Sweating the Metal Read online

  Over the next thirty-four weeks, we acquired a whole range of new skills such as underslung-load carrying, flying using night-vision goggles, procedural instrument flying, formation flying, low-flying navigation and an introduction to tactical employment, which included flying operations from confined areas. It even encompassed a short Search and Rescue (SAR) procedures course, which included elements of mountain flying and maritime rescue winching.

  I remember when I first approached the Griffin, thinking: ‘This is the Daddy!’ It made the Squirrel look like a tadpole in comparison. The cockpit felt massive, with lots more instruments, levers and switches, but what really stood out was the collective. In the Squirrel, it’s literally the shape and thickness of your average handbrake lever in a car. In the Griffin, it’s huge, with a vast array of buttons. At first I’d no idea what they all did, but it looked dead cool to me. After my familiarisation flight, I was walking around with a huge grin on my face, born of knowing that I’d just flown a ‘proper’ aircraft. With its looks and profile redolent of the classic Huey, I felt just liked I’d flown in Vietnam.

  One of the biggest learning curves for me was flying on night-vision goggles (NVGs). We went back to Henlow for a course on the physiological aspects of this, but what really surprised me was just how quickly you lost your sense of depth perception. You’re immersed in a bizarre, eerie world on NVG; everything has an ethereal green hue. It takes some getting used to. I was night flying with my instructor – a brilliant guy called Tony McGregor, who had an astonishing fifteen thousand flying hours under his belt – and as I went into the approach, he said, ‘Frenchie, do you think we could hold a hover just over the one spot?’ Because of the way NVGs limit your depth perception, I’d been gradually edging ever closer to some trees.

  The thing that stands out most for me on the Griffin occurred while I was at RAF Valley doing the SAR element of the course. You start doing some dry-winching over what’s called the golf course at RAF valley – picking up oil drums from the ground. When you’ve got that, you move on to picking them up from water. And then, when the crewman believes that you’re capable of pulling him out of the water, you winch him down into it, he releases, and then you fly a short circuit and winch him up again. To complete that element of the course, you winch the crewman on to a boat.

  I was flying with my instructor and was into a hover slightly off the stern of a P2000 Royal Navy training vessel. I was pretty tense because I had the crewman at the end of a wire suspended beneath the aircraft and I was squeezing the cyclic so hard I was worried I’d pop all the buttons off the end!

  It’s a really difficult manoeuvre. You’re flying into wind, the boat is rolling and listing on the waves somewhere beneath you, and you’ve got a man on what is effectively a very long pendulum swinging underneath the aircraft. Everything seemed fine; I had a good visual on the boat, and I thought the crewman had landed on. The intercom had gone quiet and I remember looking down and there was the crewman sprawled face-down on the zodiac at the back of the boat. He wasn’t moving. My heart sank, my stomach flipped and I thought, ‘Shit, I’ve killed him!’

  I was in the hover above the boat but the intercom was dead quiet. I was sat there thinking, ‘Well they must be able to see it too, but what the fuck do I say? How do I explain this one? I haven’t got my wings and I’ve killed a crewman.’ I looked over at my instructor and his mouth was open but his stomach was heaving. He hadn’t got the mike keyed though, so it took me a second or two to realise he was belly laughing. The fuckers had planned this all along! They all had a good laugh at my expense.

  It felt like everything finally came together for me at 60 Sqn; the instruction seemed better somehow, but I think it was also that we were treated like adults. We’d left the basic training behind, we’d evolved, and it felt like we were recognised for that. I only failed one sortie in the whole thirty-four weeks and that was due to no more than me having an off day – I couldn’t have found my own arse that day! I re-did it the following morning and got a very good pass, and then took the nav test, technical exercises and the final flying test all in my stride. I landed at the end of the three-hour final handling sortie that marked the end of the course, and my instructor looked at me and said, ‘Congratulations mate. You’ve got your wings.’

  Getting your wings in the RAF is a huge event, but somehow it can feel like a bit of an anticlimax. Bear in mind that I’d started at RAF Cranwell in August 2000 and it was now May 2003; it felt like I’d been working for most of my adult life to get to this point. Given all that had happened, the ups and downs, I’m not sure I could quite believe that I’d done it. Finally, after everything, I was a pilot.

