One I Crashed Earlier!!!Â
January is obviously a bad month for me. This particular winter’s morning was lovely and clear and I was due to fly my first sortie back from two months off flying after spending the period up to Christmas with my leg in plaster.Â
Eight weeks earlier I’d been ‘sent’ out to the garage to clean out the rabbit after a minor family dispute. All went well until my welly boot slipped in the snow on an eighteen inch brick wall I was stepping over. As I went down I’d heard the ‘snap’ and knew it was something fairly serious. Dragging myself across the front garden I’d pulled myself up to the front window and banged on the glass. I’d gratefully fallen back into the snow as my wife appeared, only to be more than a little disappointed as she drew the curtains and returned to watch the end of Neighbours! Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’d spent November and December on crutches.Â
So my mood was good as I showered and dressed for work that January morning. I was still on the combat phase of my ‘Convex’ flying on 111 Squadron at RAF Leuchars. ‘Convex’ is when you really learn to fly and fight the aircraft on a front-line squadron, having completed the Operational Conversion Unit syllabus on the training squadron. In my case the aircraft was the Tornado F3; the air defence version of the RAF’s swing wing fighter. Having been grounded for so long I was mad-keen to get back in the saddle and spirits were high as I jumped on my motorbike and set off on the 6-7 mile journey from Wormit, on the banks of the river Tay, to the airfield.Â
As I said at the beginning the weather was clear; cold but dry and I had no worries about the ride into work. That is until I hit Five-Roads Roundabout. Locals will know the place. It’s the small roundabout between Wormit and Leuchars that has four roads leading off of it. Yes I did say FOUR! Well, what the locals also know and I had forgotten in my enthusiastic haste to get in early, was that it doesn’t matter what the weather is like over the rest of the country, Five Roads Roundabout seems to have its own micro-climate. That day was no different. As soon as the front wheel touched the layer of black ice it lost traction and started to slide. I corrected as best I could but by this time the rear wheel had joined in the fun and I was slithering from side to side, thinking I was bound to break the repairs to my ankle if I went down on the left leg. I took the only option open to me. As the bike twisted and presented my right side to the road surface I laid the bike down and kicked it away using the foot-rests. Luckily I was travelling quite slowly at this point and the roundabout was clear of traffic. I parted from the bike and we gracefully slid across the icy circle in perfect formation. Jumping up I found I was unhurt, as was the bike, and I jumped straight back on and continued the journey. The rest of the ride was uneventful and I didn’t see it as an omen for the approaching flight.Â
- Five Roads Roadabout
Arriving at the squadron we briefed for a simple 1v1 combat sortie and together with my pilot, the boss, walked to the jet; tail letter ‘HF’. The weather was glorious and due to remain so and the start-up, taxi and tack-off went like clockwork. Of course there was a little apprehension on my side; first trip back after a long lay-off, still on Convex having not yet received my ‘Combat Ready’ status and flying with the boss. I was a pretty happy bunny then, as we roared back to Leuchars for a visual run-in and break after the sortie had gone really well.
Turning down-wind we began the monitored ‘pre-landing checks’. I followed the pilot through the drills carefully.Â
‘Wing sweep … 25,’ he started. I looked through the canopy and mentally confirmed the variable geometry wings (swing-wing) were in the landing position.Â
‘Airbrakes … in and locked.’Â
‘SPILS … below 10 off.’Â
This is all going well I thought as I looked forward to a cup of tea and a debrief that should paint me in a reasonably good light.Â
‘Flaps,’ continued the boss. ‘Mid and indicating.’ I had another quick look outside and confirmed the flaps had travelled to the approach setting.Â
‘Landing gear.’ My eyes automatically checked the aircraft speed. ‘Below 235, travelling.’ The pilot selcted the landing gear down and I watched as three red lights turned to green as the gear locked down.Â
‘Three greens,’ I confirmed, but there was a nagging doubt in my mind that continued to grow as the boss continued with the checks.Â
‘Fuel.’ Was the boss’ next call. We saw we had about 200 Kgs to spare and calculated a landing speed. That nagging doubt was still there in my brain; raising the hackles on the back of my neck. What was it?Â
‘Hook light … out.’Â
‘Harnesses.’ I carefully checked mine and confirmed ‘Tight and locked.’Â
‘Brakes,’ continued the boss. ‘Good check and Anti-skid out.’Â
I looked back at the undercarriage panel and noted we definitely had three green lights indicating that all three undercarriage legs were locked in place, but I still had a feeling something wasn’t right.Â
‘Nose wheel steering … erm …’ There was a pause as the boss waited for the light to illuminate and then it hit me.Â
‘Did you hear some audio when you put the gear down,’ I asked.Â
