Tornado Tales | Ian Black (F3 Pilot)

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your flying suit or something and I have as I've done these interviews with you and I've become more uh accustomed to them wondered whether you know you should actually sort of set yourself in a bit of an environment but um I've been out all day doing stuff and I haven't really so I've put some models behind me of the airplanes I've flown perfect and trying to look myself reasonably presentable um and I just had a quick chat with Mike and talking about the tornado F3 that I flew I flew the F2 once and then I flew the F3 after that and I was trying to pick um out of the five years and 1200 hours I flew trying to pick um not just one story perhaps but maybe an event or a period in flying the tornado that would you know interest people um and I guess sort of going back through my logbook as I did this morning uh that the big sort of changeover was um there was a very different shift in emphasis of what we did between um the tornado F3 coming into service which was a little bit um lackluster to say the least uh and and the fall of the Berlin Wall the end of the Cold War everything sort of took on this sort of same way same day type feeling and although the type of flying that we were doing the became far more complex and far more operational as the sort of the threat from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact diminished there didn't seem to be as much of a purpose into what we were doing yet the RAF had committed to having two squads of f3s at conningsby three at Leeming and two at Lucas so that that was cast in stone and that was going to happen so there was no way they were going to change that at that time so we um we started off with the F3 in Leeming and that had two hardened shelter squadrons and one hangout Squadron so we had 11 23 and 25 and I got posted initiated 23 Squad from the lightning and I left the lightning to join the tornado F3 as it then was ocu and it was a bit like the Phantom most of you so they you know they had 26 airplanes sat out on the line letter A to Z uh you know they almost ran out of letters on the alphabet but it was it was a sausage machine but it was a very very slow sausage machine and you know one of my I guess big gripes about the RAF of that period was how um how ineffective ocu's were and you know I'm not gonna spend the uh the hour talking about that or half an hour talking about it but you know you had an awful lot of airplanes had an awful lot of ground crew an awful lot of students and at the end of the course you know you only produced maybe 10 Crews every six months or so it was really slow and it was for the Phantom and I gather it still is with the the typhoon and certainly pilot training um so I know that's something of a bit of a bug bear to me that it wasn't a very you know you'd sit for three or four days and then fly a trip and then when you're learning to find your airplane you want to be flying twice a day every day so it was a very very slow laborious process and the airplane was reasonably serviceable but you know if the radar didn't work then that mission was canned so you had to then go back and do it again and there was lots of other stuff going on in between so it wasn't a great um a great course to do but in the end we got posted to 23 Scotland that we were the nucleus of 23 Scotland as it were and again that wasn't a particularly Dynamic Squadron we moved into a brand new house site so you know the initial start of it was tedious you know we were doing things like building coffee bars and parts getting really really boring stuff and one of the sort of uh things which was very disappointing was we only had the aircraft I don't know three or four months and already they were talking about using too much fatigue and worrying about the amount of fatigue we used so our aircraft that we got were I think they were called Zed list Radars um and they were delivered all new from the factory for some reason I don't think I ever went and got a brand new one although we did go and have a visit to the factory but they didn't have Auto Wing sweep um they didn't have Auto maneuver flap and they were very very basic so they had said list radar they had an rswr that sort of worked but they had no other defensive AIDS and we sort of worked up to um getting operational on the Squadron which we did in sort of four or five months and I was out in Cyprus in the May having joined in the February I think and I got a phone call to say did I want to go to 25 Squad which was then forming on the next house site um with a guy called Mick Martin who was a really nice guy and a very very sharp operator and did they want me to go there to um just have some experience and you know I only had nine months experience on the Tornado by then and I jumped to the channel so I said yes so I didn't do very long at 23 I went to 25 and I guess I'd been there I would have to look at my log but it hadn't been there that long and again once you know said we set sort of got into this routine of going to fire and missile going to Cyprus doing exercises and and stuff like that and so looking at my logbook in August 1990 I just come back from La book doing an exercise called Mallet blow and I must have then gone to alconbury to um provide a static for an air show we're there at the weekend and life was pretty calm to be honest I remember my backseat and I you know thinking of things to do on the Saturday night it must have been on the Friday night we went to the Base Cinema and we once watched The Hunt for Red October did you know this is you know the Cold War and this is how it's going to be in the Cold War sort of getting a bit you know warm now and nothing's going to happen and then there was an actually uh an announcement you know in the middle of the thing a bit like the 1940s pathway news that um Iraq had invaded Kuwait oh well that won't affect us too much and they're not our problem but literally by the end of the film um rumors were starting to go around but the RAF were going to get involved and [Music] um things were going to change definitely so the RAF deployed 29 and fire Squad who were in rotation at Cyprus at the time and we were told that the Leeming Wing would then deploy to um dharan to replace 29 of high school so on the Monday morning you know the the usual sort of oh let's think of something to do and fly back and all that sort of stuff we literally got airborne and flew back in a straight line and I remember um the weather at Leeming even for an orbits was particularly bad and the cloud base was below turn the feet where we shouldn't normally have got in but they wanted us back so desperately that I remember getting to turn their feet and not seeing