John Nichol - Tornado Down

‘Got to dump the bombs,’ said John. For a heartbeat, I hesitated again. Dumping the bombs off would be a very tangible admission of our failure.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said, as if reading my thoughts. Both pilot and navigator have a jettison button beside them in the Tornado. He hit his. I felt a huge ‘Doosh!’ as the bombs came off safely, thudding harmlessly into the desert. Unfused, they would lie there in the sand until the rust – or the locals – got to them. The Tornado lurched upwards as the weight came off.

By now we were way behind the other two aircraft, having spent so much time over the target. They had pressed home their attack and were making good their escape. We had been too busy to respond to calls from the formation leader. His check-in call came again over the radio, much more urgently now.

‘Check in!’

‘We’ve had a problem,’ John replied.

‘Don’t worry about it. Get home.’

John was still pushing out chaff and flares like mad, we were still getting flak bursting all around us, but we were running fast away from the target to safety – or so we thought. Inbound, we had spotted a large Iraqi communications site near the IP. Closing on it now, we could see Iraqi soldiers running around the masts, scuttling little khaki specks.

‘Strafe the bastards!’ John called, hoping to retrieve something, at least to have some gun-camera film to show. But it was a futile call. We were not lined up for it. We decided just to get away from them, out of range of their hand-held missiles, their Triple-A fire. I whacked on sixty degrees of bank, pulling the jet round, well wide of the position. But suddenly there was an almighty ‘Whump!’ and my teeth rattled. The Tornado jumped across the sky like a scalded cat.

Oh Jesus Christ… the right engine’s dying, the stick’s gone dead, the fire warning is blaring out: we’ve been hit by a SAM!

In peacetime, a crew would very likely eject from an aircraft with a fire in one engine. In time of war, especially over enemy territory, it can be better to fly on, in the hope that the fire will simply burn itself out. This is not quite as insane as it sounds: each of the Tornado’s engines sits inside a titanium shell, which should contain the fire, allowing it to burn out – in theory. And modern aviation fuel is extremely inert: it will not catch fire even if you throw a lit cigarette into it. This is quite true, I had seen it demonstrated in training. The aircraft will fly on its remaining engine. We knew we would never be able to refuel in the air with the problems we had, but we thought we might be able to make it to a reserve airfield or ‘bang out’ – eject from the aircraft – over friendly Saudi territory.

But this time our luck was out: we were ablaze from stem to stern, the flames fanned bright by the rushing airflow. The whole back of the plane was on fire. And the right wing was on fire, while a plume of grey-white jet fuel was streaming back from the other wing, spilling out into the void.

I said, ‘Prepare to eject, prepare to eject.’ I was getting good at that: it was the second time in three minutes; I’d already called it when the stick fell lifeless as the missile hit.

For the second time, John told me to wait: ‘Whoa! The bullseye point.’ He gave me our exact location, with reference to a known position on the map: quite a good idea to know that before jumping out into the middle of a blank, featureless desert. Then we radioed in our present position. Please Lord, and a big Black Hawk Special Forces chopper would be winching us up in a few hours’ time, while Apache gunships and fighter cover kept the dogs at bay. John called up the formation leader for the last time: ‘We are on fire! We have got to come out. We are ejecting. Ejecting…’

Nobody heard him.

I pulled the stick back. The featureless scrub beneath us disappeared suddenly as the nose came up. Even through the oxygen mask, there came the thick black smell of burning aircraft. I called to John, ‘Prepare to eject, prepare to eject… Three, two, one. Eject! Eject!’

We both hauled up on the handles between our legs at the same time: there was a faint mechanical thud through the seats. Automatically, straps whipped around me, drawing my arms and legs firmly in against the seat frame to prevent ejection injury.

‘Why us?’ I asked myself. I closed my eyes, tight. There was a slight delay, for a hundred years, during which nothing happened. ‘God it’s failed!’ Then the rockets fired. A giant grabbed us by the shoulders and ripped us upwards, at thirty times the force of gravity – 30g – rag-dolls tossed high into the air: a massive roaring noise from the seat-rocket motors, a deafening wind-rush, a sensation of tumbling over and over in space. The slipstream was crushing, even through the flying kit, 400 miles per hour strong – try putting your hand out of the car window at seventy miles per hour, then multiply that sensation by a factor of six. There was a feeling of falling, endlessly falling, somersaulting end over end… Then the drogue gun fired out a small stabilising parachute, to stop the whirling through the air. Immediately, as the seat came upright, the main parachute deployed. There was a jarring ‘crack’ as the canopy snapped open, a massive jerk as it caught the weight. My throat tightened. The seat cut free automatically, falling away to earth. I opened my eyes.

I was hanging under the blessed silk of the parachute with a twenty-pound survival pack dangling between my legs, floating down into the deathly silence of enemy territory.

John Nichol: ‘Shit, this is it,’ I muttered to myself on the way down. I looked over and actually saw the Tornado crash. A huge ball of flame went up, followed by a massive pall of black smoke.

‘Somebody’s going to notice that bugger,’ I thought. After the chaos and insanity of the preceding few minutes, it was icy calm.

Landing. There was something I should remember about landing. I tried to collect my thoughts, my head whirling. Since we had baled out at a mere 200 feet or so above the ground, the thought collection had best be rapid.

Not so long before we went to the Gulf, there had been a case where someone had broken both his legs very badly in an ejection. Any extra weight on your lower body, like a pack, is a very bad idea for the amateur parachutist. The drill is to pull the release strap so that the pack falls away, dangling twenty feet or more below and between the legs. That way the extra twenty pounds or so hits the ground first. That was what I had been trying to remember. I started fumbling madly to get at my pack release straps. It fell away just as the ground came rushing up. I landed with a bang, on my backside, winded by the impact.

JP was about 100 yards away; I could see he was dazed, but basically in one piece. I picked up my pack and ran over. As I got near, I started laughing. His matinee-idol good looks were just a teeny bit damaged: he had blood streaming down his face from a big gash over the top of his left eye. He kept touching the source of the blood with a tentative finger.

‘You look bloody messy!’ I said, to cheer him up.

‘What are we going to do now?’ he demanded, groggily. A vast stretch of mucky brown plain surrounded us in every direction. Janine’s escape and evasion brief, delivered in the calm, orderly safety of the Pilot Briefing Facility, seemed somehow unreal, now we were confronted with this featureless desert-scape. Lawrence of Arabia would have come in handy.

‘I don’t want to worry you,’ I said, ‘but we’re in Iraq. Can you believe it? We’re standing in the desert in Iraq!’ I looked at him. He really didn’t look pretty any more.