…... flying close formation at 550kts and 100ft, pulling up and throwing these bombs at the target. Apart from being absolutely great fun, one of the things that struck me recently thinking about talking tonight was if you look at what we are doing now, with attack aeroplanes and laser-guided bombs: it’s all precision-guided munitions. But at this stage, this was the very, very early stages of this sort of technology in the Air Force, and 208 was pivotal at the front of developing the tactics for deploying these sort of weapons operationally. At the time, it was just another option that we had in our inventory, without realising quite how pivotal this was in establishing the whole way in which we deliver bombs in the future, and that was a tremendous experience.
Now, I had been on the Squadron flying Buccaneers for only 13 months when I deployed on this and, as a first-tourist, to have the opportunity to go and do that is absolutely unparalleled, and this was one of the things about being given the opportunity to push forward on the Squadron that really, really helped me.
Shortly after the end of that detachment, Graham handed over the
Squadron to Ben. One day in 1982, I remember Ben asking me to come to his office. I will say that this happened fairly frequently for reasons various, but Ben asked me to come to his office and he said: “Dave, tell me why I should send you on the QWI (Qualified Weapons Instructor) Course next year”. So I said: “Well, it’s a very kind offer”. But I then told him why I thought I shouldn’t, and that was basically because if I did the Course, I felt I was going to get trapped on the Buccaneer, and I’d long had an ambition from when I was at university to go to ETPS (Empire Test Pilots School) to become a test pilot on ‘A’ Squadron – Flight Test Squadron at Boscombe Down. That was my ambition and I felt that, as much as I’d love to go and do the QWI Course, if I did this, I would get trapped and wouldn’t have the opportunity. So, off I went to the QWI Course!
Now, I had a great time. I really enjoyed it, and learned a lot that stood me in good stead. But one of the really interesting things is that in my early days in Flight Test, a lot of the work was in weapons development and weapons delivery, and the QWI Course stood me in really, really good stead for a lot of the test flying that I did, and right through to one of the most interesting times that I ever had, which was the 6 months leading up to Gulf War I when money wasn’t an object and we got all the toys that we dreamed of for years and put them on the aeroplanes.
I remember in particular putting CRV-7 rockets on the Jaguar, and we didn’t have computer weapon aiming. We were back to the basics of manually depressed sights, with calculators, rather than log tables. There were no computers to actually work out how to deliver these before going off
