinning at 225 revs per minute just 5ft away from the ship’s crane. It would have been all but impossible on any other day in the Falkland Islands (where, even in summer, the wind can exceed fifty knots) but on this particular day it was unusually benign – no more than three or four knots. I learned a lot about flying on that mission that was to prove invaluable in Afghanistan.

  Given the Falkland Islands’ isolation and its uncontrolled airspace, you can do things there that just aren’t possible anywhere else in the world. All incoming and outgoing commercial airline flights are intercepted and escorted by two RAF Typhoon fighter jets. The residents of Port Stanley positively welcome low flying (they phone the base and complain if the jets don’t scream overhead at max chat at least twice a week); and at least twice a month the Argentine Navy sails inside the exclusion zone to see just how awake the Typhoon crews are, which heralds a scramble to intercept and chase them away. It’s like a playground for the UK military, but it’s hugely beneficial from an operational readiness perspective.

  W
e used to do something called the ‘Tiger Run’. We would call the RAF Regiment over the radio and say, ‘Tiger Run – game on,’ and they would then turn on the radar for their Rapier anti-aircraft missile system. The object of the game would be to fly the aircraft as low and fast as possible to see how close we could get to the airfield before they managed to get missile lock on us. To beat our personal score meant flying through some of the gullies that ran in from the west straight into the airfield. The flying was intense and took a lot of focus, but it was to prove hugely beneficial when we got to Afghanistan.

  5

  DÉJÀ VU

  In January 2006 we were briefed that we’d be deploying to Afghanistan as a component of 16 Air Assault Brigade and flying in support of ops by 3 Para Battlegroup, under Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal. We would be flying to Kandahar Airfield and operating between there and a newly-built British base called Camp Bastion. At that stage, I don’t think it was much more than a few tents and a dirt runway, but it was growing by the day.

  We also knew that we’d be flying on ops with the Army Air Corps’ Apache AH-1s. We’d heard mixed reports about them; at that stage they were so new to UK service that the MoD hadn’t identified a role for them and nobody really knew how they’d fare. Obviously, we’d never worked with them before and there were all sorts of rumours flying around. We’d heard they were slow and their weapon sensors weren’t very good, which, as it transpired, was absolute rubbish because they are fantastic machines. With what I know now, I wouldn’t want to fly anywhere without one.

  After New Year’s Day 2006, there were really only two things on my mind: ‘A’ Flight’s impending departure for Afghanistan, and the big day for Ali and I, which we’d arranged for August. We’d planned on a big do, with our respective families, friends and work colleagues. It was to be a formal gig at the church in Odiham, with myself and the guys from the Flight in full ceremonial uniform, replete with medals, swords and white gloves. But then events conspired to bring about a radical change of plan; Ali told me she was pregnant. That changed things, especially since word started to come back from Afghanistan that things were deteriorating. Suddenly, the whole business of my deployment looked different.