1983 - 1992
RAF St. Mawgan - Nimrod Line Flight
On September 19th 1983, I arrived at St. Mawgan to take up my new job as Flight Sergeant in charge of ‘A’ Shift on Nimrod Line Flight.
I will try to explain the shift pattern adopted by Nimrod Line Flight (NLF). There was a day shift, consisting of a Flight Lieutenant in charge and all the individual Trade Managers and the senior Crew Chief. There were three shifts and each shift was split into two. Each shift had a First tourist shift officer nominally in charge with a Flight Sergeant as number two and a Chief Technician Shift Controller. In addition were a number of Crew Chiefs who looked after individual aircraft and all of their paperwork. When the shift split, the Officer covered one half with the Shift Controller and the Flight Sergeant the other. There was a Day shift from 08.00 to 17.00, an Evening Shift from 17.00 to 23.59 and a Night Shift from 23.59 to 0800. The Day and Evening shifts consisted of the whole shift and the Night Shift was a half shift. The evening shift, as a whole, only worked from Monday to Thursday. On Friday, half of the shift came in and stayed at work until 08.00 on Monday morning and covered whatever happened over the weekend. The other half of that shift then covered the Night shift on the following week for four nights. In theory, we had one week in six off, however in practice we had regular exercises and everyone came into work anyway. Nevertheless, morale was extremely high. No sooner had I carried out my arrival procedure than I found myself with a week off, which was very convenient and I drove home.
Once I got the idea of how things worked and learned something about the aircraft, I really enjoyed my time on NLF. I had a super bunch on ‘A’ Shift who liked a good party in addition to being good workers. I should mention here that ‘partying’ did have one very sad result. We had been in the habit of having a Sunday get-together in one another’s houses for a few drinks. The idea was that one of every couple would not have any alcohol and was therefore fit to drive. After one of these parties in 1987, one of the lads left and was killed in a car accident when his Triumph Spitfire collided with a Range Rover. He was married but that weekend his wife was away visiting relatives. I do not know whether alcohol was a contributory factor to the accident but there was an immediate stop to the Sunday parties!
One of the main problems involved exercises, which seemed to come around with startling regularity. The powers that be seemed to change the system every time that we had a change of OC Engineering Wing or OC Nimrod Engineering Squadron; on one occasion we found ourselves working 16 hours and then trying to get home to get some sleep. This was often impossible because of ‘Air Raids’ or whatever so we were stuck where we were until the next shift time came around.
Detachments
For most of the time we worked hard but enjoyed it. There were benefits in detachments overseas to look forward to and I was lucky enough to go on three of these and unlucky enough to go on two others which occurred as a result of the First Gulf War.
Hawaii
My first detachment was in 1986 to Hawaii and I could not believe my luck. Somehow we were tasked to take two aircraft to the USN Base at Barber’s Point to take part in Exercise RIMPAC. This was an exercise involving countries surrounding the Pacific Ocean so quite how we got involved is anyone’s guess. Anyway, most of us flew out in a Vickers VC10 aircraft and I finally believed that I was going to get there when we landed.
We settled in to our accommodation, which, unfortunately was on the Base itself; I say unfortunately because this meant that our allowances were only $10 a day, with which we had to feed ourselves. The detachment was for four weeks but after three I was ready to come home; in the meantime I had played a little golf and explored most of the island of Oahu, including Waikiki Beach, Hanauma Bay, the Arizona Memorial and USS Bowfin.
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| USS Bowfin |
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| Arizona Memorial |
With regard to the photographs, the USS Arizona Memorial commemorates all those killed on the attack on Pearl Harbour on 7th December 1941; 1,177 Sailors and Marines died on the Arizona itself and of those, this site marks the final resting place for 1,102 of them. U.S.S Bowfin is a Second World War submarine which can be visited with the use of audio guides. Hanauma Bay is a favourite swimming beach. I tried snorkelling here for the only time in my life. The fish could be fed by hand.
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| Hanauma Bay |
As far as work was concerned, apart from the fact that most of our flying seemed to take place in the middle of the night, it wasn’t too strenuous. We had the usual crop of faults, one of which caused a bit of a problem. We had a radar fault that involved replacing a very heavy component, usually removed with the use of a hoist fixed on the side of the aircraft fuselage. When we went to find this hoist, it was discovered that we didn’t have one. We borrowed an American truck with a powered tailgate. This we reversed very carefully until it was just about touching the aircraft fuselage with the tailgate at the correct height and then slid the equipment out on its rails onto the tailgate. We fitted the replacement item using the reverse procedure. When it was done we all breathed a sigh of relief, because it would have been so easy to damage, or even hole, the fuselage.
