Sweating the Metal Read online

  Because I thought I’d be streamed fast jet, I’d already arranged a holding post with the fast jet test squadron at Boscombe Down. I couldn’t change it, so there was nothing else to do but change my perspective. If I couldn’t be a fast jet pilot in the RAF, at least I’d be able to live the life for a few months and get it out of my system.

  So that’s what I did. After a period of leave, I arrived at Boscombe Down in November 2001 for four months. I had the time of my life and can look back on having flown the Jaguar, the Hawk and the Alpha Jet. Although the time I spent in them wasn’t loggable because I hadn’t earned my wings then, it didn’t matter. Firstly, I made loads of memories. Secondly, when you’re talking to mates outside of the RAF, one of the first things they ask you is, ‘Have you flown a fast jet?’ At least now I can say, ‘Yes.’

  RAF Shawbury in Shropshire is home to the Defence Helicopter Flying School and the Central Flying School (Helicopter) Squadron; it’s where you come if you want to fly helicopters for the Army, Navy or RAF. So in March 2002 I arrived ready to learn everything I needed to know about rotary-winged aircraft – or helicopters, as they’re more widely known.

  At this stage, I really didn’t know a great deal about them, but when I looked at the RAF’s fleet of helicopters I set my sights on the Chinook from the off. There was something different about it. That said, I still felt apprehensive. To me, helicopters were the devil’s machines. I know how fixed-wing aircraft stay aloft but I regarded helicopters as little more than six million separate pieces flying in an unstable formation. So far as I was concerned then, it was aerodynamically impossible for a helicopter to fly, so the only conclusion that I could draw was that they’re so fucking ugly that the earth repels them. I wasn’t sure I could deal with that.

  The course began with a month of ground school where we learned the principles of flight and looked at vector diagrams that apparently proved that helicopters can, in fact, fly. I’m sure that anybody with a first in Engineering or Pure Maths could quickly prove otherwise, but the school did a pretty good job of convincing us, so I parked my scepticism and concentrated on the finer points of helicopter meteorology. As ground school progressed, we learned the various checks in a procedural trainer, which is a cardboard mock-up of the cockpit. The needles on the dials move and the sim makes all the relevant noises, but it’s just to get you used to where everything is. Eventually, we actually started walk-arounds so we were up close and personal with this mythical flying beast.

  It was a single-engine Eurocopter Squirrel HT1 – the ideal platform in which to learn the rudiments of helicopter flying, according to the RAF. The engine is tiny – about 2ft long by 11 inches high – but it’s worth about a million pounds, so there’s clearly more to it than simple pistons. It must be all the pixie dust that they put in there to keep the thing aloft.

  Everything about the Squirrel is small and light – you can lift the tail with a finger because it’s plastic, thin and very, very light. The blades are no more than five inches wide, yet they spin at 225rpm and somehow keep you airborne. One thing you don’t want is to see the engineers working on the tail rotor before you fly, because if you do, you’ll see the transmission tube that runs the length of the boom to keep the tail rotor spinning, which is no more than finger-thickness and spins at 1,000rpm. It really is best not to think about it too hard.

  My first actual flight in it is a familiarisation one with an instructor, and it’s the only free ride on the course. There were three of us riding along for that. The instructor walked out to the line, helmet on, dark visor down. Standing there before me and my two fellow students he assumed almost mythical status, for he can fly this thing.

  So, picture this… we get in – I’m in the back and I just can’t compute how we’re going to get airborne with four adults inside. The instructor runs through his checks and starts the aircraft, his hand whizzing around the cockpit. He reaches to his left and pulls on a lever that looks just like the handbrake in my car and suddenly we’re in the air. We go straight up, taxi in between some other helicopters, fly gently over the grass on the airfield, turn through 180° to make sure there is nothing behind, and off we go. Down goes the nose and we are flying. I’m dumbstruck because it feels just how I’d imagine a flying carpet would feel.

