…... We put 
2 pairs around the City and I was No 2 in the second pair. Bill Graham and Nige Maddox were leading the first pair and we whizzed round the City of Beirut. It was the best two-and-a-half minutes flying of my life! It is the only time that I would ever get the opportunity to fly between buildings in a capital city. I’ve still got the tee-shirt: “Real men fly through Beirut, not over it!”. I did it once, I’d done it twice, maybe three times and then I had to stop because, sooner or later, there would have been something I wouldn’t have seen that I would have hit. But it was absolutely fantastic flying, and there were Ben, and Dutch Holland on the ship, and a lot of people who dug us out of the ‘dwang’ that the Americans seemed to be throwing at us because they did not appreciate that style of flying.
But, one of the things that was interesting, as a result of Trial Tropical when we started off the employment of laser-guided bombs, the politicians had latched on to the fact that these bombs, on paper, had a 37-foot accuracy number (but that’s another lecture). So, when we went to Cyprus, they said we had to use laser-guided bombs (to minimise potential collateral damage). Now all of the artillery guns were going to be up in the mountains, and our tactics at the time were to run in and toss the bombs. Caz Capewell and I, the 2 pilot QWIs there, worked out that we could only take out a target 300 feet above our run-in height from the profiles we had, and with some modification of these profiles, we could bump it up to 600 or 700 feet and that was it. And so, literally, on the ‘back-of-a-fag-packet’ in the crewroom, we came up with a dive profile that delivered these things from 15,000 feet onto the target, and this had never been conceived in the RAF before: the medium-level deployment of laser-guided bombs. But we hadn’t proved this, and so we got a guy out from CTTO (Central Trials & Tactics Organisation) to run a trial. We had an allocated 6 bombs; we got the workshops in Episkopi to build these big raft targets; we found a bit of Epi Bay where if we fired the lasers we weren’t going to blind anyone; and CTTO really did not believe this was going to work. We had 2 raft targets and I designed them. They put one target out, we dropped a bomb: ‘doof!’ Sunk the target. Second one: ‘doof!’ Sunk the target. After these first 2 ‘direct hits’, CTTO said: “OK, you’ve proved your point, you’re not going to drop any more bombs – this actually works!”
Now, because they didn’t believe this was going to work, we had a bet on: there was a bottle of champagne on every bomb. If it took out the target, they bought the champagne. If it missed, we bought the champagne. We conceded not to drop any more bombs on the basis they provided all 6 bottles of champagne which, in fairness, they did, so that was fine. Again, 208 was pivotal in terms of the initial employment of this sort of technology from medium level. It’s taken for granted as the norm now, but I don’t think it’s ever really been captured in quite that depth of how much we actually did.
