Page 135 - Demo
P. 135


                                    133having been able to jettison my parachute, which remained attached to the dinghy through my harness.Once in the helicopter, I was ordered by the lovely (she - it was a she!) but quite forceful doctor to sit in the corner and behave myself, while we went to fetch the Tornado crew. As I sat there, I became aware that a spare comms. lead was dangling from the bulkhead.Keen to find out what was going on, I plugged it in. Error!. With a helmet still full of water and lots of static, the wiggly-amps took the path of least resistance %u2013 straight through what had, until take-off time, been my brain. The perfect end to a perfect sortie.There are a couple of footnotes to this saga. The first involves the reaction of the Tornado pilot (a friend then, but an even better one later, as we pounded the AOC%u2019s Wilton together)6. I stumbled, regardless of the Doc%u2019s orders, from the helicopter to see how he was, only to be greeted by a look of complete bewilderment (he was not aware at this stage that he had hit another aircraft). What was said then has been reported apocryphally more times than I can shake a long stick at. Suffice to say that it had something to do with %u201chow long has he been on helicopters%u201d. The second occurred at Ely hospital where, having trailed around from department to department carrying our flying kit (in case we had sustained back injuries in our ejections), we were pronounced fully fit, and then immediately told by the sister that we were to stay in our beds and not to get out even for the potty.So, that is the tale of how I came to share ownership of the north Norfolk Coast %u2018flow arrows%u20197. How I subsequently acquired a 50% interest in the Hexham arrows is another story..........1 Z = GMT2 Time on Target3 A standard low level routing from Norfolk to mid-Wales4 The %u2018same way, same day formation, beloved of participants in Red Flag and other major exercises; it simplified planning, de-conflicteddifferent elements, and saturated defences 
                                
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