Page 282 - Demo

278parachute. But we also spent time demonstrating various things to make their life%u2019s better. We would also hide a couple of QFIs in the woods. One would be up a tree and the other in a buried hide. The students would then be tasked with a systematic search of an area where the guys were hidden. They seldom found them but to be fair we knew which tree to climb and eventually dug a proper hide which we kept covered up from exercise to exercise. Being up the tree was interesting. You had to go high enough not to be seen from below but if you went too high you were sticking out of the top. On one exercise a helicopter came looking for them and flew low over the wood. Trees were bending all over the place and I was worried that someone would fall out.On day 4 we would give them a time to be prepared for a rescue aircraft. They would have various fire sets built and laid out SOS type signs on the side of the hill. The idea was to make it as obvious as possible. At some agreed time, a JP or later a Tucano would come howling round the hill and there would be a huge panic to get things lit. The search aircraft would do a couple of passes and then go home. There were some difficulties with this as Otterburn was an active range and you could not fly over bits of it. The QFIs who flew the aircraft always thoroughly enjoyed it and would give us a phoned debrief on how effective the signals area had been. We would then get a SAR helicopter in to winch the students up and often give them a little fly around. They always came out grinning and we knew that the helicopter crew had fed them despite being told not to. Actually, being given a little food just increased the pangs of hunger. I do not think that I minded very much. We then moved them to another wood much closer to where we were staying but they did not know that. They now had to build natural shelters. They could build them for 4 people and cuddle up together to keep warm in the winter. In fact, the nights were often cold in the summer too. We showed them how to build fires with a reflector behind it made of logs. This threw the heat into the shelter and also used less wood. As