‘I’ve a feeling I did,’ replied the boss. ‘Still no ‘low’ light.’ As had many before him and I’m sure many since, he had cancelled the warning tone as soon as it started; a reflex action. We overshot the approach and waited a few more minutes for the light (low light) to tell us that the steering gear for the nose wheel was working. It didn’t appear.Â
‘Pan, pan, pan,’ called the boss on the radio. ‘Pan Saturn one in the circuit with a nose wheel steering failure, request state of the cables and standby intentions.’ Meanwhile I opened the emergency flight reference cards (FRCs) and started reading through to get an idea of the way we’d handle the emergency. The boss had asked for the conditions of the cables. These are wires stretched across the runway at each end, that a suitably equipped fast jet can engage with a hook lowered under the airframe, much the same as a landing on an aircraft carrier. This would either stop the jet very quickly (approach end cable) or stop the aircraft running off the end of the runway if it couldn’t stop (overrun cable).Â
I double checked the indications we had, warned that a cable engagement may or may not be suitable and called for our wing-man to give us a visual inspection. It wasn’t a particularly uncommon emergency and we both expected the other aircraft to report that everything looked normal. Things started to appear a little more serious when they calmly told us that the nose wheel was 90 degrees out of alignment; in other words, the wheel was sideways on to our direction of travel.Â
‘Right,’ I said. ‘We won’t be engaging a cable. We’ll make a normal landing but hold the nose wheel off the runway until 100 knots. We need to be prepared for some swing once the nose wheel comes down, but hopefully it’ll pivot fore and aft and everything will be pretty much as normal.’ I read out a few other checks and we set up for the approach. It wasn’t until afterwards that I realised we hadn’t discussed our actions if anything went wrong during the landing. Maybe we didn’t want to think about it.Â
The boss called for the final approach and I checked my straps again, ensuring they were tight and locked. We completed the remaining pre-landing checks and I called the speeds as we carried out a pretty normal aerodynamic landing. It was a procedure the pilots practised quite often and the boss flew it perfectly, touching the main wheels down on the white piano keys painted on the end of the runway. He held the nose wheel off the concrete as I called the aircraft’s airspeed speed and distances to go to the end of the runway. As we approached 100 knots I gently rested my left hand on the black and yellow handle between my legs. If necessary I was ready to eject us both from the aircraft at an instants notice. At 90 knots the nose started to drop towards the runway and as it gently lowered onto the surface we both expected the wheels to caster fore and aft and we would then complete a normal arrest before leaving the jet on the runway.Â
It didn’t happen that way. As the wheels touched down both tyres burst as the aircraft slewed violently to the left. I gripped my hand around the ejection handle as the boss used differential braking (the technique of applying only one of the brakes to bring the aircraft back into line) and the rudder to try and correct the swing. As the jet started to correct to the right I had the dreadful feeling it was going to flip over and mentally prepared myself the imminent ejection.Â
‘Are you happy boss?’ I asked without any real conviction.Â
‘Yes, it’s under control,’ his reply.Â
- Should I have ejected?
The useless nose wheel went straight through the surface and was physically ripped from the aircraft as it dug into the sand. As the jet collapsed onto its nose a fine mist of hydraulic fluid ignited into a ball of flame which thankfully extinguished as quickly as it had started. I only found this out later after talking to an eye-witness, but had I seen it at the time I would almost certainly have pulled the handle. Fortunately I didn’t; upon impact the airframe had twisted and there could have been no guarantee that the ejection sequence would have operated successfully at that time. Instead I was thrown forward into my straps as the jet came to a very sudden stop.Â
- The nose wheel was completely ripped out.
‘Pins,’ I yelled as I fitted the safety pin to my own ejection seat. There was no answer from the front seat. ‘Confirm your seat pin is in,’ I shouted again. Without the seat pins fitted I couldn’t open the canopy for fear of ejecting one or both of us into the metalwork.Â
‘Seat safe,’ I heard from the boss. I pulled back the canopy lever and was relieved to see the glass start moving upwards. I was now faced with a long drop to the ground and automatically thought of my recently healed but still weak left ankle. Oh well, I thought and climbed up onto the seat-pan. I looked round to see a fireman just to my left hand side and was momentarily amazed that he could have got a ladder up the side of the jet so quickly. I looked down and saw he was actually standing on the grass. As can be seen from the pictures; with the nose wheel gone and the right main buried to the top of the tyre, it was simply a case of stepping over the side. I trotted to the runway as the emergency services hovered around the jet and after a quick check with the doctor I walked back to the squadron for a debrief.Â
I’m not a superstitious man but I decided not to risk the journey home on my bike that evening, but instead had a ‘few’ beers before being picked up by my wife. A hell of a day!
