Harry Benson - Scram!

And so on a wet October day in 1979, I found myself squashed into a minibus heading for Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, Devon, one of forty apprehensive young men hoping to become Royal Navy pilots and observers. I was now Midshipman Benson, aged nineteen years and one week .

For many years, pilots and aircrew of the naval air commando squadrons have been proud to call themselves junglies . The original junglies were the crews of 848 Naval Air Squadron who operated their Whirlwind helicopters in the jungles of Malaya from 1952. Operating in support of the Gurkhas and other regiments, the commando squadrons became known for their flexibility and ‘can-do’ attitude, an approach that has continued to the present day in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The very first commando assault took place during the Suez crisis of 1956 when twenty-two Whirlwind and Sycamore helicopters of 845 Naval Air Squadron landed 650 commandos and their equipment in a mere one and a half hours. Given the limited capability of these underpowered helicopters, it was an astonishing feat. In 1958, naval air commando squadrons were involved with support operations in Cyprus and Aden. From 1959, 848 Naval Air Squadron operated with Royal Marines from the first commando carrier HMS Bulwark , and later from HMS Albion , mainly in the Far and Middle East. It was at Nanga Gaat, the forward operating base deep in the jungles of Borneo during the Indonesian confrontation of 1963, using Whirlwind 7 and Wessex 1 helicopters, that the nickname junglies was born. The new twin-engined Wessex HU (Helicopter Utility) Mark 5 entered service in 1965 in Aden, Brunei and Borneo, bringing with it a substantial improvement in lifting capability. The Sea King Mark 4 increased capability further, entering service with 846 Naval Air Squadron in 1979.

By early 1982, Britain’s political and military priorities had altered dramatically. In place of the Far East adventures, the typical junglie could expect to spend a substantial part of their winter training in Arctic warfare in northern Norway and the rest of the year on a couple of six-week rotations in Northern Ireland.

It was into this environment that I emerged as a baby junglie on Monday 1 March 1982. Officially we were Royal Navy officers first and Royal Navy pilots second. Unofficially we all knew exactly who we were. Junglies first, Navy second.

My training was fairly typical. After convincing the Admiralty Interview Board that I had sufficient leadership potential as a young officer and sufficient coordination as a trainee pilot, I joined Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth in the autumn of 1979. For many of my new friends and colleagues, this was the first time they had been away from home. For me, with ten years of boarding school under my belt, the routine and discipline of Dartmouth was a piece of cake.

My naval and flying training took nearly two and a half years from start to finish. Along every step of the way lurked the ever-present threat of being ‘chopped’. Most of us survived our first thirteen hours of flight experience in the antiquated tail-dragging Chipmunk aeroplane at Roborough airport near Plymouth. The similarly antiquated instructors at Roborough were all experienced assessors of young aviators. Those of us with sufficient aptitude passed. Those who didn’t got chopped.

After passing out of Dartmouth, I spent the summer of 1980 on ‘holdover’ at RNAS Yeovilton in Somerset. Holdover was the Navy’s attempt to slow down the flow of pilots to the front line. Defence cuts meant that there were simply too many aircrew in the system. Yeovilton was home to the junglies , flying Wessex 5 and the new Sea King 4, and stovies , flying the Navy’s shiny new Sea Harrier vertical take-off and landing jets. My few months at Yeovilton were brilliant fun. I knew that either junglie or stovie would be an attractive option once I finished flying training.

Towards the end of 1980, I resumed my place in the training pipeline and completed a range of ground courses. My fellow trainees and I spent a gruesome week being schooled in aviation medicine and advanced first aid at Seafield Park in Hampshire. Here we learnt how easy it was to become extremely disoriented whilst airborne. Each of us was strapped in turn into a rotating chair that was spun around. Starting with our heads down and eyes closed, we were then asked to lift our heads up and open our eyes. Watching others become completely unbalanced and fling themselves involuntarily out of the chair was a lot more entertaining than when we had to experience it for ourselves. The most shocking demonstration was to sit in the chair with eyes closed while the chair was spun up very slowly indeed. I was not aware of any movement at all. Opening my eyes to discover the world rushing past at a rate of knots was extremely disconcerting, though highly entertaining for onlookers.

In an adapted decompression chamber we all experienced a few minutes of hypoxia, the state of drowsiness that ensues at high altitude, and which can lead to death if insufficient oxygen reaches the brain. The staff set up a realistically simulated helicopter crash scene for us to use our first-aid skills. All Royal Navy aircrew have a special memory of the horribly realistic sucking chest wound that blows little bubbles of blood and the supposedly wounded leg that turns out to be completely severed.

We also spent eight days in the New Forest on survival training. This involved being dropped in the middle of nowhere with only the clothes we were wearing and a tiny survival tin full of glucose sweets. The first twenty-four hours were not fun. Ten of us were invited to swim across a freezing lake to clamber into a nine-man liferaft that simulated a ditching at sea. Discomfort, sudden attacks of cramp, and one of our colleagues with the runs, made the time pass very slowly indeed. It was a relief to be able to swim back to the shoreline and start an eighty-mile trek over the next three days. The last five days were spent building a shelter called a ‘basher’ and practising our survival skills – setting traps, carving spoons out of bits of wood, and skinning and cooking a rabbit that had been temporarily liberated from the local pet shop. I lost a stone in weight during these eight days.

Our final noteworthy course was one well loved by all Navy aircrew. Colloquially known as ‘the dunker’, the underwater escape trainer is a diving tower filled with water. The purpose of the dunker is to teach aircrew how to survive a ditching at sea. Perched on the end of a hydraulic ram above the water is a replica of a helicopter cockpit and cabin. The aircrew, dressed in normal flying gear and helmets, strap into the cockpit at the front or the cabin at the back. The module then lurches downwards into the water rolling neatly upside down some twelve feet underwater. Our mission is to escape before we all drown.

The staff took us through the ditching procedure. As soon as you know you’re heading for a swim, the first thing is to pull the quick release lever that jettisons the door. In the dunker, we simply had to simulate this. As the helicopter hits the water, with one hand you grab onto a fixed handle in the cockpit, with the other you prepare to release your straps. As the helicopter disappears under water, you grab one last gasp of air. When all movement stops, you release your straps, haul yourself out using the handle as a reference point, and allow buoyancy to take you up to the surface.

My first experience of the dunker was unnerving and disorienting, which is of course the point. But after a couple of goes, we became confident and even cocky. With six of us plonked in the rear cabin, a sign language game of ‘After you’, ‘No really, after you’, ‘No please, I insist’ then ensued, to the growing irritation of the excellent Navy divers who were there to watch that we didn’t get into trouble. The module only stayed under for less than a minute. The really cool customers were the divers who watched us vacate the module safely before strapping themselves in to ride it back upright and out of the water. We also practised the same escape in darkness with the tower windows blacked out. The dunker saved lives: those aircrew who survived crashes or ditchings at sea which killed their passengers, undoubtedly did so because of their sessions in the dunker.