One of the things at Lossiemouth at the time was that we had an Auxiliary Air Force RAF Regiment Squadron, so quite often we would have weekend exercises where we worked through a straight 12 days. May 19th and 20th 1984 was one of those weekends and, on the Sunday - the 20th - we launched off on a 6-ship, and in a coordinated toss manoeuvre over the Moray Firth, the leader crashed into the water. Now I was definitely in that formation and sadly Bill Graham and Tony Wright were killed and myself and Doug Carter as the deputy had to bring everyone back home. That was the first time 208 had suffered a fatal loss in a Buccaneer up to that point. It’s one of those things that will never leave me, and I have lost other friends in accidents, but one of the things that’s quite interesting looking at it today is, thankfully, we lose far fewer aeroplanes and people than we used to. But, when we do, people don’t know how to handle it, and it is very difficult. We went back to the bar that night, and I should say that there was another fatality: a corporal with a heart condition had died of a heart attack on the Saturday night. We then lost Bill and Big T. We went back to the bar, and these were the days when you could only wear a flying suit in the Mess until 5 o’clock. At about 9 o’clock that night, still in flying suits, and with full fighting speed on, there was a flying officer RAF Policeman at Lossiemouth, who came to the bar and was about to try and throw us all out for being improperly dressed. It was pointed out to him that that would be the fourth death of the weekend if he actually tried.


But we had decided that we would launch the Wing next day, that we would fly every aeroplane because, as aircrew, we could deal with it, but all the guys on the ground, and girls - the adminers and engineers - weren’t quite used to seeing it. Now it was about 9 o’clock and I’d got quite a fighting speed on, and Ben came over to me and said: “Dave, I’ve got this great idea for tomorrow - you’re going to do a display practice and I’ll fly with you to really wave the flag.” Now it sort of comes to this cross-over point where either you’re so ‘ratted’ that you say “yes”, or you are not quite there and you know this isn’t going to be a good idea. I thought: “hum, how do I deal with this”, so I said: “Boss, that is a fantastic idea, but I’m afraid I could only fly the display practice as a constituted crew with my nav, with T-R, so I’m really sorry we can’t do it”. My logbook records that I flew the tanker the next day, which was my sort of level of stability.


Now, at that stage, I then applied for ETPS again. I got a very good recommendation from Ben, for which I thank you, and was accepted onto the Course. So then came to the end of 1984 when it came to flying my last sortie and, after the accident, we had a real dilution of experience. The Squadron had been declared ‘Combat Ready’ and John Ford had taken over as the CO, but we hadn’t flown any 6-ship formations  since the accident. So I said, for my last sortie, I wanted to take the Squadron off and fly a 6-ship to actually get us back up on the step.  It was agreed, and I flew it with Ron Wilder,

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