Postings

Dreams do come true

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

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.

MASOR
MASOR again

My first posting RAF Marham

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

My first posting in the Royal Air Force was RAF Marham, in 1980 to 1981, straight from trade training. Like many first postings, it came as a bit of a shock.

I arrived full of whatever confidence survives trade training, only to discover I had been permanently put into the transit block. This, I was quickly informed, was reputed to be the worst accommodation block in the RAF. I never found any reason to doubt it. It was a dreadful place. Rough, miserable, and barely fit for purpose. To make matters worse, we were getting weekly bull nights, so it felt only a small step up from basic training, and not always even that.

At first I thought I had landed in hell.

Then I met the two lads I was sharing with, Jock Riley, who was a fireman, and Mark, who was a supplier. To my young eyes they were both impossibly cool. The sort of blokes who seemed to know exactly how the RAF worked, how life worked, and how to enjoy both. If I am honest, I was a bit scared of them to begin with. I was still fresh out of training and probably looked it. But they turned out to be great company, and we had some cracking times together.

Eventually common sense prevailed and I was moved into spare married quarters, because the transit block really was not fit to house anybody. But before I escaped, it left me with one memory that has never gone away.

One night I had been out down the pub and, for reasons that completely escape me now, I decided tequila chasers were a good idea. At the time this seemed clever. By the end of the evening it was clear that it was not. On the way back we stopped for a Chinese, which in hindsight was not exactly a masterstroke either.

By the time I got back to the block the world was spinning and I knew I was in trouble. I ran off to the toilets in a hurry, only to find all the lights were broken. No matter, I thought. I rushed into a cubicle, aimed roughly in the direction of the pan, and was violently sick. Feeling a good deal better afterwards, and rather pleased with my own crisis management, I went back to bed.

The following morning I was rudely awakened by what felt like an official delegation. I was marched back to the toilet block to inspect the scene of the crime.

It turns out that if you are going to be sick into a toilet, it does help to lift the lid first.

That was a lesson I learned the hard way, in darkness, after tequila, with witnesses. I have never touched tequila since, and with good reason.

Another strong memory from Marham was the regular trips to Norwich with Julian Hathaway. We used to head over to a place called the Star Bar, which brewed its own beer. It was superb stuff, and the interesting thing was that it never seemed to be quite the same two nights running. That probably added to the charm, though it may also explain a few things.

We would settle in there and get completely pie eyed, as young airmen with more enthusiasm than sense often did. Being responsible and irresponsible in equal measure, we then went back to the car and slept it off before driving home. In our minds this was the height of practical planning. Looking back, it was probably just another example of the casual madness of being young and thinking yourself indestructible.

If either of us needed to be sick during the night, the drill was simple. Open car door, lean out, deposit stomach contents onto the ground, shut door, carry on. No drama, no fuss, no dignity.

We were both into the very early illegal CB radio scene as well, so that added another layer of nonsense to the whole thing. Instead of just sleeping, we would spend half the night on the CB, no doubt sounding like two drunken idiots to anyone unlucky enough to be listening. At the time, of course, we probably thought we were absolutely fascinating.

It is funny what stays with you. Not the grand occasions, not the polished parade-ground moments, but the daft little episodes. Driving to Norwich for beer that changed from night to night, sleeping in a car so we could sober up, hanging out of the doors to be sick, and rambling nonsense over illegal CB radios. Completely ridiculous. Completely unsafe by modern standards. Completely unforgettable.

My other strong memory of Marham was during the building works for the hardened aircraft shelters, in preparation for the Tornados coming. One weekend, my mate Phil Taylor and I were on TANSOR readiness. Phil was a qualified driver. I was not. That did not stop him taking me out onto the airfield from time to time to let me have a bit of practice anyway, which seemed like an excellent idea at the time.

So there we were, with not much going on, springing about the airfield in a Land Rover while I was behind the wheel pretending I knew what I was doing.

As it turned out, I did not.

At one point I drove straight into a newly concreted taxiway. Not just damp concrete. Proper freshly laid stuff, probably about a foot deep. The Land Rover went into it and concrete went absolutely everywhere, including right across the windscreen. For a moment there was that awful silence where you know you have done something spectacularly stupid, but your brain has not yet caught up with quite how stupid.

Somehow, with more hope than skill, I managed to get us out of it and back to the tower. We then did what young men in uniform have done since time began. We tried to make the evidence disappear.

To be fair, we did not do a bad job. We cleaned the Land Rover up, got rid of every obvious trace we could find, and when we were stood down we handed it back to MT looking, to our eyes at least, entirely respectable.

We were quite pleased with ourselves.

That feeling lasted until the next morning.

It turned out we had cleaned the vehicle beautifully, apart from one small detail. We had entirely forgotten about the engine bay, which was now comprehensively decorated with hardened concrete. So while the outside looked spotless, lifting the bonnet revealed the sort of scene that rather gave the game away.

The next day all hell broke loose.

You can imagine the trouble we got into.

Looking back now, it was idiotic. At the time it felt like just another bit of bored weekend inventiveness between two young blokes with more confidence than judgement. But that is often how the best service memories are made. Not the official moments, but the daft ones. The ones where you know full well you should not laugh, but after enough years have passed, that is exactly what you do.

So when I think of RAF Marham, I do not only think of aircraft, towers and station life. I think of the worst accommodation block in the RAF, two roommates who turned out to be top lads, tequila in a dark toilet block, nights in Norwich at the Star Bar, sleeping in cars and talking nonsense over illegal CB, and one utterly doomed attempt to hide a Land Rover’s close encounter with a freshly poured taxiway.

