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100from the regional authorities.I have got ahead of myself so, to return to the summer of %u201982, thestation was faced with one other considerable problem. Despite mypleas, the request for a %u2018down declaration%u2019 of the Harrier Force (to reflectboth the reality of force availability at G%u00fctersloh and engineer itsremoval from the Part One TACEVAL roster) was refused by HQRAFG. I don%u2019t know why to this day, and of course the inevitablehappened.In late June, the hooter went for a no-notice Part One and a quickcount showed that at G%u00fctersloh, out of my fifty-two pilots only twentyfour were available %u2013 and this included eight new chaps on Nos 3 and 4Sqn who were not yet combat-ready, the STANEVAL people and ourthree US exchange officers. Fortuitously, given the absence of severalaeroplanes on the navalisation programme, we had to generate %u2018only%u2019twenty-four aircraft in the anti-armour weapons fit. Even morefortuitously, the TACEVAL team chief was a Canadian Air Forcecolonel I knew well. In a quiet room in the FWOC we struck a deal thatif I generated twenty-four aircraft within the stipulated twelve hours %u2013and we were now also short of ground crews %u2013 and if I could put a pilotin each one of them for start up and taxi, he would call it quits and ask noquestions. This we duly did. The RAF, and me too, are to this dayindebted to Colonel Morrison. Others I knew at Ramstein at that timewould have really enjoyed roasting us.In a few minutes you are going to hear about the Harrier at war somay I fast forward to the aftermath of the conflict and recall foursignificant points.First, it was abundantly clear that delivering lay down weapons, suchas cluster bombs, from a pass distance (ie the height of the aircraft overthe target) of 250 feet was just inviting trouble. To survive you had to gomuch lower and it was the Falklands experience that propelled us intothe new era of operational low flying with the appropriate regulartraining programmes at home and, importantly, in Canada and the USA.My second point concerns the worry in the staff corridors of HQRAFG that returning aircrew, having tasted red meat, would becomeimpatient at the constraints of peacetime flying in Germany. Nothingwas further from the truth. Without exception, the pilots who came backto G%u00fctersloh from the RN and from reinforcing No 1 Sqn, had enjoyedtheir full fill of excitement and I had no worries about their flying