…... and flying them and, frankly, a lot of stuff from the QWI Course, especially the maths, was more valuable than what I did at ETPS for the job I had to do as a test pilot then. So, actually, the QWI Course really set me up well for the subsequent times.
So I finished the QWI Course, passed successfully, and as Rob has already alluded to, shortly afterwards I passed my driving test! So I was actually a Buccaneer QWI before I was qualified solo on a car! My wife couldn’t be with us tonight – she’s working – but she’ll tell you she’s flown a lot with me and she far prefers flying with me in an aeroplane to actually driving with me in a car, but that’s another story.
Then into 1983 and the decision had been made that 208 Squadron 
would transfer from the overland to the maritime role. So we were due to go up to Lossiemouth, and obviously there were different aspirations of what people wanted to do, and I’d had this long-held desire to go to ETPS. So I put an application in, and it went through Ben, who wrote me a very nice, good report for my professional attributes: go to ETPS it said, but the RAF said: “You’re going to Lossie as a pilot QWI”. Now this obviously was a bit disappointing on a personal level, but there’s something here that Ben doesn’t know because, had I have actually been accepted that year and done the ETPS Course in 1984, at the end of that Course there were no postings to ‘A’ Squadron, which is really where I wanted to go. So I wouldn’t have got the Flight Test posting that I really wanted to. So that actually resulted in me getting the posting that I wanted to at the end of ETPS.
So then we came to the end of 208 Squadron Buccaneers as an overland Squadron from Honington and, on 31st July that year, I flew with Ben and we led the final Buccaneer 6-ship ‘Farewell to East Anglia’ trip around all of the places we used to go to: the airfields and the ranges, and it was a great privilege to actually go and lead that sortie. Retrospectively, looking back on this, the whole time the Squadron was at Honington, it was a very, very, competent hard-flying unit, and we only lost one aeroplane. That was somebody flying an avoidance manoeuvre to avoid a mid-air collision with a 4-ship of Hunters around Wales. They succeeded in avoiding the mid-air, the Buccaneer didn’t like being manoeuvred like that, Claerwen Reservoir got somewhat polluted with AVTUR, and 2 people got Martin Baker ties. But for such a hard-flying unit, that was the only aeroplane we lost, which I think was a great tribute and reflection on the professionalism and abilities of the people on the Squadron.
The Squadron then went to Lossiemouth and I had a couple of months away on leave and doing some course that attempted to make me a better officer which, frankly, was doomed to failure. But, eventually, I sort of arrived up at Lossiemouth, and had been there about 3 days