  Graduation is a big affair, with a formal lunch and a party later in the evening, but on that morning you also find out what you’ll be flying. For me, the news was the best I could have hoped for – Chinooks! My best mate Philip and his wife came over from France, as did Mum and Dad, and everyone dressed up to the nines for the ceremony.

  We’re all stood to attention in our number one uniforms and then when your name is called, you march up to the front, halt smartly, and the reviewing officer – a General of at least two-star rank – pins your wings to your chest and shakes your hand. It’s immense, actually, and when it happens you feel the enormity of the achievement wash over you. There were my parents looking at me with pride, my mate Philip smiling, and suddenly the realisation hit me. Everything I’d done, the lifelong desire to fly, the hard work, the disappointment… it all led to this point, the culmination and realisation of a dream. Finally, I could call myself a pilot.

  Next stop: RAF Odiham and the Operational Conversion Flight (OCF), where I’d learn to fly the Chinook and become combat ready. First though, there was two months’ leave to look forward to…

  3

  THE BEAUTY OF THE BEAST

  RAF Odiham, near Basingstoke in the leafy Hampshire countryside, is home to the Royal Air Force’s three Chinook Squadrons: 7, 18 (B) and 27 Squadron. As well as being an operational unit, 18 (B) Squadron is also the training flight where pilots and crewmen learn to operate the Chinook.

  There’s been an airfield at Odiham since 1925, but it became RAF Odiham on October 18th 1937 when it was officially opened by Field Marshal (then General) Erhard Milch, Chief of Staff of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Apparently, Milch was so impressed with what he saw that he is reputed to have told Hitler, ‘When we conquer England, Odiham will be my Air Headquarters,’ and ordered his pilots not to bomb it. Whether or not this story is true, the fact remains that RAF Odiham wasn’t bombed during the war.

  I drove through the gates of RAF Odiham to join the OCF in July 2003, and it’s been my home base ever since. This was a new world for me, a new start, and I wanted to set off on the right foot because until you’re combat ready, you can still lose your wings. Although they’d been tailored on to my uniform, metaphorically speaking, they were Velcroed on.

  The OCF was all about operating the aircraft as opposed to simply ‘flying’ it, and there’s a crucial difference between the two terms. The fact that I could fly was a given now, so the OCF took things to another level entirely. It’s where you learn how to really get the best out of the Chinook. Take the Squirrel: all it can do is move people. The Chinook, on the other hand, is a tool: with it you can influence combat, resupply troops and bases, evacuate wounded soldiers, move them for assaults, move heavy loads… there’s just so much it can do.

  When I first walked out to the aircraft, I was a well of excitement; I don’t think I’d felt anything similar since I was six and it was the run-up to Christmas. I simply had to get into that aircraft. I couldn’t wait to start it up and fly it. Outside I was the cool professional, an officer of the RAF and a competent pilot. That’s what the world saw. Inside, though, a ten-year-old kid was dancing for Harry, England and St George.

  I looked up to the rotor head and it was about twenty feet above me… twenty feet! On the Griffin, it was three feet. It took four minutes
just to walk around the bloody thing. And I was thinking, ‘This is a war machine; a real man’s aircraft.’ It looked like pure muscle and power. And it had this funny paradoxical charm – it was ugly but still beautiful. Its ugliness somehow highlighted and enhanced its beauty. It’s a beast, yet it’s so very graceful when airborne. I’ll never forget my first flight at the controls and the smell on walking into the cockpit, an evocative mixture of oil, hydraulic fluid and sweat. It’s strangely compelling and somehow brilliant. Every Chinook smells the same.

  Your frame of reference is all based on increments; from the single engine of the Squirrel to the twin engines and complexity of the Griffin. This, though, rewrote the rule book and threw the old one out. It was Arsenal or Manchester United against a Sunday League pub team: the Chinook was in another division. Take off in the Squirrel and you’re using 95% or more of available torque. In the Chinook, I couldn’t believe that by only moving my arm by three inches I was lifting sixteen tonnes of metal and only using 50% of the available power. It had more of everything: six blades, six fuel tanks, five gearboxes, two rotor heads and two engines. It was ridiculous, and it hinted at capabilities that I had only dreamed of.

