Brian Carroll RAF interview. English Electric Lightning Anecdotes

hello this video is going to be of particular interest to any of you that love fighter jets particularly cold war British fighter jets and in particular the English Electric lightning I'm and recently a white and I'm a global adventure travel filmmaker follow along as I share my hard learned lessons in storytelling videography and photography [Music] I was lucky enough to make a documentary about Thunder city which is the collection of warbirds not closed that once existed in Cape Town and they hatched he at one time had for flying english electric lightning 'he's three Buccaneers and i think it was four might've even mean five four cancers and at that and they're in their heyday i made a documentary of that jet it's called thunder and lightnings and during the production of that video I interviewed Brian Carroll born in London in 1932 so I'm 45 and had a hard life well now Brian Carroll was the second-highest hours wise English Electric lightning pilot in the Royal Air Force he also worked with the Royal Saudi Air Force and he has a story to tell that is I'm fascinating but before that a short anecdote about how Brian took the controls of a lightning 20 years after he'd lost set in the cockpit so the air show where I was lucky enough to actually fly in a Buccaneer I sat in the back we went ahead of time and we witnessed Brian Carol land a lightning having not sat in a cockpit for over 20 years the amazing ability of this man now apparently Dave stock who was at the time he's now passed away he was the senior pilot at Thunder City and he would take people out for joyrides they'd come and it's been ten thousand US dollars and have half an hour in a lightning and go supersonic get this thing going get as much rest as you can before we release the brakes 600 knots as soon as possible and go set up apparently the story goes that David arrived after Brown had been taken out - and been strapped into the lightning in a place that obviously was very familiar with and long came Dave he said what have we got today and they said well his name is Brian and he's from England very nice and he said what is he done his training and they went yeah I yes they've he's definitely done his training he's well what what morning and somebody said don't you know who this guy is and apparently Dave didn't and they said it's Brian Cowell Dave knew who Brian Carroll was and he went oh and apparently he walked out in this days and he climbed in to the Lightning sat down did up his straps and said I'm not flying today I'm not flying today I'm sitting here today but I'm not flying today I don't I'm not going to fly with you if you want to fly with me go for it I'll tell you what I'll do the radio for you apparently it went something like this this was reported back by the guys who were strapping everybody in and prepping the aircraft and Dave told me afterwards that he he watched Brian fly absolutely meticulously just he just rivalled in watching this superb fly flies airplane and they landed at radar stop where I had already landed in The Buccaneer and they had they were coming up behind us and but Brian was doing the flying and I was on the ground at the time when Brian landed after 20 years landed and then had a chute failure Dave reported that this guy was he said he was come you just I think it was nothing and you watch the landing and I filmed it and as he landed the airplane the chute failed and the aircraft continued the entire length as a good turn off three-mile runway military strip and he took up the entire to slow the aircraft down slow doing what you're supposed to do touchdown short in case you have a have a have a failure with something so you've got lots of space which he did and they've reported back that after 20 years this guy was superb he said he is never sat with anybody in his life it was so smooth so accomplished and he said it was one of the highlights of his flying career then join the Air Force is a national servicemen and had the good luck to get into flying training which is really only for two years and I did rather well I found flying was a natural ability something I had no idea about and I would think granted a Permanent Commission in the area and stayed in for twenty two and a half years flying of variety of airplanes from the Harvard and which I got my wings then went on the meteors through the hunters instructed on vampires threw javelins and ultimately the lightning and that that 22 year point I was staying in the Air Force which I thought I was and I was invited by the british aircraft corporation now BAE to head up a new contract in Saudi Arabia as the chief flying instructor for the Royal Saudi Air Force and that was a job I had for 10 years in Saudi so the Lightning was really my main airplane and I've accumulated just Childre 3,000 hours of flying in the Air Force apart from normal squadron operational stuff I was finished up as the chief examiner Strike Command and I would take teams of instructors from area cold assault in Norfolk to RAF Germany where we would we were really known as the trappers they didn't like us we would examine all the pilots on the squadron both on the ground for their ground subjects and fly with all of them to make sure that their operational flying was correct and up to standard and we would write reports upon them and if they failed we would tell them so and we'd come back a week or two later and follow them again so they were always very apprehensive when we arrived I can well remember going a couple of times just for a weekend jolly and taking say an engineer across for a flight and offering pilots on either 19 or 90 to a trip and they would disappear the speed of speed of light they did not want to fly with an examiner even though it was going to be friendly and they wouldn't believe me but they notice they know you have a mark to lightning and you can fly off on your own somewhere so that looks fine I would do that so that was really my job in the Air Force at the end of the time and then as I