by Harry Benson
The six huddled SAS troops skidded and stumbled their way towards the Wessex 5, away from the limited protection of the rocks, heads down into the helicopter downdraft. A smear of orange dye stained the snow, the remains of a smoke grenade used to pinpoint their location. Dressed in their white Arctic clothing, the soldiers were in varying stages of hypothermia after exposure to a night of sub-zero temperatures, gale force winds and driving snow. Seated just below and behind Tidd, Leading Aircrewman Tug Wilson helped them stuff their kit into the cabin of the Wessex. As they clambered wearily aboard, he poured each of them hot soup from a thermos.
‘I think we’d better get out of here.’
Tidd’s voice on the intercom sounded electronic, distorted by the throat microphone attached around his neck. He looked out to his left, past the M260 missile sight suspended from the cockpit roof that partly blocked his view. He could just make out the two other Wessex helicopters nearby, still loading their troops. A lull in the weather, between the wild and unpredictable snow showers, presented a window of opportunity.
‘Thirty seconds, boss,’ called Wilson. ‘I’m just getting the last ones in now.’
‘Four Zero Six, Yankee Fox. I’m loaded and would like permission to depart. It looks clear right now.’
Tidd radioed across to mission leader Lieutenant Commander Ian Stanley in the adjacent Wessex 3. Equipped with radar and flight control systems, the single-engine Wessex 3 was there as pathfinder for the radar-less twin-engine, troop-carrying Wessex 5s. Stanley had led Tidd in Yankee Foxtrot and his colleague Lieutenant Ian Georgeson in Yankee Alpha, the second Wessex 5, in close formation up to the top of the glacier. The plan was for all three helicopters then to fly back down in formation the same way they had come up, the Wessex 3 keeping them clear of the mountains through the snow and poor visibility.
In the cockpit of the Wessex 3, Stanley and his co-pilot Sub-Lieutenant Stewart Cooper looked at each other and nodded. OK. Let him get out of here while the going is good. He had done the same yesterday when they dropped the guys off. Ian Stanley was confident that Tidd would know what he was doing. Both Tidd and Georgeson were far more experienced at flying in these Antarctic conditions, having trained with the Royal Marines in the Arctic.
‘Roger Yankee Fox, you’re clear to go. See you back there.’
Tug Wilson leaned out of the back of the Wessex, restrained by his aircrewman’s harness, and checked that all was clear behind. ‘OK boss. Let’s go.’
With the wind blowing hard up the glacier, Tidd had only to ease the collective lever upwards a little for the seven-ton machine to jump eagerly into the air. Half a mile ahead lay a snow-covered ridgeline before the glacier sloped steeply downwards towards the sea and relative safety. The escape route ahead looked straightforward enough, passing between the giant forbidding mountains that rose high above them on both sides. The very edge of a snow shower appeared just as Yankee Foxtrot lifted. Tidd accelerated to sixty knots, staying low over the glacier in case he needed to land again. Wilson slid the rear door closed to shut out the icy wind and make best use of the cabin heating system for the benefit of the frozen SAS troops.
The speed and ferocity with which the weather changed was astonishing. Without warning, the snow shower encompassed the helicopter like a tidal wave. ‘Tug we’ve got a problem,’ shouted Tidd whose world had suddenly turned white. It was like being submerged in a glass of milk. The ridgeline at the end of the glacier, and the sea behind it, had vanished into the snow. As Wilson quickly slid open the rear door to help look for visual cues, Tidd banked left to try to return to the rocks he had seen a few seconds earlier. It was a fifty-fifty decision that ended up saving their lives.
Disoriented by the sudden whiteout and complete lack of visual references, Tidd glanced into the cockpit at his instrument panel. The radio altimeter (radalt) was now unwinding at an alarming rate. Realising that collision with the ground was inevitable, Tidd hauled in power with his left hand and flared the aircraft nose up with his right to cushion the impact. The tail and left wheel of the Wessex hit the snow at about thirty knots, sheering away the undercarriage and causing the aircraft to come crashing down on its left side. The aircraft slid onwards for fifty yards. The left side of the cockpit filled up with debris and snow as the windows imploded. Had a co-pilot been sitting in the left seat, he would undoubtedly have been killed, crushed between the missile sight and the ice below.