  It’s huge – 99ft from end to end. It’s not a contemporary aircraft; it was designed and built by Boeing in 1962, so it saw service throughout the Vietnam War. Despite this, because there’s nothing more up-to-date out there to compare it with, it doesn’t look dated. The real beauty is its available, usable space inside the cabin, and it’s this that is the raison d’être behind the aircraft’s design. The rear is dominated by a massive hydraulic ramp, which means fast loading or unloading of whatever is in the cabin – vehicles, freight or troops (up to fifty-five of them). A tail rotor would not only hinder loading and unloading, but it would divert power from the engines and make the aircraft more difficult to manoeuvre. As it is, 100% of the power is available for lift.

  Everything I’d flown up until this point had a tail rotor, but not this. Instead, it had two discs driven by two engines combined in one huge mother of a transmission. It’s called combining transmission. It splits the 3,750 horses generated by each of the two Textron Lycoming T55-L712F turbine jet engines via sync shafts to the forward and aft heads. If one engine fails, the other can drive both rotors. In each head, there’s a gear that transfers the rotation from the longitudinal plane into the vertical plane.

  There are three blades on each rotor, each one 3ft wide and 30ft long. At rest, they bow groundwards and there’s an air of tranquillity about them. When turning though, they spin at 225rpm – almost four times a second – and make no mistake: stray too close during the last stages of a shutdown and they’ll take your head off. The really stunning thing is that the blades on each disc intermesh – one blade will go then the other, then the other. They’re on the same level and they’re synchronised via a series of linked shafts that render it mechanically impossible for the blades to hit each other. It’s absolutely amazing when you think about it. The two discs rotate in opposite directions so the torque is cancelled out, which is why there’s no tail rotor. It also means you don’t use the pedals to counter the side-to-side movement (or ‘yaw’); they’re really only used in the hover – they turn the fuselage around a central axis.

  The Chinook is massively flexible, so there are lots of options for control. The aircraft is fitted with three hooks – one with hydraulic release and two with electrical release – so the possibilities for picking up underslung loads are tripled: there are so many permutations. It has a maximum permitted take-off weight of over twenty-four tonnes, so it can carry a pretty hefty payload – including another Chinook.

  You look at it and you’d imagine it handles like a Bedford truck, but it’s more like one of those crazy monster trucks that they use for the Paris–Dakar rally. It’s an exceptionally easy aircraft to fly – you almost think what you want it to do and it responds, so you only need the subtlest of touches on the control surfaces. Its incredible manoeuvrability and responsiveness belie its size, so you’d never think you have 60ft of cabin behind you; it feels like it stops right behind your arse. Its acceleration is phenomenal for a helicopter. It cruises at around 140 knots but you can squeeze up to 160 (185mph) out of it in certain conditions, although it’s incredibly noisy. Cleverly, those engineers at Boeing have carefully managed to design it so that most of the sound is in the cab rather than outside; that’s why we issue ear plugs to all our pax (passengers).

  It can perform loads of manoeuvres that other helicopters just aren’t capable of, so it’s a dream machine to fly tactically. If you make an approach and have to turn into the wind, you can turn through 180° in around fifty metres – that’s about half the length of a football pitch, and you’re flying at around 120 knots. No other helicopter in the world can do that. You can use its bulk to assist you when stopping tactically – basically, fly in on the approach carrying a lot of speed, but scrub it off quickly by stepping the arse out as you flare, much the same way as skiers do parallel turns. You push the aircraft’s tail out one way and then turn it the other way.

  In the same way that most modern cars need power-assisted steering and brakes, so the Chinook needs hydraulic assistance to power the flying controls. At sixteen tonnes even without any cargo, it’s a leviathan; one of the biggest helicopters in the world. To illustrate the importance of the hydraulic systems on the Chinook, there is built-in redundancy – two systems run in tandem in case one fails, and there’s a further back-up system in the unlikely event that both of them break, leak or otherwise fail. They’ve really thought of everything. It’s a truly brilliant aircraft.

  The OCF is eight months long, and as with all the other flying courses, you spend a month at ground school followed by seven months of flying. Six hours was all it took for me to solo, which illustrates how second nature the flying side of things had become. Muscle memory kicks in, so it’s a bit like doing a car journey on a route you’re very familiar with, where you get home and can’t remember driving along a certain road. Almost the entire course is about learning to operate the aircraft and work as part of a four-man crew. In the cockpit, you and your co-pilot sit in armoured seats, with armoured panels and an armoured floor. In the back, you have two loadmasters, known colloquially as ‘crewmen’, and they are essentially responsible for running the aircraft.

  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.