the lights and thinking well I'll just make up my own minimum now and get a 150 100 feet and I did see the lights and landed and as soon as we landed it was you know unbelievable to to set the scene it was a sleepy little three Squadron big Airfield that all of a sudden overnight had gone on a war footing yeah and you know before when you went to stores and asked for a new pair of gloves and the guys said no there aren't they in you've got to bring two pairs in to get one all that sort of stuff that went out the window and within 24 hours whatever you wanted you got and if you asked for something it was given to you right so we we had lots of briefings to start with and there were lots of meetings that didn't involve uh the junior pilots and Navigators but at senior level so lots of meetings and it was pretty clear that there would be a winged deployment from the the Leeming wing and that would involve 11 23 and 20 fire Squadron and I tried to remember how many crews meet and I think I think it might have been about 10 Crews from each Squad pretty much 75 of each Squadron were going to go and deploy to leaming so we all moved out of 25 Squad and the 10 Crews that were chosen and I I was trying to think as well you know were you chosen because you were the world's best fighter partner the best fighter Navigator and I don't think you would I think it was more a case of you know who wasn't on leave who wasn't going on leave whose wife wasn't having a baby um who was a weapons instructor um who had experience on type you know and it sort of naturally fell down to finding ten Cruz from each and we then became constituted Crews as well so my backseata stayed as my backseat for the whole of the next three or four months so we moved across to 11th Squadron and said goodbye to 25 Squad as they're 23 and 11. and formed the sort of the Leeming wing and then there was a huge amount of shuffling of airframes because all of a sudden the RAF decided that you know they were going to deploy the time they were three of which they're going to deploy maybe 20 25 maybe 20 around about 20 25 aircraft to the gulf and that was going to cause some a massive logistical problem because it wasn't um and this was one of their failings was they couldn't just pick 11 and 25 Squad and send those because all the aircraft were different standards so some had said list radar some had W or Wireless Radars um some were due for major Services some weren't deformative Servicing and so the engineers had a huge task of trying to pick 25 aircraft that they knew they could deploy in August they'd have made the service until December or January so that was the rationale behind it and at the same time all the um I think they were called ctto which was Central trials and tactics organization they already had a huge wish list for the tornado F3 of bolt-on goodies that they wanted that they were never going to get and they were items that had they asked for in 1990 they'd have got them by the time they went out of service all of a sudden all those things they wanted became money now object and things like um well chaff and flares was the big one and um A9 Mike was another and also radar absorbent paint on the aircraft so they all the things that they wanted to put onto the aircraft were embodied into the aircraft in double quick time the biggest things really were the Chapman flares which should have been on the airplane from day one and so they were put on to the back of the engine doors that went on the back of the airframe and of course you know being their defense Squadron we never operated with live weapons and chaff and flares were classed as big as live weapons so all of a sudden now we then had to train the grand crew and the graveyard to train us that you know when you approach the aircraft there were danger aircraft arm signed and little flags on there you know a flare going off on the pan could have been a disaster so we we've had to have tuned to now flying with live live weapons the sky flash that we had was the Super temp Sky Flash and I don't remember exactly what that meant but it was the latest standard so that was fine one thing that we didn't do which we should have done is that we should have started training with four dummy missiles on and four winders on and maybe tanks on because all we ever did was fly in the clean configuration the F3 and the F3 was actually pretty good and the theme from the configuration but once we got to Dara and it became 40 degrees C and it was it was it wasn't so it was a sea level so that wasn't an issue altitude the airplane was a completely different airplane so we didn't really you know do ourselves any favors with that um one of the things which the tornado F3 um it became clear that it wasn't good at was that the radar cross section was massive it was obviously pre anything to do with stealth and when you stuck four Sky flash underneath which had what eight fins on each missile times four these fins were like great big sharks underneath the aircraft and the Sidewinders and the tanks all of a sudden from the frontal area the cross section was massive some bright spark had the idea that they would paint the Leading Edge of the Wings with what was known as radar absorbent paint or round red arms or material it was like um a sort of non-slip sticky surface on your stairs and they dorbed that on the Leading Edge of the wing so if you see pictures of the F3 um what they did was they uh they got the the Leading Edge of the wing and they put this Ram paint on there and they put it up the fin as well I don't think they put it on the tail plane and then then somebody had another great idea that because of the cross section of the airplane that what they would do is put tiles radar absorbent tiles down the intake and they were glue the thing so at night when we'd finished flying at you know eight o'clock at night whenever it was the engineers would go down the intake and glue these on the floor tiles you know absorbent tasks onto the intake of the airplane now it was supposed to cure overnight with the glue but after a couple came off and got ingested down the engines I think they thought a pretty silly idea so so we gave that idea up and you know the radar absorbent paint was a pretty crazy idea as well there was something in the airplane um called the special facility switch I seem to remember and that was so super secret that nobody on the squad even the weapons instructors didn't know and there was a brown envelope and there was a big joke at the time that it was in the back seat and there was um the the radar member was frequency agile and you could change the frequency of the radar and nobody knew what this switch did but it was a war time only and we were told that if you go to war