As the helicopter ground to a halt, the inertia crash switches in the aircraft’s nose automatically shut down both engines. Tidd still had no real idea whether or not they would survive. Lying on his side, he reached down to turn off the fuel cocks and electrics to find the central panel and entire left side of the cockpit submerged under snow and broken glass. The only sounds were the howling wind outside and the cockpit windscreen wiper squeaking vainly up and down. Through the relative silence, Wilson’s distant voice shouted up from the back: ‘Everyone seems to be in one piece.’ Tidd slid open the flimsy cockpit window, now unfamiliarly above him, and clambered up onto the side of the aircraft to help Wilson open the rear cabin door.
From their position on the ice further up the glacier, Ian Stanley and Stewart Cooper had watched helplessly as the Wessex helicopter disappeared into the front edge of the snow storm ahead before banking left and sinking into a dip just before the ridgeline. Stanley’s only words were ‘Oh shit!’ as he saw Yankee Foxtrot’s rotor blades plough into the snow and the aircraft then crash and slide along on its side.
The snow shower passed as suddenly as it had appeared. Visibility improved once more. ‘Yankee Alpha, I’m going to hover-taxi up to them. Follow me and take care,’ radioed Stanley to Ian Georgeson as he lifted gently away from the ice and taxied the few hundred yards down the glacier. There was now no shortage of visual cues. Bits of Wessex tail rotor and other assorted debris lay dotted on the snow.
As the helicopters landed either side of the stricken Wessex, Georgeson’s aircrewman Jan Lomas jumped out and headed off to inspect the damage. Wilson and the SAS troops clambered up out of the wreck. Miraculously it appeared that nobody had been killed. The only injury was to one SAS staff sergeant who had been cut above his eye by the cabin machine gun.
Dazed, Tidd wandered over to the Wessex 3. Stanley’s crewman Fitz Fitzgerald plugged Tidd’s helmet into the cabin intercom. ‘God you’re a messy bastard,’ said Stanley from the cockpit above. ‘You’ve left the windscreen wiper on.’ It was the words of an experienced leader easing the pressure from the situation.
‘If you can find the fucking switch, you go and turn it off,’ replied Tidd with feeling.
Out on the snow, the two crewmen Fitzgerald and Lomas divided the soldiers between the two remaining helicopters. The SAS troops were not at all happy about having to leave their kit behind and keep only their side-arms. But they were given no choice. The helicopters were already at maximum weight and could lift no more. While Georgeson jettisoned fuel directly onto the glacier to reduce weight further, Tidd and two troops squashed into the back of Stanley’s Wessex 3. Wilson and the remaining four troops went with Georgeson’s Wessex 5. With ten people now crammed into the Wessex 3 and fourteen people in the Wessex 5, Stanley radioed Georgeson to ‘follow me’. The depleted formation rose to the hover once again.
The shocking scene on Fortuna Glacier just after Mike Tidd’s Wessex 5 crashed on its side. The engine is still smoking. Ian Georgeson’s helicopter is in the background. This photo was taken from the cockpit of HMS Antrim’s Wessex 3. The SAS men inside this helicopter were split between the two surviving helicopters. Georgeson’s Wessex crashed ten minutes later as he crossed the glacier’s ridgeline in whiteout conditions.
In the back of the Wessex 3, Stanley’s observer Lieutenant Chris Parry sat crouched over the radar screen. His job was to keep the formation clear of the cliffs to the side of the glacier. What he couldn’t see was the ice ridge in front of him; the forward sweep of the radar was blocked by the helicopter’s main ge
arbox just in front of the radar dome. As Stanley crossed the ridge, Georgeson was following a few rotor lengths behind in Yankee Alpha. Another ferocious snowstorm hit the formation just at the wrong moment, barely ten seconds after launch. As the Wessex 3 dropped rapidly down over the ridgeline, automatically maintaining a low altitude over the steeply descending glacier, Georgeson lost sight of the aircraft in front. ‘I’m getting whiteout,’ he announced calmly to his crewman Lomas, who reopened the cabin door that he had only just shut. Trying to maintain level flight in order to regain visual contact with the aircraft in front, Georgeson was completely unaware that he was in a dip in the ice and on the wrong side of the ridgeline. Just as with Tidd minutes earlier, he saw the radalt unwinding rapidly and pulled in power. There was a fateful inevitability as the Wessex touched down on the snow.