went to Saudi to Duran and was there with the chief flying instructor with the Saudi Air Force and after being there about two months the colonel who had been caretaking the unit spoke to me for almost the first time he'd been watching me and listening and monitoring what I was doing and I had a very brief talk in his office about half an hour and he said right Brian he said the whole show is yours I'm going to react and he disappeared so I had the whole unit then for the last ten years and very briefly for the last year and a half when we were converting all the Saudis rather were converting to the f-15 they asked me if I would also run 13 squadron at the same base which was an operational squadron and I was given the honorary rank of lieutenant colonel which equated to my raf rank for that short period of time they didn't pay him any more money they just gave me the job but it was fun and I enjoy doing it and so that all finished in 1982-83 when I think back to UK and regrettably had to hang up my helmet that said I think you maybe know that we still have three lightnings in in England CAA will not allow us to fire them which is a great shame but we have to a branding thought there's two f6s that's the single seaters and we do I do fast demonstration runs therefore air shows and that fast being 150 knots with a nose will raise ready to lift off and then we have to stream the chute and toggle back then taxi back in again very frustrating and I do a similar thing at Cranfield which is the university up near Milton Keynes where we have a two seater and that too is quite good fun when we take passengers down the runway there and they come back with a smile about three foot wide thinking it's fantastic and I do briefs and don't blink because if you do you'll miss it well I mean performance of the Lightning is really quite outstanding and even by modern standards today considering the Lightning was on the drawing boards in 1947 and that's going back many many years the quantum leap from the wartime World War two and just after when the meteors and the vampires are coming in and they would do five hundred and twenty five hundred and fifty and the Lightning was a quantum leap we're now looking at something going supersonic which hadn't happened before so it was just tremendous and as I say compared to f-16s mirages and such the performance of the Lightning is still as good as anything around today okay Eurofighter is a better airplane it's gets to hide faster and in cold power whereas we need reheat for the Lightning but that said after 45 seconds from brake release the Lightning is doing 450 knots and 15 seconds later it's doing a climb of 50,000 for a minute so you're getting to 36,000 feet in about two and a half minutes still doing 0.9 or 9 miles a minute service ceiling with 65,000 feet which is to be high I did on one occasion in Saudi on an air test with little else to do see how high I could get the Lightning and I did get it to eighty seven thousand three hundred feet but it's quite dark and curvature of the earth is very very obvious at that height you can see it lower you can see it at sixty-five thousand but not quite so on not so apparent so that was quite interesting and very much on a knife edge sort of doing close to mark too and also being very close to the stalling speed because you've got indicated airspeed which is quite low that your tour speed is still around about fourteen hundred miles an hour so you're moving very fast but if you know that the indicated airspeed you're almost stalling and falling out the sky and you have to be very careful in those conditions because if you did over control it or if there was turbulence which at that height is fairly unlikely the air could in fact fall out of control and could tumble and if you did that there would be no means of recovering and it would just break up and you would die because at that time I didn't have the right equipment on to be that high so I shouldn't really have been there but I thought well why not it's a good aeroplane it's safe I'm not really too worried I don't know whether you're going to hear about a near bail out condition that we had in Saudi which might be of interest to people and I had a student airborne on what was his first trip he had not flown the lightning at all he done some simulator work he done some ground school work and this is what we used to call the instructors benefit ride so we'd put the student in the right-hand seat we would fly it from the left-hand seat and we say right now will I will now show you what this airplane can do so we would do the maximum rate takeoff climb to height go supersonic maximum rate descent we've done all of this with this chap I'd done all of this and we then down over the desert about two or three hundred feet accelerated to about 650 knots and then just took it up into a vertical climb and all was well until then and we were going through about 22,000 feet when I had a reheat fire and a reheat one warned came on and this is fairly major emergency so I obviously closed the engine down we rolled over levelled out I put out a mayday call we were about a hundred miles south okay fire one engine number one engine had a fire and there were also a reheat fire on the same engine which is further back now the earth the the danger there is that you've got a fire extinguisher for the engine you don't have one for the reheat department so this is quite a problem it could be quite a problem so you do all the drills you close the engine down you slow the aircraft down you use the fire extinguishers and then you wait for the lights to go out it has what they call a triple FD system free from fall so if the light stays on the fire is still burning if the light goes out the fire's gone out it says in small print and I'll come to that a bit later on so we put out the Mayday call I did all the drills and bear in mind my student was on his first ever trip in this airplane I looked across and we carry flip cards with all the take-off start up procedures all the emergency procedures it actually got