we'll tell you what it does and you'll all find out then and the brown envelope be opened and we're all joking so you know you turn you put the switch on and the F3 becomes an F-15 or something but I think actually what it was it just increased the power of the transmission or something at some of the ECM feature of the radar but it wasn't that great a secret I can remember that so we got uh Chaffin flares we've got aim9 mic which was a um an improvement today man Lena that was on a flare rejection mode so the A-line Lima when it saw a flare come out it would go for the brighter source and it was just home for the flare the A9 mic had a system where it looked at the the heat source and if a flare came out that was hotter it would then look at it and say that's hotter than reject that and then flick back to the the primary heat source so it did have like a flare ejection capability and I've read recently that actually it didn't it didn't do an awful lot of good and we're a bit Hoodwinked into getting there in my mic but anyway we got the M9 mic and then we got half quick in the aircraft which again we hadn't used before and that was a secure radio and it's a bit like having if you're not familiar with it people listening to it it's quite a hard thing to explain but it's as if you're having a conversation with somebody saying um the big red fox jumps over the bridge and then the the phrase of the B red Frost jumps over the bridge is all um pixelated so it's like the the the the the the and then the other person's radio is tuned to the same frequency effectively that you are so that becomes the big red fox jumps over the bridge and everybody is tuned to the same half quick frequency and that's from how I remember it works so the way you worked it was you sent a thing called a Mickey which was a tone and you did this all together so you synced all your radios together and you sat on the pan and the leader would say sending a Mickey in five four three two one and you press one and you send the making you go beep like that and then it'd all be synced to it and if you all sync to it then you could effectively have a decoded or a coded radio frequency and that's something I already didn't have or never had [Music] but the Americans insisted if we've been operating the gulf then we had to have half quick radio so that all got him implemented and I seem to recall as well that on the have quick was maybe not the halfway but on the iff on the interrogation Friend or Foe that changed every 30 minutes and they gave us some little Seiko um digital watches without a strap-on we had to put that into our earpiece and our headset in our head in our bone domes and every 30 minutes ago matters to remind us to change the the score code other things that we got we got um but I looked at a photograph of myself in the Gulf um one of my original selfies and it didn't seem to be there but we I think we had uh visors on our bone domes that were gold-plated for uh laser um wow denial so if somebody pointed a laser at you but you had this gold visor that reflected or deflected the laser but I looked at my bone Dome of a picture I took it myself and I didn't seem to have a gold plated visor so maybe they ran out of money on that one yeah Ian to wrap up yeah because obviously you're an author and everyone knows you as that as well so are you still online are you still doing books there currently yeah so what's coming up for yourself yeah I still do books I did one of the lightning last year called the lightning manual which has been really successful and that's sort of gone from a new um approach to writing books so there's a bit more memorabilia in there a bit more writing a couple of photographs I've done I've got a new guy who scans my images who's absolutely brilliant so my photographs I'm now being able to go back through all my negative collection and he's producing uh negative images which are like Kodachrome so that's really good it I'm working on a phantom book uh called The Phantom manual which we spoke about before we started now which is going to be a two volume but one on the operational side which will cover 892 Navy stuff British Phantoms ground attack air defense f4js fault and Islands everything so that's why that's in one full book and then next year I've got a book commission to do on the transatlantic Airways Harrier which is something a bit different for me uh and something I'm very excited about doing and that'll probably lead on to Harry Emanuel uh like the Haynes manual dip because um I know that when I start getting into the Harry and everything to do with the Harrier I want to do a book that covers only the um needle nose pointy nose harriers or the dolphin ones not the the gr5s after that I probably got enough material just to do another lightning book and then I want to start writing my biography books so and I've got a I've got a fictional novel I want to do at some stage so yeah I'm pretty busy at the moment not off yeah but you're obviously online as well is it still is it firestreaksbooks.com yeah it's uh www.firestreakbooks.com uh and as we spoke about before I do try and uh put stuff on Twitter I don't put much on Facebook now and I don't put much on Instagram because I just don't really have the time I know that there is a way you can post up on Instagram that goes on the Facebook and Twitter and all that sort of stuff and Link it all together but as as we spoke you know rather if I put something on there about flying the Phantom and somebody asked me a question I can actually have the time to answer it and say yeah that's probably right that's wrong with it yeah I think that's a good way of thinking and I'll link Ian's website in the description below as well as well as his Twitter and you can go and get my follow-on and get his books uh so yeah Ian thank you very much for coming on the show it's always a pleasure to have you on and hopefully we can get you on again because you're a wealth of stories and it's I could I could Porky for ages and ask you this that and the other day but uh thank you for doing this well you're you're a great interviewer Michael and I love talking to you and um you know you're always very enthusiastic and I'm very grateful to all the exposure you give me so anybody that listens to this stuff if they want to go onto Twitter and ask me a question or if they if they would rather have a book done this way or that way you know not too modest I'm quite happy to take criticism or comments or advice from anybody really really well cheers Anne thank you very much again Ian that's a good time [Music]

Channel: Aircrew Interview

Views: 11,322

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Id: y8KiO6L7FRM

Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2022