Wings (2 page)

Morgan felt rage grip him. ‘All-consuming anger welled in my throat,’ he recalled, ‘and I determined, in that instant, that this pilot was going to die.’

It seemed to him that ‘the world suddenly became very quiet. I was completely focused and was acutely aware that this was the moment for which all my training had prepared me.’

He had flown many hours of mock-combat, but never encountered a real enemy. He hauled his Harrier down and behind the second Argentinian. Edging into his peripheral vision on the left, he
suddenly picked up another Skyhawk skimming low over the wave-tops. He decided to go for this one first. He ‘rolled out less than half a mile behind the third fighter, closing like a runaway
train’.

The radar that detected targets and relayed them to the ‘head-up display’ (HUD) beamed onto the cockpit windscreen. As it picked up the aircraft an electronic pulse sounded in
Morgan’s earphones that became an ‘urgent, high-pitched chirp’ when it located the heat of the Skyhawk’s engine. This was the signal for the pilot to lock on the
Sidewinder.

‘My right thumb pressed the lock button on the stick and instantly the small green missile cross in the HUD transformed itself into a diamond sitting squarely over the back end of the
Skyhawk,’ Morgan remembered. The weapon was ready to fire.

‘I raised the safety catch and mashed the red, recessed firing
button with all the strength I could muster.’ There was a fractional delay as the missile’s
thermal battery ignited. Then ‘the Sidewinder was transformed from an inert, eleven-feet-long drainpipe into a living, fire-breathing monster as it accelerated to nearly three times the speed
of sound and streaked towards the enemy aircraft.’

The shock of the departing missile flung Morgan’s aircraft onto his starboard wing-tip. As he righted the Harrier, he saw the missile racing for the Skyhawk’s flaming jet pipe,
‘leaving a white corkscrew of smoke against the slate grey sea’. After two seconds ‘what had been a living, vibrant flying machine was completely obliterated as the missile tore
into its vitals and ripped it apart.’ The pilot, Ensign Alfredo Vazquez, ‘had no chance of survival and within a further two seconds the ocean had swallowed all trace of him and his
aeroplane as if they had never been’.

There was no time for reflection. Another target was directly in front of him, only a mile away. It was the Skyhawk which had bombed the landing craft and it was turning to the left. Morgan
locked on and fired. The jet was flown by Lieutenant Juan Arrarás. He seemed to realize the mortal danger behind him and swung hard to the right, forcing the missile to reverse its course.
It made no difference. The Sidewinder closed on the Skyhawk, impacting behind the cockpit in a flash of white light.

‘The air was filled with the aluminium confetti of destruction, fluttering seawards,’ Morgan wrote. ‘I watched, fascinated, as the disembodied cockpit yawed rapidly starboard
through
ninety degrees and splashed violently into the freezing water.’ At that moment ‘a parachute snapped open, right in front of my face’.

Arrarás had managed to eject from the disembodied cockpit. He ‘flashed over my left wing, so close that I saw every detail of the rag-doll figure, its arms and legs thrown into a
grotesque star shape by the deceleration of the silk canopy’. Morgan felt a flash of ‘relief and empathy’ for his enemy, then concentrated on his next target.

Both his missiles were gone. That left the Harrier’s two 30 mm guns. What he took to be the last remaining Skyhawk was ahead of him. He lifted the safety slide on the trigger. The head-up
display had disappeared from the windscreen and he had only his own skill and eyesight to rely on when taking aim. As he closed on the Skyhawk it ‘broke rapidly towards me. I pulled the
blurred outline to the bottom of the blank windscreen and opened fire.’ The cannon shells pumped out at a rate of forty per second. In the darkness he could not see whether or not they were
hitting. Then, ‘suddenly over the radio came an urgent shout from Dave Smith: “Pull up! Pull up! You’re being fired at!”’

Morgan had seen only three Skyhawks. He had failed to spot a fourth, piloted by Lieutenant Hector Sanchez, which was now bearing down on him. He ‘pulled up into the vertical, through the
setting sun, and in a big, lazy, looping manoeuvre, rolled out at 12,000 feet, heading north-east for
Hermes
with my heart racing.’

Smith, meanwhile, dived low and chased the third Skyhawk
over the water. At a mile range he fired a Sidewinder. Seven seconds later it struck the aircraft of First Lieutenant
Danilo Bolzan. There was a brilliant white flash as the missile exploded. Looking behind, Morgan saw it disappear ‘in a huge yellow-orange fireball as it spread its burning remains over the
sand dunes on the north coast of Lafonia.’

Two Argentinian pilots, Bolzan and Vazquez, were now dead. Arrarás, whose rag-doll figure had flashed past Morgan’s cockpit, had also perished, killed by the impact of the low-level
ejection. Though they had won the battle, the British pilots’ survival was uncertain. They were dangerously low on fuel and
Hermes
was ninety miles away. If they ran out of petrol
they would have to eject into the freezing sea and pray that a helicopter would find them. They climbed high, gaining the maximum height to glide down into a landing.

‘At forty thousand feet the sun was still a blaze of orange,’ wrote Morgan, ‘but as I descended the light became progressively worse. By the time I had descended to ten
thousand feet the world had become an extremely dark and lonely place.’

To add to the hazards a storm was brewing and
Hermes
was lying in heavy rain and gusting wind. There was no fuel to spare for a careful approach using his on-board radar to guide him.
He called the carrier and asked the Controller to talk him down, onto the centre line of the flight deck. He was descending through thick turbulent cloud with three miles left to run when his fuel
warning lights flashed. A few seconds later he ‘saw a glimmer of light emerging through the rain and at eight hundred feet the lights fused into the recognizable
outline
of the carrier’. He ‘slammed the nozzle lever into the hover stop, selected full flap and punched the undercarriage button to lower the wheels’. The Sea Harrier was a jump jet,
capable of stopping dead in mid-air and hovering. Morgan’s aircraft came to an airborne halt on the port side of the deck. He manoeuvred it sideways onto the centre line, then ‘closed
the throttle and banged the machine down on the rain-streaked deck’. As he taxied forward to park he heard Dave Smith landing behind him.

