Flying the Buccaneer & Tornado | Jon Parker (Part 1 In- Person)

i want to thank our sponsor avia watchers who create timepieces to seek the honor of both the aircraft and the untold story of the airmen who have dedicated themselves both in and out of the cockpit to bring these incredible machines to life they give the customer a deeper look into the shape and form of an aircraft and tell some of the incredible stories behind aviation to help drought the brand the vision is to produce watches that are functional yet enjoyable to wear which also tell a story of both man and machine make sure you head to their website at ava.com to check out all our amazing timepieces thank you and enjoy [Music] i was put in front of the television while my mum did the windows and i watched uh buccaneers bombing the torrey canyon and at the same time of course we had all the apollo uh moonshot stuff was going on as well about to be uh in 67 68 so it was the germany program and mercury and all that stuff was going on so i was really interested in it but really watching the buccaneers do the attack on the torrey canyon and little did i know that i'd end up flying the exact same airplanes 20 years later and so yeah so it was a journey by passage really for me you know it was uh inevitable that i'd end up flying the buccaneer yeah so why did you choose the raf at first rather than the navy um i wanted to be a fighter pilot and i didn't really care which force uh would have me in the first that would i'd join but i really wanted to fly the lightning so only the air force flew the lightning and so the lightning was what i wanted to uh to be able to fly before it went out of service so the air force was really the most of the attractive um options for me so can you tell us some of the aircraft you started training on i started straight to the jet provost jet propeller smart three at lincoln news and it was a mixed course some of the half of the course had done university air squadron and so they'd done the course already but on the bulldog and the rest of us were all council house kids and uh we went straight without any degrees or anything and so when we first got there we were the runts of the litter we were scoring all the low marks but we were working really hard not to so at some point of course you start doing things that the other team hadn't experienced and now it's in a level playing field and we're now working really hard and fast and uh and so we were able to catch up so we had a lot of people go fast jets from our course i think they were 18 and 15 went fast yet something like that so it was you know a very um successful course in that regard then you got selected to obviously fly the book in here how did you feel about this uh distraught i'd volunteered to go to the lightning the last lightning course was a course ahead of me at broady so i said well they really don't want to fly it so can i go and they said no you'll go where you told and i thought okay well i'd like the harrier then if that's the case and then it doesn't matter where you want to go the air force will put you where it thinks you need to go and so i ended up getting posted to the buccaneer with another two guys off my course which was unheard of normally it was one place per course and we had three um but it was good because we were pretty close friends anyway and so we went on the disastrous journey together but once we flew it we thought hang on there's something about this airplane it's a monster and below 300 knots it was horrible but you know one knot above 300 knots different just one knot just one knot i mean you were 300 knots and it just seemed to click into this amazing machine that was super fast super stable super low and you know we all love low flying and nobody's ever flown under a buccaneer yeah exactly what was the role of the buccaneer when you joined uh it was nuclear strike in terms of maritime so remember it was the cold war and we didn't really want to start throwing nukes around unless we really had to and so it was seen that a good option to dissuade somebody from carrying on with what they're doing was to nuke them at sea so nuclear strike maritime nuclear strike was the main role but at the same time uh the russians had built a marvelous cruiser called the kirov class and so the squadron i went to was 208 and it flew the mark ii buccaneer b model with all the inertial navigation systems which were very new at the time um so that we could support the sea eagle missile which was an amazing missile how it went out of service i don't know an island nation without an ability to sink ships from the air it's crazy isn't it it's uh it's odd so but anyway that's that's the decision that was made but we flew six ships with four missiles per airplane so 24 missiles and we would regularly get them within 10 seconds over the target from 90 degree angles fired from 55 miles out yeah absolutely it is so what was it like what the strengths and weaknesses would you say of the aircraft age and the airframe was really um starting to get too tired for what it was aiming to achieve a fast jet that's limited on its number of pulls of 4g was a limiting factor although i did manage to pull one past 9g once avoiding the ground so it could do it if it wanted to broken more when you've gone back oh yeah yeah yeah yeah totally um but um and that was in the gilroy bombing competition with uh fat boy davis in the back and uh we had some sort of event as we were doing a steep dive well it's a shallow dive it looks deep to me because it went really steep uh and so i backstop the story because in the early days of the buccaneer fitting conformal wing tanks meant it was a little bit dodgy firing off the catapult so the beauty of the aeroplane was that it was so strong and we decided that we would use the conformal wing tanks because we weren't being punched off the front of aircraft carriers anymore so we'd be able to use those fuel tanks but what it gave us was a g-tug so if you pull too much g it would add another three all on its own all of a sudden when i went to pull 9g to avoid the ground those wing tanks gave me extra and that's what stopped us from hitting the ground wow so had we not had the conformals i wouldn't have been here today neither would