They almost got away with it. However, the forty-knot wind slewed them around so that they were drifting slowly sideways. The starboard wheel caught in a small ice crevasse and the aircraft toppled over onto its side.
In the lead aircraft, Cooper had been peering behind him through the left cockpit window giving his crew a running commentary on the position of the second Wessex. ‘OK, OK. Fine. He’s still with us. Fifty yards. Steady. Oh God. He’s gone in.’ The huge spray of snow and the complete disappearance of the Wessex suggested a huge crash into the cliffs. ‘It looks like they have really totalled themselves.’
With no radio contact, an overloaded helicopter and appalling weather conditions, there was nothing for it but to return to HMS Antrim, the County-class destroyer from which they had launched two hours earlier. The journey back was subdued. They cleared the mountains and crossed the coast. Parry radioed disconsolately ahead to the ship: ‘Four Zero Six departing coast now. ETA fifteen minutes. Regret we have lost our two chicks.’
There was a long pause.
‘Roger.’
After the horrific conditions high up on Fortuna Glacier, the normally taxing task of landing on a bucking ship in a mere gale now seemed curiously routine. The scrum of soldiers and crew tumbled out of the back of the Wessex 3 onto the flight deck. Tidd approached the hangar surprised to see Stanley’s senior maintainer, Chief Fritz Heritier, and his team laying out a load of drips and stretchers. ‘Guys, you don’t need that, our only injury is a gashed cheek.’ It was painfully obvious that Tidd, who had been disconnected from the intercom in the crush of the returning aircraft, didn’t know about the second crash.
When he heard, it was like a kick to the stomach. Ian Georgeson, Tug Wilson and Jan Lomas were good friends as well as colleagues. Tidd went up to the bridge to talk to Antrim’s captain, Brian Young, task group commander. A former aviator himself, he knew what it was like to lose friends.
Up on the glacier, Yankee Alpha had toppled over on its right side with a sickening thud. After spraying its rotor blades to the four corners, it had juddered a few yards onwards down the glacier. The cabin of the aircraft was a tangle of bodies, backpacks and ammunition. Lomas lay at the bottom of the pile, pinned down by Wilson, in turn pinned down by one of the SAS soldiers. Looking sideways, Lomas could see Georgeson’s feet kicking to his right. ‘Are you alright, boss?’ shouted Lomas.
‘Yes, I’m just stuck,’ came the reply.
Freeing themselves from their own tangle, neither crewman was able to reach the emergency exit above them. This time movement was almost comically restrained by their goon suits, the tight waterproof immersion suits they wore to keep them dry in the event of a ditching in the sea. One of the taller SAS troopers finally reached up to the yellow and red handle and jettisoned the bubble windows above them. The gaggle of thirteen men scrambled out one by one. There was some concern that the aircraft might either disappear down into a crevasse or burst into flames at any minute. So it was with considerable bravery that Lomas and Wilson managed to clamber up onto the fuselage, past the steaming exhaust, and reach down to free a smiling and grateful Georgeson. As luck would have it, the only minor injury was to the very same SAS staff sergeant who had been injured in the first crash. He now had a matching pair of identical injuries from two crashes within ten minutes.
Sheltering downwind in the protection given by the crashed aircraft, the team crouched and discussed what to do next. The surface of the glacier was like nothing they had seen. In parts it was flat and snowy. Elsewhere it was cruelly serrated with waves of ice interspersed with blue crevasses disappearing into the depths. Walking off the glacier was not a sensible option. And it seemed highly unlikely that their only source of rescue, the Wessex 3, would return to rescue them that afternoon. The SAS troops had already survived one tumultuous night out in the open. All the aircrew had been on survival training courses where the mantra was: protection, location, water, food. Protect yourself against the elements and work out how you are going to get out before you worry about water and food. The team set about preparing themselves for another night on the glacier.
