Harry Benson - Scram!

Meanwhile, out at sea, Jack Lomas was at the controls of his Wessex, Yankee Hotel, oblivious to the drama unfolding ashore. In the rear cabin was his crewman Petty Officer Steve MacNaughton. After dropping off passengers and stores on the deck of Hermes , he now received curt orders over the radio from Hermes ’ ‘flyco’. ‘Yankee Hotel, clear the deck immediately and hold as close as you can on the starboard quarter. Expedite.’

Lomas lifted off straight away and circled round to bring the Wessex to a hover just to the rear and to the side of the carrier. After a wait of ten minutes or so, Lomas called flyco for an explanation.

‘You’re planeguard. Confirm you are equipped.’ They were to act as search-and-rescue cover in case any of the returning Sea Harriers ditched into the sea.

‘I have one winch and one crewman. I’m also short of fuel. Request a quick suck.’

‘Negative, hold.’

Almost immediately Lomas heard the first of the Sea Harriers call up on the radio as the ship began a turn into wind to assist their recovery. Lomas was more concerned about his fuel state to think much about the sailor wandering a few yards in front of him towards the triple chaff launchers just behind the Hermes bridge superstructure. Chaff comprises thousands of tiny strips of aluminium foil that form a bloom. This then creates a big false target on radar to an attacking missile or jet.

With a giant whoosh , one of the chaff launchers suddenly fired its rocket up through Yankee Hotel’s rotor blades before bursting high above the helicopter. Lomas’s heart leapt in his mouth at the shock. ‘Fuck me. What the fuck was that?’ he shouted to MacNaughton before transmitting to Hermes : ‘You’ve just fired chaff through my rotor blades.’ His message was ignored.

He was also almost too shocked to notice the Sea Harriers landing on the deck, one by one, just a few yards to his left. The historic event was reported later on the BBC news by correspondent Brian Hanrahan: ‘I counted them all out and I counted them all back.’

‘OK you can leave now,’ a seemingly unconcerned Hermes told a still stunned Lomas.

Of course Hermes was correct to prioritise the Sea Harriers. Without them, there would be no task force. A single Wessex was well down the pecking order. But the brusque way that the situation was handled seemed unnecessary. Barely coaxing Yankee Hotel back to land on Resource with well below minimum fuel left in the tanks, Lomas told Steve MacNaughton, ‘My God, that was frightening.’

The other half of Jack Lomas’s flight, Oily Knight, Noddy Morton, Petty Officer Aircrewman Arthur Balls, and Royal Marine Colour Sergeant Tommy Sands, had deployed the previous afternoon to the County-class destroyer HMS Glamorgan , sister ship of Antrim which was operating in South Georgia. Tommy Sands had been embarked with the flight as military trainer. But for reasons of practical operational efficiency, he had been trained up by Arthur Balls and Steve MacNaughton to act as an additional aircrewman.

It was a tight squeeze landing Yankee Tango on the flight deck of Glamorgan with the ship’s own Wessex folded and stowed in the hangar. To Oily Knight, operating two Wessex from one deck looked like an accident waiting to happen, should one aircraft be stuck on deck with the other needing an urgent suck of fuel. Still, he thought, close cooperation between crews should minimise the risk.

It wasn’t entirely clear to any of the crew what their task was as they arrived on board. Their confidence did not improve when they woke up the following morning within sight of land. Glamorgan and two sleek Type-21 frigates, Arrow and Alacrity , had been tasked to provide naval gunfire support for the raids on Stanley with their 4.5-inch guns.

Their first mission, requested by Glamorgan ’s captain Mike Barrow, was to fly up to 3,000 feet and drop a few blooms of chaff at decent intervals so that they looked like ships to any attacking aircraft’s radar. Armed with AS12 missiles on either side of the aircraft, Arthur Balls sat in the left seat behind the M260 missile sight as Oily Knight drove from the right seat. Noddy Morton and Tommy Sands sat in the back as stand-in crewmen. Next to them was a supply of brown paper parcels containing chaff.

Oily Knight was not at all impressed with the idea. First, all junglies hate heights. Staying at low level avoids the perceived problem of high-altitude nosebleeds, a common junglie concern, and the rather more real danger of having to descend blind through cloud. Second, it seemed obvious to Knight that chaff might fool an incoming missile, but it wouldn’t fool an attacking aircraft. The pilot would see the sudden magical appearance of several big echoes behind a small slow-moving echo on their radar and draw the obvious conclusion: they’re not ships. Third, opening the parcels through the open door of a windy helicopter inevitably meant that half of the thousands of tiny bits of foil would fill the cabin rather than the sky below. Nonetheless, having restrained himself from the temptation to express these concerns, Knight set off to complete the task professionally, as ordered, before returning to Glamorgan to refuel.

The second mission of the day was to conduct a surface search along the coastline. There had been talk of a possible submarine sighting near Port Stanley. This would be where the AS12 missiles might come in handy. Flying south of the capital, the crew of Yankee Tango had a good view of the bleak Falkland Islands coastline. The plan was to fly close enough to keep land in sight but not too close to come within range of any shore-based Argentine positions.

The low-lying land brought them closer in to the coast than they had intended. Through the long-range setting of his missile sight, Arthur Balls could see a column of smoke way out to the west, most likely a result of the earlier Sea Harrier raid on the airstrip at Goose Green. But if he could see so far inland, others much closer on land could also see them. Knight and Morton both spotted the missile launch out to the right side of the aircraft at the same time. A very bright white light source left the coastline and gradually climbed towards the Wessex at what seemed like a slow pace. Inside the aircraft there was a short pause as the situation sunk in. ‘ Fuck, we’re being shot at .’ Knight’s immediate reaction was to apply fighter-evasion techniques. He pushed the nose of the Wessex forward dropping low and fast towards the surface of the sea, trying to stay at right angles to the incoming missile.

When practising fighter evasion, the trick that always seemed to fool fighter pilots expecting an easy win was for the helicopter to achieve a maximum crossing rate. As the fighter closes with the helicopter at high speed, the attacking jet has to tighten its turn progressively. This would affect the targeting system enough for the jet to overshoot. I’ve seen how effective this can be at first hand, having sat next to a frustrated and surprised fighter pilot in the cockpit of a Hunter jet as we overshot a formation of low-level Wessex helicopters beneath us. At least this was the theory as Knight pushed the Wessex down to sea level. He hoped the same principle would apply against an attacking missile.