fat boy that's for certain you can say so how did you find working with a navigator fantastic um most of my flying career was spent you know in two c aeroplanes and it's really true that the sum of the parts is greater than the individual constituents and of course you had to work hard at getting that crew cooperation going but we were selected for the for that reason so we were able to um getting on with people in a cockpit is an art form it's not easy and it's a um a perishable skill so you have to practice it um but when a crew is really clicking then there's nothing you can't achieve and or solve remember it's the problem solving that's the the difficult bit and you have to maintain the day job you have to keep the aircraft doing it what it's doing at the moment and add that level of um decision making and leadership throughout and it can be the pilot or it could be the navigator that takes over that part of the the leadership role you know right i've got the picture this is what we're doing okay fine i'll get that let's do that what squadrons were you based with on the uh just 208 um so i got retoured to the buccaneer actually i did the first tour and then that tour was elongated by another year and a half so i was very lucky i thought too it was a fantastic squadron and i was lucky enough to serve on it again when i was a hawk weapons instructor um i was a flight commander on 208 when it flew the hawker valley so i had in effect three tours on not quite three tours because the the bit on 208 was very short-lived i was then sent to 74 squadron at valley um on the other side of the runway again for only six months and then to 19 squadron which was the central flying school squadron so you probably have loads but can you share maybe a memorable story from your time on the buccaneer we had a squadron exchange with the canadians at barden solingen and they came over to fly with us at lossymouth and one of the things that we found was that we had to go some distance away to be able to attack ships so the f-18 that they were flying didn't have quite the range to get all the way to the ships that we were attacking so we did tactics against trawlers and merchantmen that were coming around the top of scotland rather than as far as we'd normally go which is halfway to iceland that would be our normal hunting grounds but on this occasion to give them the chance we would only go half as far and they had found that because the buccaneer is so fast as soon as we get any sort of rackets from an f-18 fighter we would all just disperse so a six ship would just detonate and we'd all go to the target a different way but we'd all arrive at the same point in space at the same time which was really weird but we had the best navigators in the world certainly on the on the buccaneer and so they could get us all back together again just in time to pull up for the attack if it was a laser guided bomb attack or if it was seagull missiles we'd all arrive and fire our missiles and still achieve what we called salvo compression over the target now the f-18s their job was to stop us and these canadian pilots had come from germany we'd taken them on plenty of boozy whiskey trails and all the other things that we do with visitors up in scotland but really they wanted to get in amongst the the buccaneers on the very last day we were putting up a four ship and it was led by a really great pilot from the buccaneer guy called john tate he was a qy and i was leading the back pair as it happened so i was the number three in this case so deputy lead for him and we're going down the runway and we're about 30 seconds behind so the lead pair just get gets airborne and straight away john calls duck and that means get low as you can get as low and i'm thinking i'm on the runway here the only way i can get lower is by bringing the gear up and that's then going to get a bit noisy so i don't want to do that so as soon as we get airborne we just stay pretty much level and go across the golf course really really low and ahead of me i can see uh john and his dash too have widened uh to get some cross support for each other and so i do the same with my pair at the back now remember we've got very very low with quite long wings so the wingtips are really really low at this point and so we get into what we call defensive card and we race out over the sea and it's then that i get rackets from an f-18 so somebody's trying to shoot me uh but we're so low and we're in formation and it's almost on the beam anyway and then we lose them they both drop off both of the uh the fighters that were against us and we never saw them again that was it that was the end of uh of the day for them and then when we got to the debrief we were all a bit concerned you know why did you choose to do that that was stupid you know why don't you go out into the area and get some flying done and the answer was well we've done that all week and we didn't get to shoot you so we thought the only way we could is when you were most vulnerable and then we couldn't and then the the flight lead said and i came into the fight looking for you guys and i got a sniff of you on the radar i looked down and there you were all four of you hoovering along the top of the water leaving marks on the water so i came through the flight going i took my hands off the controls and all i did was clap and that was the last time we saw the uh the f-18s from the canadians that way and that's that was a typical sort of story for for the time to be honest we used to fly in some really strong winds as well and i remember where the helicopter couldn't go flying because it was too windy for them to spread their rotors but and they were saying to us like if you guys eject while you're out over the sea we're not coming for you and uh oh well what a great story there we are then you moved on to the tornado how did you feel about this um it would have been great i mean we were looking to take the tactics that we'd established in the buccaneer over to the tornado the tornado was a spaceship i mean an amazing airplane great pedigree great fighting airplane great bomber but it couldn't carry quite as much quite as far um i'm sure there'll be tornado people who say yes we can yes we can yes we could and that isn't true at all