  For someone schooled in flying fixed-wing aircraft, it meant a whole new frame of reference and an entirely new way of thinking; if anything goes wrong, for example, you don’t have to find a runway, you can just slow down, find a field, and hover. And you could just hover there for hours, beating gravity. Once I’d accepted the concept, I realised that it opened up entirely new horizons in flying. I must confess that all my previous misgivings melted away as we flew, and I actually began to think, ‘Hey, this is pretty cool.’ I couldn’t believe I’d actually considered leaving the RAF. This tiny glimpse of rotary-winged flight showed me there was nothing to regret; it was going to be good – real good!

  My instructor was John Garnons Williams (John GW to us), and he was awesome. He was an old boy, a retired Wing Commander – very well educated, a very, very good pilot and an absolute gentleman to boot. It was a privilege to know him and I was deeply saddened to hear that he died in a training accident in January 2007.

  I felt reasonably confident about my first lesson. I mean, how difficult could it be? I’d just finished a month of ground school so I was more than familiar with the functionality of the flight controls. And I knew all the theory: basically, the controls in a helicopter affect the rotors – rotating blades on top of the fuselage, and a tail rotor at the end of the boom. The four blades on the roof are essentially rotating wings – rotary wings – and form a disc. It’s the disc that flies; the rest of the helicopter simply follows along.

  Unlike commercial and private fixed-wing aircraft, where the co-pilot or student traditionally occupies the right-hand seat, it’s role-dependent in a helicopter. The right seat is generally for handling sorties, the left for navigation sorties. So to the left of my seat was the ‘handbrake’; that’s the collective and it controls altitude. Raise it and it affects all four rotor blades at the same time – ‘collectively’. It increases their pitch angle, causing the disc – and the helicopter – to rise. Lower it and the effects are reversed; the pitch angle is reduced and the helicopter descends. On some helicopters, there’s a twist-grip throttle on the end of the collective and it’s much the same as the throttle on a motorbike – twist to go faster. Things are simplified on the Squirrel, so there’s no conventional ‘twist’ throttle per se. Instead, the throttle has three more or less permanent positions: flight, ground idle and off.

  So the collective controls altitude and the throttle controls rotor speed, which is known as ‘NR’. Rising vertically from the floor between the pilot’s legs is the cyclic control stick; moving it in any direction causes the disc to increase pitch on one half of its cycle while feathering on the other half. The cyclic change of pitch means that the disc tilts and moves in the same direction as the stick. Simple enough so far, right?

  There’s one more major control and that’s the pedals, which work on the tail rotor. The reason that most helicopters have a tail rotor at the end of the boom is to counteract the huge forces generated by the main rotors as they move clockwise. Without the tail rotor, those forces would rotate the fuselage in the opposite direction, an effect known as torque. The tail rotor pushes the tail sideways against the torque so the amount of push – and the direction of the nose – is controlled via the foot pedals. The left one pushes the tail against the torque, so the nose moves to the left. Pushing the right one has the opposite effect.

  Like I said, I knew how to fly and I knew the principles of flying a helicopter, so how difficult could it be?

  John GW took us up to hover height at 5ft. ‘Okay Frenchie, see that tree at our 12 o’clock?’

  ‘The small one on the nose? I see it.’

  ‘Okay, I want you to keep us pointed at that tree. I’ll handle the rest of the co
ntrols. Got it?’

  I thought about the thousands of vibrating, spinning and turning components that comprised the aircraft, each one seemingly with its own mind, powering this wild beast, this unbroken horse somehow tamed and made benign by John’s input. In his hands, the helicopter sat solidly at 5ft, rigidly pointed towards the tree about fifty yards off the nose, moving neither forwards nor backwards, neither left nor right. Minus the visual cues, we could have been motionless on the tarmac.

  ‘You have control,’ he said.

  I pushed gently against the pedals. And for a second or so, all seemed well. Nothing changed. Then the tree was at my 10 o’clock. I pushed against the right pedal… and I watched as the tree moved past the nose to my 3 o’clock, like a roll of film scrolling across my field of vision.

  ‘You see the tree I’m talking about?’ John asked. I clicked the push-to-talk button on the cyclic and confirmed I did. ‘Well, if you could try to keep us pointed towards it, that would be good,’ he said, like a kindly uncle.

