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Wheelings and DealingsA couple of days later we saw a copy of a minute that had been sent from the Minister's office to the Air Force Board in which it said that the Minister could not agree to the decision to. . . . Rather to my surprise I had no calls over the weekend. A whole week passed and although many rumours had started to circulate all around Cranwell, there was no official news. We were all a bit mystified that there had been no leaks to the media. I suspect that some of the pilots and ground crew thought that I was failing in my duties for not ensuring that the story had hit the headlines. Perhaps the MoD were disappointed by the lack of leaks? Or was I being too cynical?The Team Leader did manage to get approval to fly nine for a Red Arrows' Families' Day on Friday 13th. About 80 friends and relations watched an excellent rolling show. Also visiting on that day was a small group from the Classic FM radio station: Susannah Simons, Presenter of the weekly programme 'Masters of Their Art', her Red Arrows-mad 15-year old son Sebastian, and Producer, Tim Lihoreau. They were recording interviews with the pilots for a one hour programme that I had suggested earlier in the year. I had told the researcher that Flight Lieutenant Andy Evans, Red 2 in the 1998 Team, was an accomplished pianist and bassoon player and had played in the Sussex County Youth Orchestra and I thought it might make a nice change of theme for their programme – after all the Red Arrows are indeed Masters of Their Art. I always wanted to get a photograph of Andy in his Hawk cockpit playing his bassoon 'over the side' – but he would never agree to pose for it. The programme was a great success when it was broadcast on Classic FM later in the year, twice, although in the event it concentrated on Simon Meade rather than Andy Evans. Well, that is the Boss' privilege, I suppose. On Wednesday 18 March I had a long conversation with Tom Rounds, RAF spokesman in the Defence Press Office in London. He was preparing a brief for the Minister for the Armed Forces about the 'nine to seven' decision. Tom thought that the decision would be rubber-stamped by the Minister but he wanted my views on likely media reaction and how we should handle the inevitable media questions. I said that a form of words had to be found to indicate that the RAF needed the Hawks for pilot training and that we could not justify the use of 13 Hawks by the Red Arrows while the advanced flying training school at Valley was desperately short of aircraft for its daily training programme. It was up to MoD spokesmen to explain why the RAF had got itself into that parlous state. I told Tom that whatever we PROs said, the aviation press at home and overseas would have a field day about the worlds' premier aerobatic team being reduced to second-class status. I said that our own local and regional media would certainly give a lot of coverage to the story and that might encourage the national media to follow up the story. National broadsheets would certainly report the news but probably concentrate on the shortage of training aircraft without dwelling too much on the Red Arrows' aspects. The attitude of the tabloids was less certain. I thought the red tops would make a big thing about the Red Arrows being reduced in status in the eyes of the world. The story could run for weeks – well into the display season. I think I worried him – and that was my honest intention! The very next day, 19 March, Simon told me that the Minister had reprieved the nine for at least a year. I wondered if my advice offered to Tom Rounds had had something to do with that decision. Another edict from our own Command HQ, handed down at the same time as the reprieve, was that with immediate effect the Red Arrows must fly a crowd-front show and that seemed to me to be both vindictive and revengeful. The decision to change to a crowd front show at such a late stage of the winter training posed serious problems for the Team Leader. The winter training season was virtually over, the first nine-ship formations had been flown, and all that was needed was a few weeks in Cyprus to polish the routine. It was not a simple matter to delete those manoeuvres where aircraft flew over or towards the crowd. Every show routine is an intricate sequence of manoeuvres designed to flow smoothly from one to another in both time and space. If the Team could no longer arrive from crowd rear, it would have to arrive from crowd left or right and that would mean changing the sequence or timing of all the following manoeuvres. The second half of the show would need the most changes: all the Synchro Pair manoeuvres would need re-planning and re-timing and if the Vixen Break could not be flown, some other manoeuvre would have to replace it. It other words, it would be necessary to design a new show from scratch and that, in turn, would mean reverting to practising with small groups of aircraft before gradually building up once again to nine-ship formations. The past three months of winter training were largely nugatory and it would be several weeks, well into Springhawk, before the Team flew a nine-ship again. Could all that be achieved in time for the Commander-in-Chief to award Public Display Authority in early May or would the start of the season have to be delayed? There was no arguing with the crowd front order and on the day he received it Simon was sorely tempted to cancel that afternoon's Out-of-Season Practice at Kirton Lindsey, an Army base about 10 miles north of Scampton on a former RAF grass airfield. I persuaded him to fly at least part of the show because I knew there would be a large crowd of army families and local school children to watch what had become an annual pre-season free event. Simon agreed and while the Team were airborne Tom Rounds from the Defence Press Office rang. He wanted to tell me himself the news that the Minister for the Armed Forces had been persuaded by the arguments