Library Reference Number: 122
Aircraft Recognition
QRA was our bread and butter. Aware that we might only get a fleeting glimpse of our potential foe, we were very hot on aircraft recognition. Every Friday afternoon, the squadrons would hang up their jets, pile into the largest briefing room for ground training and do some aircraft recognition.
To add some incentive, HQ 11 Group set up an annual test whereby crews would be shown a series of slides with a one second exposure. It wasn't sufficient just to report a Bear or a Badger; for these high probability targets, we had to quote the mark. I vaguely recall that there were a few ships thrown in for good measure. Although HQ 11 Group didn't know much about ships, there were several Royal Navy exchange crews who did.
I could never understand why we were only allowed a one second exposure of our target'. If it was visible, surely it would be visible for longer than one second? One day whilst flying off Cyprus, I looked down through a hole in the cloud and saw a Russian warship. My sighting lasted all of one second! I knew it was Russian because it had red decking. Didn't all Russian warships have red desks? As to what it was, I haven't a clue!
Air Defence crews spent ages devising ways of recognising all the different marks of Bears, Badgers, Bison, Blinders and the likes. Bear Delta, for example, D for dimples. Bear Foxtrot, F for F ing' big boots (undercarriage nacelles). The aircraft recognition experts on the squadron had an answer for everything!
Just in case we got stage fright on the night, we carried an aircraft recognition booklet when on QRA which depicted every known type and mark of aircraft and described their distinguishing features.
At this stage in my career, I had over 1000 hours on Air Defence duties and bags of intercepts under my belt. What could possibly go wrong?
It was an awful week. It started with a period of duty on QRA but my mouth was hurting. After weeks of pain, I went to the dentist mid-week and had a wisdom tooth removed. I was grounded for a couple of days by the medics but there was a lot of activity going on at work so I found myself doing lots of time in the Ops room as the squadron duty authorising officer.
Towards the end of the week, QRA activity started building up such that both the QRA jets were getting airborne and crews were running out of duty time. The spare QRA crew was called in and the QRA crew schedule was being continually updated. There were strict duty hours for flying crews and whilst it messed up people's private lives, we had no option but to make changes at relatively short notice and give people the stand-downs which they were due. We were quickly running out of operational crews so around Friday lunchtime, I reckoned that I was fit enough to fly and found myself taking over the spare QRA aircraft with new pilot Simon Dyde. Didn't these Russians know what a weekend was?
A beer call was to take place in the crew room after work that day so we were hoping nothing was going to happen. --- Wrong!
We were scrambled in the early afternoon and roared north to intercept two Bears. I think it was Simon's first live scramble. Having seen so many Bear Deltas and Foxtrots, it didn't require the brains of an archbishop to identify the two aircraft as Bear Foxtrots and I certainly didn't need to refer to the recognition guide. I confidently transmitted the intercept of two Bear Foxtrots and passed their tail numbers. With luck, we'd make it back to base before the beer ran out.
Safely back in the crewroom with a beer in hand, I was talking with one of the weapons instructors, an older and wiser aviator than I when he told me that the two Russian aircraft had been intercepted by USAF F4s from Keflavik in Iceland and reported them as Bear Deltas. Could they have been wrong?
'No, I said, they were Bear Deltas. They had the Big Bulge radar, smaller boots, dimples etc. etc..'
'But you reported them as Bear Foxtrots,' he replied. 'Did I?' I cursed; so I had!
More rushing around was required to amend the mission report which I had recently submitted.
The worst aspect of this incident was dealing with my own sanity. I could reel off all the differences between the two types of Bear both before and after the mission. There had been no silly one-second glance at these beasts, we had followed them for several miles! Simon, being new to the aircraft and the unit, had deferred to my supposedly greater knowledge and experience although he said afterwards that he thought they were Deltas.
So what went wrong?
In the quiet of my own home later on, I started working out what I'd done that week and the results shocked me. I had been wondering if wisdom teeth really were associated with wisdom for the one that was taken out earlier that week was the third to be tugged from my mouth. Perhaps some of my brain had gone with it?
When I worked out my weekly duty hours though, the number of hours worked came something close to 80!
Ouch! Feel free to draw your own conclusions!