It was a rough, funny, chaotic start to RAF life.

And I remember it very fondly.

Hardened Aircraft Shelter

Cowden Air Weapons Range

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

There are some postings you forget almost as soon as you leave them. RAF Cowden was not one of them.

I was posted there from 1986 to 1988, and looking back now it was one of the strangest, most enjoyable and most memorable places I ever served. It was not a big station with endless people, parades and fuss. In truth, it was a very small camp, tucked away in pleasant farmland, with the beach only about a mile away and the North Sea always making its presence felt.

What made Cowden unusual was the contrast. On the one hand, it was one of the best places I ever stayed. The domestic block was purpose-built, a two-storey L-shaped building with the upper floor more dormer than full storey. We had single rooms, which was a rarity in those days. The food was second to none, mainly because the chef was only really cooking for four of us who lived in. We even had our own bar, which we ran ourselves. With office staff and civilian workers maintaining the targets, there were about sixteen people on the camp altogether, but only four of us actually lived there. That gave the place a very close-knit feel. Small enough that everyone knew everyone, and comfortable enough that you could forget for a moment what sort of place it really was.

Because Cowden was not just a pleasant little camp near the coast. It was a busy working air weapons range.

In the late 1980s the main traffic was Tornado GR1s, F-111s and A-10s. We had the occasional Jaguar and Harrier, but the USAF was really our meat and potatoes. They were not based on site, but they were the backbone of much of the flying we saw. Every now and then the USAF would send a pilot up to see us and go through the scoring. Curiously enough, they always seemed to have done rather well when they came back to look at the results.

Bomb scoring was a serious business. It was done by triangulation using scopes, intercom and a computer. The basic maths behind it was not especially complicated, a bit of Pythagoras and a database to hold the results, but in practice it had to work properly when things got busy. I ended up developing changes to the computer to make it more usable in heavy periods, and I was later seconded to Strike Command to help with development work on a new version of the system. In the end, I never saw that come to fruition, which is probably a fairly familiar story to anyone who has ever tried to improve anything in a large organisation. Still, for a while at least, it felt good to be helping make the system better. At the end of each week the results were sent out to the various squadrons, so what we did on that little camp mattered.

The range itself is still very clear in my mind. Target 7 was the furthest out to sea, around a mile and a half, a metallic raft about thirty feet square, mainly used by F-111s and Tornados. Target 6 was much closer in, about a quarter of a mile offshore, and was a circle of barrels with a small raft in the middle, though it was not used very often. Target 3 sat to the left of the tower, a circle of barrels with a cluster in the middle. Target 4 was to the right of the tower, built much the same way, and was mainly used by A-10s. Then there were the strafe pits, to the left of Target 4 and nearest the tower, also mainly used by A-10s.

And that brings me to the tower.

The tower was not somewhere you relaxed. It had a radio room and a toilet at the bottom, stairs up to the control room at the top, and a balcony running around it. From up there the view was magnificent. Straight out to sea, with Flamborough Head to the left and the Humber estuary to the right. On a clear day it was a lovely place to look out from. But it also had an edge to it that you did not forget. The tower was close to the strafe pits, about 250 metres away, and you could regularly hear ricochets flying past. That certainly sharpened the senses. It was also vulnerable in another way. The tower stood about 300 feet from the cliff edge, and one morning we came in to find that roughly 150 feet of cliff had disappeared overnight. That gives you a fair idea of what the Holderness coast was like. Beautiful to look at, but always on the move and always taking bites out of the land.

If there had been a fire in the tower, the evacuation plan was not exactly luxurious either. You got out by jumping off the balcony wearing a rope harness that slowed your fall. Perfectly sensible in a practical RAF sort of way, but it sounds mad when you say it out loud now.

The weather was usually standard British weather, nothing especially dramatic most of the time, but every so often we would get sea fog. When it came in, it really came in. One summer it stayed for two weeks. We could not see a thing, while the aircraft could apparently see everything, which used to cause no end of frustration. Cowden could do that to you. One minute it was all calm skies and open sea views, the next minute the place felt like it had disappeared into a wet white blanket.

Like anywhere, there were local characters too. We had a regular complainer, Mr Bentley of Cowden Parva Farm, who seemed to object to just about everything and was certainly no fan of the USAF. He became part of the background music of the place. Every posting seems to have somebody like that.

What I remember most now is not one single dramatic day. It is the overall feel of it. A tiny camp. Good food. Single rooms. Our own little bar. A handful of people keeping the place going. Civilian staff on the scopes and maintaining the targets, RAF air traffic control in the tower, and aircraft coming through in bursts of noise and energy before heading back out of sight. It was comfortable, but it was never soft. The tower could be nerve-racking. The sea could take half the cliff in a night. The range work had to be right. And despite the small size of the place, what we did fed directly back to front-line squadrons.

Cowden was a place of odd contrasts. It was peaceful and dangerous, comfortable and exposed, beautiful and unforgiving. One moment you could be enjoying one of the best mess meals of your service life, and the next you could be in a tower listening to rounds crack past or staring at a cliff edge that had moved alarmingly closer since yesterday.

I have been posted to bigger places, busier places and more important places on paper, but Cowden has stayed with me in a way many of them have not. Perhaps that is because it felt real. No pretence, no grandeur, just a small group of people doing an unusual job in a remarkable place.

For all its oddities, I remember it very fondly.

RAF Cowden was one of a kind.

Strafe pits
Strafe target
OC outside the tower