  I focused. And gradually, the tail’s movements became less extreme. The arcs narrowed. And the tree stayed, for the most part, between our 11 o’clock and our 1 o’clock. For some of the time, I actually managed to keep it at our 12 o’clock. It was all about anticipating the response of the pedals and pressing them accordingly.

  ‘Much better,’ said John. When he thought I’d got control of the pedals, he gave me the collective.

  ‘Okay, you’ve got the collective. Look at 12 o’clock, keep the height.’ And for a while, I did. Then we started to rise and fall like we were a yo-yo controlled by some giant unseen hand.

  ‘Anticipate, anticipate,’ I told myself. I reduced my input on the collective – small, tiny movements. We settled.

  ‘Well done, Frenchie. Very good,’ he told me, giving my ego a nice boost. I could do this. And then he said, ‘Right, I’ll give you the cyclic, and I’d like you to keep us in the same position on the ground.’

  I did that pretty well and I was thinking to myself, ‘This isn’t too bad.’

  ‘Okay. That was pretty good. Do you think you’re up to trying all of the controls at once?’ he asked. Buoyed by my success so far, I told him I’d give it a go. ‘Okay, you have control,’ John said.

  ‘I have control,’ I confirmed.

  And I did. At least I did for a few seconds – although, as I realised later, that was mainly because he’d trimmed the aircraft for me and it flattered to deceive. Then the wind increased and I over-corrected for it. Keeping us level and static was like herding cats. If I pushed the cyclic forward, the nose went down and the aircraft descended and started to accelerate. I brought the nose up to slow down and pulled on the collective to climb and I doubled my height. When I finally managed to check the acceleration, I slowed us down so much that we were going backwards. Move the cyclic left and the aircraft slides left; right cyclic and the aircraft slides right, just like a fixed-wing aircraft, but you have to put a bit of pedal on to adjust the balance. It’s like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, while also playing keepy-uppy with a football.

  ‘I have control of the aircraft,’ said John, trying not to sound too nervous, although I’m sure inside he was a paragon of fear. But then, that’s the instructors’ lot. John, bless him, never seemed fazed by anything we did, and his voice – its timbre, tone, manner – never deviated. He was never flustered.

  A few days later, I’d finally mastered the hover and we were out doing some ground cushion work – hovering but manoeuvring, not staying in the same position.

  ‘Right, when I give you control, Frenchie, I want you to look at this white line that’s at 3 o’clock. Whilst pointing the aircraft at the trees straight ahead of us, gently manoeuvre the aircraft left along the line.’

  And because everything had been coming together for me, and I could hold the hover and generally control things, I thought piece of piss. Obviously, the minute I took over the controls the manoeuvre was like a dog’s breakfast. I tried, but I just couldn’t get it right.

  ‘I have control,’ says John. ‘I was expecting a bit better than that. We’ll try again tomorrow.’

  As he flew us back to the pan at Shawbury, I felt an enormous sense of disappointment because I thought I’d cracked it. John made you want to do well. He never criticised or put you down and every comment was constructive. Even when you felt he was disappointed in you, he never said it explicitly. Always it was the soft voice, the kindly manner. It was as if your dad was teaching you something but you didn’t get it, and you’d disappointed him. He was like everyone’s dad.

  Another week, though, and I’d put everything behind me. Although I was nowhere near John’s standard, he was delighted with my progress. I was holding it all together, and my basic handling was good. And I was enjoying myself. With fixed wing there are rules; but helicopters don’t obey any rules whatsoever which, I suppose, makes them quite quirky. There’s an element of me that liked that.

  There wasn’t a real eureka moment for me when all the various elements of flying and controlling a helicopter came together. The way we learned means it happens slowly, so you don’t necessarily notice it. I think the first time I knew that I’d cracked it was after about fourteen hours of instruction. It was a Friday, May 17th, and it had been a routine sortie. When we landed, John said, ‘Okay Frenchie, I’m going to step out and I want you to take-off from here, go around, then come back and pick me up.’ Fourteen hours and I was left in total command of an aircraft costing one and a half million pounds. I loved it!

