Hunter Flying at RAF Valley - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

After basic flying training at Leeming, my advanced jet training was done at Valley in Anglesey. Six out of the 20-odd students who should have been on the Gnat  flying course, including me, were instead destined to be guinea pigs on a new course utilising Hunter fighter aircraft because there was a shortage of Gnats.

On day one of the course the Chief Instructor apologised to the six of us and assured us that the training we would get would be just as good as if we had been on the Gnat course. He need not have worried! We were delighted to be flying the venerable but famous Hunter. Our aircraft were still painted up as front-line fighters whereas all the Gnats were in standard training command colours. The real perk, however, was that all our solo flights, apart from the first one in a 2-seat T7, were flown in Hunter Mk F6s  - real single-seat aircraft. What is more our F6s had the full 10,000lb rated engine, not the down-rated version that many of the main force of Hunters were using, and since our aircraft were not fitted with the heavy under-wing fuel tanks that the front-line Hunters carried, our F6s really did perform extremely well.

The first solo was flown in the Hunter T7, in my case XL591. When the instructor deemed that we were ready, we taxied back to dispersal, he got out, made his own ejection seat safe, and then sent us off. For our first solo in the single-seat F6 a couple  of trips later, our own instructor stood on a ladder alongside the cockpit while we carried out the pre-start checks and familiarised ourselves with the cockpit: there was no flight simulator. That was a great moment. We called for taxi instructions and  then the cockpit canopy was closed and we were off. We all went outside to watch as each one of us went off on our first solo in the F6.

There was an effect known as waving goodbye whenever a pilot got airborne on his first sortie in a Hunter F6. It was the first time we had flown an aircraft with powered flying controls and the F6's flying controls were so light to the touch that it was quite difficult to keep the wings level as we left the ground for the first time. The acceleration was phenomenal. We had been briefed by the squadron commander that he didn't want to see Gnat take-offs; he wanted us to level off as soon as we were safely airborne, get the undercarriage up and locked and accelerate to climbing speed before starting to climb. The climbing speed, which I seem to recall was 330 knots, was easily reached by the end of the runway and then it was up, up and away.

I managed to give myself one or two minor scares when flying solo in the Hunter but because we did not readily admit to that sort of thing I was probably not the only one. The best solo trip for me was the night supersonic sortie very late on 3 August 1967. The visibilty was unlimited with not a cloud in sight. Amongst other things I was briefed to climb to 45,000 feet, point the aircraft out over the Irish Sea to avoid dropping a supersonic boom over land, roll over into a 60 degree dive on full throttle and exceed Mach 1. It was quite exhilarating and eventually the ground radar controller suggested that I turn around and head back towards Wales as I was about the cross the border into the airspace of the Irish Republic!

The next time I flew supersonic when captain of an aircraft was four years later overhead Paris in a Victor tanker - but that's another story.

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