One group of SAS soldiers roped themselves together. They set off the few hundred yards back up the glacier to retrieve some of the equipment left behind in the crashed Yankee Foxtrot. The aircrew and remaining troops inflated Yankee Alpha’s nine-man liferaft for protection and ran out the HF radio antenna to tell Antrim they were still alive. Ian Georgeson, as the tallest person present, was elected aerial holder. The aircrew all carried search-and-rescue SARBE short-range UHF radios in their lifejackets. But these would only be useful for talking to the rescue aircraft when it was more or less within earshot. If it came at all.
Out at sea on Antrim, a wave of relief swept over Tidd as he was given the good news that his team were all well. To him, it was as if the dead had been raised. Meanwhile Stanley and his crew were already on their way back to the glacier armed with blankets and medical supplies. The weather was worsening with thicker cloud and violent squalls. Stanley managed to hover-taxi up the side of the glacier all the way to the top. Despite making contact with Georgeson on his SARBE via the emergency frequency 243 megahertz, there was no sign of the crashed Yankee Alpha. A depressed Stanley reluctantly returned to Antrim to consider his options. It was late afternoon.
After a thorough check of the Wessex 3 by the engineers, Stanley decided to have one last crack at rescuing the survivors. It seemed like tempting fate to fly a sixth mission to the top of the glacier with just one engine to support them. Stanley had twice experienced engine failures during his career, once on land, once into the sea. Fortuna Glacier would be a bad place to experience a third.
With low cloud scudding over the ship, Stanley lifted off for the final attempt of the day armed with a new strategy. He would punch through the cloud and try to approach the glacier from above. To a junglie pilot, this strategy would be utterly incomprehensible. Flying into cloud is a recipe for disaster. Without radar control, coming back down is likely to end in tears. But to a radar equipped anti-submarine pilot, this was bread-and-butter stuff.
Although the clouds were fairly thin over the sea, the mountain tops ahead were now shrouded in a thick layer of cloud. Flying clear at 3,000 feet, the prospect of getting down onto the glacier, let alone spotting the wreck, seemed remote. Yet as the Wessex flew above where the glacier should be, a hole appeared magically in the cloud beneath them. There in the middle of the hole lay a single orange dinghy perched on top of the glacier. It was an unbelievable stroke of luck. Stanley spiralled rapidly down through the hole and landed on the ice just as the cloud closed in above them.
The SAS team were yet again extremely reluctant to leave behind their kit and equipment on the glacier with the wreck of Yankee Alpha. But faced with the choice of another night of hypothermia and frostbite, there was really little option. The problem still remained of how on earth to fit fourteen large passengers into the tiny cabin of the Wessex 3. For Stanley’s first rescue hours earlier, the rear cabin had been cramped with two crew and six passengers. Even if they could cram in a further eight people, the Wessex would be dangerously overloaded way beyond the design limit
s of the rotor gearbox and the capacity of the single engine.
One by one, the team squeezed into the back. Bodies were everywhere. Observer Parry worked his radar screen whilst sitting on top of one trooper lain across the seat. Arms and legs hung out of the door and windows. Eventually everybody somehow crammed in. Any kind of emergency, such as a crash or ditching into the sea, would be utterly disastrous. With the strong wind assisting their take-off, the helicopter slid off the side of the glacier and headed back to the ship. There was little scope for conversation because of the cold and wind blowing through the open doors and windows. Although smoking was supposedly not permitted on board, Stanley and Cooper both lit up cigarettes and looked at each other in astonishment: ‘Wow. That was fun!’
Behind them and out of sight of the pilots, most of the crew and passengers did likewise.
There was still the small matter of landing their overweight helicopter on the heaving deck of Antrim. Their only hope was lots of wind over the deck, which would reduce the power needed to maintain a hover. They would only have one attempt at landing. Should they misjudge their approach, the helicopter would have absolutely no chance of recovering for a second attempt. Ditching into the icy black sea would mean certain disaster for most or all of them in the back.
Stanley radioed ahead for the ship to get onto a heading that gave maximum wind over the deck. His final approach was judged to perfection. The helicopter descended straight towards the deck avoiding the usual careful hover. In amongst the crush of bodies in the back, Jan Lomas could make out the air speed indicator on the observer’s panel. It wavered around sixty knots at the moment they touched down on the deck. A controlled crash would have been good enough. Instead it felt like a smooth landing. Lomas was gobsmacked.