I had put to Tom the previous day and that it was the Minister who had rescinded the order reducing the Team to seven aircraft. Success for PR! Tom had not heard about the crowd front decision but that was not really his concern. A couple of days later we saw a copy of a minute that had been sent from the Minister's office to the Air Force Board in which it said that the Minister could not agree to the decision to reduce the Red Arrows from nine to seven and that he felt sure that another solution to the problem of a shortage of aircraft at the flying school at Valley could be found. As I saw it, the two most likely media questions that I would have to answer would be: why have the Red Arrows now fallen into line with most of Europe after holding out for 9 years, and why had it been left almost to the end of the training season to implement these changes? It was only a matter of two or three days before official requests came in for displays in France and the Netherlands so the news had reached the international stage very quickly from one source or another. The locals around Cranwell and Scampton, however, did not notice the crowd front changes as quickly as they would have noticed a reduction to seven aircraft and that gave us a few days grace before I had to answer questions. Once again it was BBC Radio Lincolnshire and the Lincolnshire Echo that heard about the changes first, but neither organisation would tell me what their source was. On 3 April I sent the following fax message to our Command HQ. 'I have just spoken to Tom Rounds in the Defence Press Office about an enquiry I had this morning from the Deputy News Editor of the Lincolnshire Echo (John Casey). The Lincs Echo man was wondering why we have not been flying very much recently when we normally fly three times a day every day at this stage of the training season. As agreed with you earlier, I explained that the Red Arrows are changing their show to conform with EC regulations and that the Team leader and his pilots needed time to re-organise the routine and to eliminate crowd over-flights. Inevitably the News Editor asked why we are changing the show at this late stage. I referred him to the Defence Press Office for an answer to that! 'NB. The Lincs Echo has asked to send a reporter and photographer to Cranwell on Monday next (06 Apr) to cover the Team's departure for Springhawk. I have said they are welcome but we can expect more questions then.' The reporter from the Lincolnshire Echo persevered. He telephoned the Defence Press Office, our Command PRO and me several times. Someone obviously did spill the beans – and it certainly was not me! The Lincolnshire Echo was first off the mark, as far as I am aware, and I answered their reporter's questions straight out of the Q & A briefing notes. They really went to town. The next day the single word headline across five columns was 'BANNED'. Under the headline was a large and superb colour picture of a Vixen Break and under that the story. There was also a World Exclusive tag. It does not happen very often that a regional newspaper can claim a world exclusive! The Mail had the story next and it seemed to me to be based almost entirely on the Echo's piece. The Mail's headline was, 'Red Arrows lose strings from their bow in safety crackdown.' It continued: 'For more than 30 years the Red Arrows have enthralled crowds with their aerobatics. But a tightening of safety rules means that their most famous stunts will soon disappear from the skies forever. The daredevil pilots have been told that they will have to rewrite much of their programme to meet regulations. Some of their most famous manoeuvres involve them flying over the crowd at low level. Legislation prohibiting certain manoeuvres was introduced in many European countries 10 years ago, but the Red Arrows, regarded as the best in the world, were the only aerobatic team to have a special licence allowing them to carry out the daring stunts. A Ministry of Defence spokesman said that there was a lot of ill will among other display teams that the Arrows were allowed to perform things that they weren't. All aerobatics are governed by the Civil Aviation Authority, and it was deemed that the RAF could not allow the Red Arrows this special privilege any longer.' Although the Mail's story was essentially correct, especially the comment about the Red Arrows being the best in the world, there were certain statements in it that did not tell the whole story, possibly because the reporter did not ask the right questions of his source. No-one from the Mail spoke to me at all. The Red Arrows pilots cringe when they hear their manoeuvres described as stunts because the word 'stunt' has an implied suggestion of foolhardiness and the way the story had been written implied that the Red Arrows' displays had not been entirely safe in the recent past. That implication was something that I had been particularly keen to avoid. I was surprised at the statement attributed to the MoD spokesman: I had never heard of any of ill will amongst the other aerobatic teams because of the Red Arrows' waiver to fly certain manoeuvres over, or towards, the crowd. After that I was inundated with requests for interviews from media outlets all over the country. The Team Leader and I gave both live and recorded interviews with radio stations as far away as Jersey and the Isle of Man. Television stations in the north and the Midlands carried the story and the local BBC television stations re-used gruesome footage from the Frecce Tricolori's 1988 Ramstein accident. It was particularly galling, certainly for the Team Leader. Introducing a crowd front show in his third and final year would have been his legacy to the Team. By forcing its introduction right at the end of the training season for his second year, it seemed more like compulsion than a legacy. All in all, this whole saga was a good example of how not to handle sensitive PR stories and I was embarrassed that I had to be associated with it. |