Now, I sh
ould say at this point that I was basically the tallest pilot on the Squadron. Eddie Large was about the same height, but Bobby was definitely the shortest navigator on the Squadron, and I am sure, Graham, that part of the crewing was for comedic effect to give Jim as much scope as possible for interesting cartoons on the Squadron. I thoroughly enjoyed flying with Bobby – he was great.
The other interesting thing, as Rob has already said, is that I was the only first-tourist pilot on the Squadron for the first 2 years I was there. We had 10 crews and Bob McLeland was the next most junior. He had been there for 3 years and didn’t count as a first-tourist. Now this can go one of 2 ways: you’re either the tea-boy - you pick up the crumbs and you get nowhere; or you are pushed forward to develop as much as you can, because you can make mistakes and, with the experience on the Squadron, they can soak up those mistakes and you can operate quite safely. The latter category was where I sat, and I had all the opportunities in the world and was really pushed forwards very hard as much as I could take to develop, and I will come back to this theme later because that has been one of the most fundamental things that set me up in the foundations of my career for the next 40-odd years. So, that was tremendous.
I went through, got Combat Ready, and then we went off 
to Maple Flag in 1981. Now I’d already developed quite a sort of propensity for low flying, and I am not talking about 250ft, I am talking about flying an aeroplane properly low. Brian will say from days at Kemble, that the locals got used to seeing aeroplanes, with the Red Arrows being there, flown low and fast so that the sort of heights and speeds I got accustomed to on run-and-breaks and thoroughly enjoyed were not the norm throughout the Air Force, but that was what really sort of floated my boat. So the 100ft OLF (Operational Low Flying) that we did on Maple Flag really was tremendous. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it.
We 
came back from Maple Flag and then, in the latter part of 1981, we had a joint, trial deployment to Cold Lake again in Canada: Trial Tropical III, which was joint between 208 Squadron and 16. It was a CTTO Trial looking at the employment of laser-guided bombs, really for the first time in an operational context. 208 were delivering the bombs, and 16 Squadron were designating the bombs with a Pave-Spike targeting pod in addition to some ground-based laser target marking. This was fantastic fun: we were going off in a couple of waves a day with 4 laser-guided bombs on each aeroplane,