On another occasion, I arrived into work before any of the Crew Chiefs. I was met by an agitated American who wanted me to immediately move one of our aircraft because they had a VIP arriving on an aircraft which could only be accommodated on our dispersal. Our aircraft was fully fuelled with about 85,000 lbs and the limit for towing was 50,000 lbs except in exceptional circumstances. This was to protect the aircraft nose undercarriage. When I asked for a defuel bowser and told our American cousin that it would take about two hours before it could be towed, he nearly had an apoplectic fit. In the end I made the decision to tow it overweight and found someone to operate the brakes. I then had a long conversation with the tug driver explaining the problems and ensuring that he knew he was to go at minimum speed with wide turns on any corners. About three quarters of the way through the towing procedure, one of the Crew Chiefs arrived and took over responsibility. When he came in after completing the move he came in and complained that I hadn’t told him that the aircraft was overweight! Oh well I can’t remember everything.
The only other thing that was memorable did not actually involve us, but so nearly could have, was the crash of an American helicopter on the dispersal next to ours. I was off shift at the time but one of our Sergeants was one of the first on the scene, helping to get the crew out of the wreckage.
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| 1986 - US Naval Air Station Barber's Point |
Florida
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| Nimrods at Homestead AFB |
Key West was an interesting place but ‘The Southernmost Point on Continental USA’ was pretty scruffy as can be seen in the photo.
R.A.F. Laarbruch, Germany
One Friday night in September 1990, I received an urgent call to get myself to St. Mawgan. When I arrived I found that I and three other electricians were to be detached immediately to RAF Laarbruch to prepare a fleet of Tornado aircraft for Operation Granby, Gulf War 1. The fact that I was a Flight Sergeant with no experience of working on Tornado for over seven years made not the slightest difference because I had the correct Tornado qualification on my records. We were given 24 hours to pack up ready to go and approximately 24 hours after that I found myself, with 23 other electricians in a hangar at Laarbruch being briefed on the task that was before us. There was no accommodation on base for the SNCOs and so we were sent downtown to a local hostelry. The junior ranks were accommodated all over the place on the base and some of the accommodation was not suitable considering that we were going to work 12 hour shifts seven days a week. I spent some time liaising with the Station Warrant Officer and his staff trying to get suitable accommodation and, for the most part succeeded. As far as the work was concerned, the SNCO in charge of the electricians in the hangar was overworked trying to organise shift patterns as well as supervising all the modifications that were taking place. I introduced myself to the hangar Flight Sergeant and suggested that I take over all of the management aspects of shifts etc. and let the Chief concentrate on the aircraft. This proved to be a good decision and I managed to keep most of the workers happy for most of the time. A shift pattern was organised that allowed a certain amount of time off and made sure that no-one was on permanent night shift. I even managed to get a few rounds of golf in on the Station Golf Course. The whole task lasted about a month and we were then released back to our own units. At Annex C, Certificate 26 will be found the letter of thanks to St. Mawgan from Laarbruch’s Station Commander.
R.A.F. Akrotiri, Cyprus
As the first Gulf War started, I was detached to Akrotiri with two Nimrods; they carried out surveillance flights over the Eastern Mediterranean. It wasn’t a specially arduous detachment for us because the Iraqis did not have anything that could get anywhere near Cyprus. I think that some Scud missiles were launched in our direction, but they didn’t have the range. In all I spent about 5 weeks in Cyprus and then was replaced about two days before the war ended.
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| Eastern Mediterranean Nimrod dropping flares |
In 1991 I was awarded an AOC 18 Group’s Commendation for services during Operation Granby. It is unclear why I should have been singled out but good to be recognised.
In 1992 we were told that the Nimrod Squadrons were to be located entirely at RAF Kinloss. I was now within my last 4 years of service and therefore had the option to choose my last posting. This was supposed to be so that personnel could get themselves settled in an area of their choice and start planning for the rest of their life. When I applied to stay at St. Mawgan, I was given two choices of posting, which illustrated the problems in my trade and rank. The options were RAF Valley, Anglesey, approximately 370 miles and RAF Odiham, Hampshire, a distance of approximately 215 miles. Obviously Odiham was a much better option but still not really in the spirit of Last Tours.
It was known that St. Mawgan was to become the headquarters for the RAF’s Search and Rescue Fleet of helicopters and as such there were to be some changes in the way Engineering Records and Control were staffed. One of these posts was for a Flight Sergeant, but the trade had been set at either Airframe or Engine Fitter. At the time I must have had a friend in OC Engineering Wing because, after a good deal of negotiating, I got the job, despite being an Electrician. There was no real problem in me having the job because the post of any Flight Sergeant in the aircraft trades was one of management.
My last photo is of a souvenir Penguin produced to celebrate the demise of NLF whose logo always involved Penguins with the motto ‘All Flap, No Fly’.
And so the end of an era and off I go to pastures newish.
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