So ended the last air-to-air action engaged in by British pilots. It hardly merits the description ‘dogfight’, as the Argentinian pilots, despite their manifest courage, then as in
previous encounters, never properly ‘came out to play’, to use the characteristic euphemism of the British jet jockeys. It came at the end of a brief air war that still carried a whiff
of classic aerial combat of the First and Second World Wars.

As a young war correspondent who had sailed to the South Atlantic with the Task Force I had a grandstand view of some of the fighting. I witnessed the heroism of the Argentinian pilots as they
took their Mirages and Skyhawks in low over San Carlos Water through a curtain of corkscrewing missiles and fizzing tracer. On the long trek to Stanley my blood stirred when a pair of Harriers
screamed protectively overhead. They seemed to us, shivering in the sleet and mud, the direct descendants of the Fighter Boys of 1940. And that is how they self-consciously saw themselves. Ground
controllers still vectored pilots onto targets by informing them that there was ‘trade’ in the offing – just as they did in the Battle of
Britain. Pilots still
called out ‘Tally Ho!’ before launching their attacks.

Having downed a few pints of beer after his victory, David Morgan retreated through the eerie red glow of the night-lighting in the
Hermes
passageways to the deserted briefing room,
where he sat for a while. His ‘feelings of satisfaction and pride were tempered by a melancholy that I could not identify’. He remembered a poem, ‘Combat Report’ by John
Pudney, who had served as an RAF intelligence officer in the Second World War. Something compelled him to write it out in felt-tip pen on the briefing board. The last lines seemed right for what he
had just seen and done.

That done, he sat down on the bench at the front of the room. He became aware that ‘there was moisture running down both my cheeks’.

The air war ended two days later. British pilots would never again fight another like it. High technology was already in the process of edging human agency from the aerial battlefield. When
Britain went to war with Iraq nine years later, British pilots rarely saw an enemy plane, and the seven fixed-wing
aircraft brought down were the victims of missiles. In the
Balkans conflict of 1992–1995, the Serbian air force posed little threat, nor did the Iraq air force during the 2003 invasion, or the Libyan air force during NATO operations in 2011. In the
Afghan conflict there is no risk at all from enemy aircraft as the Taliban do not have an air force.

British and American pilots sit in the skies, launching incredibly expensive weapons, utilizing the most sophisticated technology against men with rifles who wear sandals to go to war. In this
conflict, I also had a ringside seat.

In the summer of 2008, in Helmand Province, I was with the Parachute Regiment on an operation to clear a route south of the Kajaki Dam in preparation for the delivery of a new turbine for the
powerhouse generator. As we moved down the track we came under sporadic fire from insurgents hidden in mud-walled compounds. A pattern was soon established. The RAF Joint Tactical Air Controller on
the ground with the Paras radioed the map co-ordinates of the troublesome enemy to a distant air base. There was a pause while permission was obtained for a strike. Then a few minutes later the
location would erupt in flames from a laser-guided bomb launched from an aircraft flying at a height that made it invisible. Military aviation has come a very long way in a very short time. This is
the story its journey.

In the space of three generations flight has flooded and ebbed from the world’s imagination. Aeroplanes are part of the backdrop of life and travelling in them has become
mundane and usually tedious. Yet a hundred years ago the sight of a rickety contraption of wire and canvas, fluttering and swooping above the fields with a strangely clad figure perched
precariously inside, was guaranteed to create great – even wild – excitement.

In June 1910, only twenty months after the first aeroplane made a paltry, 450 yard hop over British soil,
Flight
magazine reported that ‘it is becoming the fashion to consider any
openair function quite incomplete unless there is an exhibition of flying to give tone to it’. The editorial was commenting on an incident that had taken place a few days before. At an
agricultural show in the city of Worcester a Blériot monoplane ‘ran amok’. At the controls was Mr Ernest Dartigan. He was assistant to a Captain Clayton, who had been due to give
a
‘series of spectacular flights’ but had injured himself in a crash the previous day. Rather than disappoint the 14,000 people gathered at the showground, Dartigan
had rolled the Blériot out to taxi up and down on the grass. The results were disastrous. Dartigan quickly lost control and the aeroplane charged into the crowd, killing a woman and injuring
several others.

At the subsequent inquest, Clayton admitted that he was not a captain at all, but had adopted the title ‘for business purposes’. Neither he nor Dartigan possessed a certificate of
competence from the Royal Aero Club. The pseudo-aviator did not shoulder the blame alone, however. A Worcestershire County Council official who witnessed the accident told the court that the
‘conduct of the crowd was foolhardy in the extreme. [They] insisted upon crowding around the aeroplane and badly hampered the movements of the man who was in control, in spite the efforts of
police and officials to keep them back.’
¹

This little tragedy tells us quite a lot about those early days. It reveals the ad hoc nature of primitive aviation, glorious or foolhardy according to your point of view. Everything was
necessarily innovatory and improvised. ‘Captain’ Clayton might have crocked himself in a prang, but the show went on nonetheless. The pressure that Dartigan felt to perform is also
revealing. He seems to have considered himself duty bound to give the crowds what they came for. One suspects he also saw an opportunity to indulge his own fantasies. With Clayton indisposed, a
splendid opportunity arose for his assistant to shine. From the outset, aviation was in the hands of those with
a tendency to show off – frequently with the same sad
results as on this occasion.