the flip card out and was reading the emergency procedure for the problem that we had and he spoke to me and said well sir he said have we done all the drills I said yes I said but read him again and we'll do them again which we did and all was fine now he said what are we doing so now we don't panic okay so and he sat back and relaxed so we then shall have a slow recovery with a number two engine on just idle to fast idle setting and a slow glide back at 250 knots and you have to say about 10,000 feet for at least five minutes to wait for the fire to go out if it's still burning it can burn there control rods through and suddenly you're out of control and the things going to crash there's no means of landing this aeroplane without hydraulics you've got to have hydraulic control the lights went out and we continued our approach to durán doing a slightly high slightly fast straight in approach to land and all look pretty good except that by now my main flight instruments have failed for whatever reason they're just completely failed so I understand by instrument so that's that's fine you can do it on an about half a mile from touchdown I had complete failure of every instrument in the cock-block nothing worked and sorry about the noise so ever everything had failed in the cockpit I had no instruments all we were then by then we were committed we were too low there's no collection of bailing out so I just continued on just a fix heading and we landed stopped at the far end the fire crew were there we got out and to my horror the back end of the aircraft was still on fire even though the warnings had gone out and in fact I have if you're familiar with solder if you melt solder and let it drop on the ground you get a nice sort of splodge of solder well I have a disc about inch and a half across of molten lightning fuselage engraved for the aircraft seven one six and the date when the reed fire and the ring on fire on a little keychain which I keep at home but I don't want to lose it but that that was quite an experience but that's that's as close as I've ever come to maybe having to bail out and we didn't do it on that day then it was I've got to come back now really to to UK to talk about that I was based at RAF Leuchars on the 23 squadron for a number of years and from there when the Cold War was so long we would scramble off to intercept Russian bears off the Iceland ferry's gap so we get a scramble day or night any time of the day or night we're always on alert we would take off and we would then fly north and rendezvous with a tanker that was the victor tankers which had been scrambled in plenty of time and we'd stay with him for a while often using purely silent procedure we didn't want to let the Russians know we were on route we would refuel on the tanker we then break away from the refuel leave the tanker maybe 300 miles north of base and then accelerate away go and find the Bears take photographs make friendly visual signals to them or otherwise they would do the same to us they would try and take our photographs too but we were somewhat more maneuverable than the bear which as you probably know is a huge bummer on more than one occasion I would be alongside the tail taking photographs and I could see a russian photographer inside with a huge camera but a bit on a tripod setting it up and soon as you had it said I just roll over the Fen and go the other side look back in and he'd be walking back across with his tripod a camera setting it up and I rolled back the other side and I think all he ever got was a shot of my tail plane going away with the reheats burning was I got lots of photographs but we used to just carry a 35-millimeter camera and just take shots as we wanted yeah it was good stuff and we did that and I suppose the only I have one very unusual intercept one night I was scrambled off and all we always were north we expected to get north out of loose and we went to east and I was on my own my number two had failed my number two aircraft had failed it so he didn't go with me I just on my own and they sent me out east I went east forever and the Dutch coast was coming up I could see it on my radar and they finally came back said we now have a target for you crossing right to left on a northerly heading we require a positive identification no it was it was at night it was very dark extremely dark I finally rolled in about a mile or a bit less behind this aircraft it had no lights on at all which is very unusual it was just no lights the radar we had had what we called a vis ident facility which had labeled you to get in very very close on this particular mode and it would sometimes hold lock sometimes wouldn't this was pretty good a hell look right down in fact less than the minimum and I got right in behind this in fact I finished up underneath this aircraft in the dark with no lights on and I couldn't see it it was a black aircraft or appeared to be against a very black sky and I sat there for quite a long time and I called radar and said I cannot see this echo I just cannot see it it's just too dark he's got no lights and they came back and said you must identify it essential you must identify it and eventually there was just the vaguest outline of black against less black or the other way around and I said well I don't know it might be a kc-135 and as soon as I said that all the lights in the world on this airplane came on he knew that I was underneath him thank God because if it moved and would have crashed and the ground rail I said that's affirmative yes we knew what it was we just wanted to check they were testing me I guess well the system I'm not sure which and by then I was having to make a decision do I now go into Norway because I was getting low on fuel and land somewhere in Norway or do I get back to Lukas and being a kc-135 I said well could I have some fuel than he said negative not oh well as friendly it was American of course however I did have enough you and I got back back to Lukas Linda always well but that was an interesting intercept and a quite quite difficult no I