Terry He
yes recounts an event that graphically demonstrated the resilience of the Buccaneer and its crews.
'Twas a bleak winter's day, 12th January 1981, and we'd been tasked on Exercise Mallet Blow. Our 'Cab' was the trusty XV352 - an excellent beast that had seen me through several 'notable' missions. John Plumb and I were No. 2 of a pair and were running in towards the coast near Amble to carry out a SAP, I seem to recall that the target was somewhere on the Otterburn range. We were doing 500 knots at 250 feet (er, yes Boss, I know that sounds a bit high for me, but that's what my copy of the report says!) I'd just started to ease up to get a bit of height to cross the coast when we went through a huge flock of seagulls. I only saw them at the last second and had no time to avoid them. Almost immediately there was a rapid series of loud bangs accompanied by much dust, debris, vibration and the loudest noise I had ever heard in my life. The noise was not John shouting out what an idiot he thought I was but, in fact, the sound of the heavens blowing directly past my ears at extremely high speed. I started to slow the Cab down and gain some more height. It was impossible to hear anything else and worryingly, at first, I couldn't get a response from John.
I put out a blind call to our lead ship to say what 
had happened and started to turn south towards Leeming. (Why Leeming and not Leuchars I cannot recall, but they were roughly equidistant and I suppose, psychologically, south was 'downhill'!) I was aware of a large, gaping hole in the canopy just above my head and of the ejection seat top handle hanging loose and flapping about my right shoulder (I think that scared me more than all the rest of it put together!). I was not to know at the time, but it turned out that one of the birds had smashed through the canopy just above my head; it had then ricocheted off the blast screen and clouted John on the top of his helmet. The bird's remains took their final route to glory by smashing another hole through the canopy and exited above John's head! Poor old John had taken quite a nasty knock and at first he couldn't see much because his vision was obscured by blood, guts and feathers. In addition, all his maps had got sucked out of the hole in the canopy above his head!
We got the speed right back to around 200 knots, whereupon finally we could just about manage to speak above the noise of the slipstream, and started to take stock. The ADD wasn't working anymore and there were several holes visible all over the airframe. They looked like pictures of classic World War 2 flak damage and there was quite a lot of it, with several holes in particular punched around the starboard engine intake. Looking around the cockpit all seemed well except I could see significant differences between the engine indications. This posed the time honoured twin engine dilemma - which one's the good'un? Being a bear of not too large a brain and who'd just had a very nasty surprise,