  After the solo, things moved pretty quickly and I started to learn much more advanced handling. Things like utilising a phenomenon called ‘cushion creep’, which allows you to take off when the aircraft is too heavy and you don’t have enough power to lift straight up. I learned how to do quick stops when the aircraft is carrying too much speed to land – you adopt a nose-up attitude and perform a series of rapid, tight turns to scrub it off. Very quickly it seemed, I’d amassed more than thirty-seven hours on the aircraft and the end of the course was just around the corner. I passed the basic handling test with flying colours, which meant I had all the necessary skills to fly the aircraft, could handle emergencies and knew advanced handling techniques, but I was still a long way from getting my wings. I wasn’t a pilot yet.

  2

  THROUGH ADVERSITY TO THE STARS

  You travel a long road as a prospective RAF pilot before getting your wings. I was still a long way from the Holy Grail after the best part of two years’ flying training. It was like running for an oasis in the desert. The closer I got, the further away it seemed.

  I was full of optimism when I arrived at 705 Squadron at RAF Shawbury (more an administrative move than a physical one). It was here that the basic skills I’d learned so far were consolidated and developed into more applied techniques. The syllabus included instrument flying, basic night flying, low-level and formation flying and, finally, mountain flying.

  Instrument Flying (IF) is all about trusting your instruments, not what your sense of balance or your senses or anything else is telling you. It’s drummed into you from the off. You fly with covers on the windscreen and the cowling so you can’t see out; you have no visual references at all. IF is all based on scanning your instruments.

  The main instrument, which sits right in front of you, is the AI, or Attitude Indicator. It displays your position against the horizon, so you can see immediately if the aircraft is rolling, yawing, climbing or descending – it shows you nose up, nose down, angle of bank, left or right, and it has a little suspended ball that tells you whether the aircraft is in balance or not. It’s the only instrument with back-ups. There are four on the aircraft: two main ones and two smaller standbys.

  Underneath the AI is the HSI or Horizontal Situation Indicator – basically a compass, except it’s rather more complex. It’s overlaid with other instruments to indicate the direction of navigation beacons. It enables us to fly an approach t
o an airfield in cloud or in the dark and that’s why it’s called a Horizontal Situation Indicator and not a compass – it gives you an awareness of where the aircraft is in space.

  The Altimeter tells you your height and there are two; a Radar Altimeter or ‘RadAlt’ which gives the height of the aircraft as it passes above the ground, and a barometric one which uses pressure to work out the height above mean sea level, or above the ground when you’re at higher altitudes.

  The VSI or Vertical Speed Indicator shows how fast you’re climbing or descending. Finally, we rely on the ASI or Air Speed Indicator to tell us how fast the aircraft is flying through the air.

  Instrument Flying is an absolutely alien sensation because you have no references and your inner ear is blind, deaf and dumb to reason, so when confronted with the instruments it acts like Kim Jong-il in the face of international condemnation. I never had a trust issue with the instruments. I did, however, suffer from ‘the leans’, which is a bizarre phenomenon. With the leans, your ear doesn’t believe it when the instruments say you’re flying straight and level, so your body tilts to a 45° angle. I soon got over that, but it wasn’t the best of starts.

  The real issue for me was scanning the instruments and maintaining control because I was a bit rough with the aircraft. Initially, I wasn’t a talented pilot; I had to work at it. I didn’t have finesse, so I was quite ‘agricultural’. That’s a description of my flying used by many instructors in debriefing. ‘Frenchie passed, albeit being a bit agricultural with the aircraft.’ But as we say, a kill’s a kill, and I completed the course successfully.

  You might think that having concluded advanced flying training at 705 Squadron the RAF would now recognise me as a pilot – but no. Having learned to fly the Squirrel – a ‘basic’ four-seater helicopter – the next rung up the ladder was something more complex: the Griffin HT1, a military version of the Bell Textron 412EP. It’s twin-engined, has a cruising speed of 120 knots (138mph) and an endurance of three hours, so it’s an altogether different beast and massively more capable than what we’d been used to. As well as being multi-engined, the Griffin is also multi-crewed, meaning that we’d be introduced to the concept of Crew Resource Management (CRM) – basically, learning to work as part of a crew.