didn't know no just the hunters I flew that was quite good we flew hunters we converted on the squad when hunters very first came into service so there were no two-seaters which is quite nice so we had Neville Duke the test pilot from Dunnsville and Bill Bedford you have the test pilot they came up to Lucas and we sat in the crew room where we drank coffee and they talked to the crews or the pilots about how the hunting was to fly and what you should or shouldn't do and what it was like and we read the pilots notes and we did a little little written test so that we knew the speeds and limitations and I was walked out to my aeroplane with Bill Bedford and we walked around it and we got in and he helped me strapped in and patted me on the head and said have fun and off I went and it was great it was great and I never did fly a two-seat hunter yeah so that was good fun in terms of worthwhile story yes I suppose there's at least one more from Saudi one of my students had briefed him to go off on a solo trip one day and the weather was marginal but it was okay and he wasn't just solo he'd been solo several times and he was briefed to do a particular sortie and we always worked south of Duran we never worked north of the airfield and I went off shortly after him and did an air test and I heard him in the air and he was lost he called up said I'm lost I'm lost we had facility in the lightening it out there that we could actually get a bearing on a transmission so I was doing this of a slow orbit round and asked him to transmit to try and pick up a bearing on I couldn't get one he didn't know where he was he could only see vertically down because of blowing sand he was a horizontal visibility was was poor I can't remember know exactly what it was but it wasn't very good and he was just lost and I couldn't find him and I knew where he should be and I just couldn't find him on radar ground rate I couldn't find him nobody could find him and eventually I had to land and I landed taxi back went into the crew room and I said well this I won't mention his name but I said he's on the ground somewhere he's either crashed or he's bailed out or he's landed heaven knows where and a couple of missed though the phone rang and I happened to be standing by the phone I picked it up and it was this pilot on the telephone and I said fantastic where are you he said I'm at Ft a CAF j-just do for those who don't know was the northernmost town in Saudi that the Iraq is invaded during the Gulf War it was a little little oil terminal there Japanese ran it and a little very very short 300-foot strip there are 3,000 for the strip sorry and this guy had spiraled down that he spotted a runway and as he came in to land the wind increased from maybe 10 knots to 7 0 knots straight under on me now they all believed that Allah does look after their own and I do too because there was no way he could have landed on that runway with anything less say he finished at the far end there's Tom macadam was so soft that the wheels were almost submerged the aircraft just sank into this tarmac it was that soft anyway we by now we had a c-130 airborne from Riyadh so we put we call it into dharam we loaded ground equipment and I went up with the c-130 to this little airfield to see if we could fly the airplane out so they had to jack it up put in PSP the sort of perforated steel sheeting Jack it up changed the wheels and everything I borrowed a car from the local Emir to go down the runway which was like the rocky road to Dublin it was very undulating and very soft tarmac not very long and I did some calculations and I worked out that I had I could just get enough fuel in the airplane to get back to Darin but anymore I wouldn't get able so it was you know just on a balance like that so the following morning very early account members about 7 o'clock with mother in 630 we all got out there and we had the airplane towed to the firing of the runway again on PSB matting so wouldn't sink in the Emir and all his entourage were there still about 5 foot off the wingtip and I said he ought to move them away because he's going to get quite noisy in a minute and they wouldn't move so I got started up and I said well I'm going to actually run this - full cold power on the brakes until it starts to creep it wouldn't hold forth although it was thought that the brakes would start to let it creep then gonna hit full reheat before I roll as I said I'm gonna need every inch of runway and it proved to be so because the c-130 crew is Americans were at the far end and they reckon I had well they said a foot left I think I have they lied I think I had three for the runway left when it when it finally unstuck got this machine airborne actually just infringe Kuwaiti airspace it was that close to the border and I threw a hard turn but I couldn't avoid going over and they got a bit upset but it was too bad climbed up to 36,000 feet and headed back for Darin and I was about 80 miles out from Duran when they called up and said that Darin weather had gone red and I was to divert to Bahrain and I said well I don't have to fill I can't do that they said well it's red you can't land here is the weather's is right out I said well watch me I said so I got a GC a ground controlled approach mulleted it with our onboard ILS I've had a couple of failures on the way back intimate failures but nothing critical it didn't really matter too much and anyway I got it in that was the main thing and landing taxied in and the base the station command or the base commander the Saudi he came down and he had any problem so I said no not really it's fine he said oh thanks very much and off he went and I never did get the gold watch I thought I might've got four but it was a interesting time yeah that's about me

Channel: andrewstpierre

Views: 18,922

Rating: 4.935185 out of 5

Keywords: video, videography, video creators, youtube creators, photography, English Electric Lightning, cold war jets, RAF, Brian Carroll

Id: MTm_naqT30o

Length: 27min 5sec (1625 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020