i mean the tornado could only carry two missiles we could carry four and we could fly up to forty thousand feet whereas the tornado with two seagulls on them two big hindenbergs could probably get to 17 to 20 000 feet therefore not get as far so half the load probably two-thirds of the distance not really a maritime strike platform for the siegel missile not a matched platform however what it really did bring was an amazing bomber um with amazing kit i mean it both aircraft both the buccaneer and the tornado both joined as the best in their class and left best in their class in the world so the best maritime strike attack aircraft ever was the buccaneer i know a6 pilots might argue with that but i think it's fair to say that whenever we joined up with those guys there was a mutual respect but the buccaneer was amazing um but the tornado was the best bomber in its class by far and i love flying the tornado tornado was a spaceship um but it wasn't quite the classic that the buccaneer was and it never quite felt that you could fly it quite so low but you could fly very low in a tornado yeah so how did you get used to the wing sweep um well the wings buzz if you forget it so that was always helpful for me the thing that was really hard for me was always to maneuver use the maneuver flaps because you'd go into a turn and you'd have to drop your thumb on your on the throttles on your left thumb and you'd have to remember every time you turned you pushed your thumb down and the maneuver flaps would come out actually there's slats and you'd start the turn and then when you rolled out you'd have to bring them up otherwise you're going to be using fuel and you know you'd be um and if you were running away you'd put the display wing in at 63 or 67 depending on what size fuel tanks you had and off you'd go um but i always felt that when the aircraft had the wings fully back there was a little bit of a nod the nose would go up and down a little bit a bit of a fugoid i think they're called um which is always a bit disconcerting when you're trying to get really really low but you still could probably not as comfortably as the buck of course but uh how long did you spend on the tornado um nearly four years just over four years in fact um yeah on 27 and 12 squadron so i did the attack game on uh 27 did operation dural twice an operation warden with 12 squadron actually operation warden um and we had a lot of experience from doing that and did tlp the tactical leadership program at florence which was a really interesting one because we were in a tornado but it was a close air support um tlp so it prioritized on cars and the the tornado at the time wasn't a cast platform at all so that's where the two crew concept really comes into its own when you're doing a job that you know would max out two people um let alone one um and the airplane was always working against us for cars um but you know we learned a lot and we were able to bring back a lot of that experience and uh and it then diffused into the wider community you briefly mentioned earlier time in the hall can you tell us about that the hawk is an amazing airplane it's a little ferrari it really is i've heard that all the time every time i speak about the hawktale pilot i love it it was um it will it will become in later years a an icon of its time um people talk about the spitfire i've never flown a spitfire uh i will one day i'm sure but the uh they always say that you just think where you want to go to and the aircraft will take you there well that's the hawk i don't need to show me that i've seen that that's what the hawk does so it was a little nose pointing great fighter in fact my favorite trip in my entire career was on the qy up phase and there are eight guys on this planet that were flying hawks that day and we all think that was our best ever flight from all the different airplane types that we ever did and we called it the battle of umbungo gorge because we ended up with 30 airplanes in one valley and only we knew what was going on because we knew nothing so we were able to see everything whereas all these people with all this extra data and links and stuff it was all breaking down and so it was it was sapping their ability to think whereas we had nothing all we could do was use our mark one eyeball and we could see everything because we were as low as you like underneath uh the weather but looking up at everybody and we cleaned up so was it good up at height as well the whole yeah the wing was super in fact they used to put things on the front of the wing so the students wouldn't kill themselves in it um little toblerones to give it more buffet so the wing was super good it wasn't as good as the alpha jet from people who've flown both i think the alpha jet probably had the edge on it a little bit in terms of turning fight but if you think um something's better than you in a hawk in a turning fight then i'd like to see it yeah we could do an awful lot with the uh with the hawk especially on the qy op phase i mean with the uh we were on one occasion we went to garvey island everybody thinks that you know a hawk qi is a pembre weapons you know bombing instructor that's not quite what it's what it is at all and we were able to do all sorts of things like super elevating the gun and firing completely out of range and pushing through a five second burst nobody ever done that maybe five the gun under zero g and uh we got some amazing results you know all through mathematics that we'd learned at the air warfare center it was the start really of the hawk becoming qy up face for all of the different platforms it was a great initiative from the air warfare center and it allowed all of the tactics to permeate down to the student level before they ever got to their full frontline platform [Music] you

Channel: Aircrew Interview

Views: 35,196

Keywords: blackburn buccaneer, blackburn buccaneer documentary, buccaneer red flag, jon parker interview, raf buccaneer, buccaneer last air display, panavia tornado gr1, panavia tornado documentary, raf jets down low, john nichol gulf war, inside the cockpit tornado, tornado pilot interview, pilot interview, military pilot interview, aircrew intervew

Id: OHIU3UZxPfk

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 05 2021