After Saxa Vord came my next posting, RAF West Drayton.

They always say that when you leave Saxa Vord you get a choice of posting. In reality, as ever with the RAF, the choice was never quite as real as it sounded. I had chosen Prestwick. I got West Drayton. Not exactly what I had picked, but near enough in the type of work, so I was not about to complain too much.

I was posted into MASOR, the Military Air Space Operations Room, the place where most military flights across England and Wales were controlled from. That alone made it a serious and exciting posting, the sort of place where things mattered and where the pace never really let up.

But the real magic for me was next door.

Right alongside MASOR was CASOR, the Civil Air Space Operations Room, the place I had dreamed about ever since that unforgettable bollocking in Aldergrove Control Tower all those years before. Back then I had been a kid in trouble, but all I could really think about was how amazing the place looked and how badly I wanted to be part of that world one day.

Now here I was.

In air traffic control terms, there probably was not a more exciting place to work. It felt like the centre of everything. Busy, important, alive. For me it was more than just another posting. It was the place I had wanted for years, the place that had lived in my imagination ever since I first looked into that tower as a boy. I do not think I can properly explain just how lucky I felt to be there. I knew it at the time and I still know it now. I was so lucky.

It turned out I was pretty good at the job.

I had been screened by SAC Mick Peaple, a lovely bloke and bloody clever with it. He clearly saw something in me, and I have never forgotten that. Life has a funny way of going round in circles because many years later I was able to give Mick a job at NATS, testing software. I was really pleased to do that. Sadly, Mick passed away from prostate cancer eight to ten years ago, which felt desperately unfair for such a good man.

After a few years on the ops floor, I started to think a bit further ahead. Much as I loved the live job, I could see that systems and software might give me a longer future. That led me to DYSIM, Dynamic Simulation, which at the time felt like a real breakthrough in the training of controllers.

It was a cracking role. You needed a bit of technical knowledge because the simulation had to work properly, but you also needed a bit of acting in you as well. You were helping create realistic situations, believable traffic, proper pressure, and the kind of problems controllers would really have to handle. It was not enough for the system to run. It had to feel real. We got good at it, and before long we were very well thought of by the training section.

DYSIM ran on the main computer system that sat close to the centre of UK airspace operations, which in hindsight meant we were rather nearer the beating heart of the whole business than was probably wise for a group of young men who fancied an early finish on a Friday.

By then we knew the system well. In fact, we knew it a bit too well. Well enough to know how to make it fall over and cause a fair bit of disruption.

So on the odd Friday afternoon, when the temptation of an early getaway got the better of us, we knew exactly how to break it. At the time, of course, we did not really think through the consequences. We just thought we were being clever. Looking back, it was daft, and a bit more serious than we cared to admit.

What I enjoy now is the neat circle of it all. Years later, when I became Chief Engineer at NATS, part of my job was making sure systems were resilient, robust, and protected against exactly that sort of thing. So there I was, helping make critical systems stronger against the kind of young idiot I had once been.

That is life, really. Sometimes you spend your youth seeing how far you can push things, then spend the rest of your career making sure nobody else can do the same.