A letter from Baghdad - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

I wrote this story in May 1999 for the Cranwell Courier, the Station's in-house magazine magazine, and it's reproduced here without any editing.

For lovers of trivia, this is the first year that all the pilots in the Team have come from single-seat aircraft. For some reason the pilots are very proud of this fact although one of the pilots did get a little bit of banter about his early tour on helicopters. In the early years Team pilots came straight from such exotic multi-seat aircraft as Vulcans, Victors, Canberras, Javelins and Phantoms all of which were fast but not fast-jets as defined these days. In more recent years Buccaneer and Tornado pilots have always been well represented but, for what it is worth, 1999 marked another first for the Red Arrows.

As I write this in early May 1999, the Kosovo conflict is still unresolved and still very much in the news – and the BBC TV news caption writers still, almost daily, spell Air Marshal incorrectly (by adding an extra ‘l’). One way or another, the war is having quite an influence on Red Arrows’ operations, as would be expected. So far we know of five air shows that have been cancelled and several more are on the verge of being cancelled or re-scheduled.

Some people found it surprising that the Red Arrows kept on practising for the 1999 Season as though the Kosovo conflict was not happening. However, it should not really have surprised anyone. Although all the Red Arrows’ pilots this year are from the Jaguar and Harrier forces, they were not required for operational duties. Neither were the ground crew, nor the aircraft, required for duty elsewhere. That being the case, what else would the Red Arrows do?

As it happens on the day that the shooting started the Red Arrows were en route from Emmen in Switzerland to Bari, but were diverted by the Italian ATC to Gioia del Colle. The Team kept a very low profile whilst on the ground at Gioia since the operational  crews were briefing for their first sortie against Serbia. Kate Adie and the rest of the media pack were asked not to film the Red Arrows as that would probably have led to all sorts of wrong stories being published. There was a long delay in departing from Gioia due to poor weather and it was not until after dark that the Reds eventually arrived at Akrotiri. Those folk who ask why the Red Arrows bother to keep night current now know why! The 11 Hawks breaking into the circuit at night apparently caused some concern and comment in the local Cypriot media, especially as the arrivals coincided with the first televised news reports of the war on CNN and BBC World.

We all hope that things will soon have returned to normal and then the Red Arrows will be expected to perform as immaculately as ever at air displays all over Europe. There are displays scheduled for at least 9 overseas countries: Jordan, Poland, Norway,  Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Eire, Sweden, and Spain. There will also be displays in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

While the Kosovo crisis was still leading the news bulletins that other trouble spot, Iraq, had tended to drop out of the news. I was reminded of this when an air mail letter from Baghdad dropped into my in-tray one day in April addressed simply: "Red Arrows England NG348 HB". I quote, without corrections:

"Dear Sir, I am M Sc student in Mechanical Engineering. My high admiration and appreciation your Reed Arrows Team. I follow up with carefull attention the great victories gained by your team. Unfortunately I have no internet so it is difficult to keep up to date record of the recent developments. Kindly send me a collection of photographs of your team pilots, with their signatures and any other information you see important."

It would be nice to think that Ahmad Jasim was just an ordinary student who likes to collect autographs, but you never know. Needless to say, I did not reply to the letter.

Requests for the Red Arrows to participate in various Millennium events have been coming in, in dribs and drabs, for several months. We politely declined one invitation to fly at midnight on 31 December 1999 even though I agree with the organiser that we would have considerable enhanced the celebrations in that particular village. S Eng O, incidentally, assures me that the Y2K bug will not affect the hi tech computers in our Hawks so that there would be no engineering reason for not flying over midnight.

Many requests for Red Arrows’ shows are sent direct to us at RAFAT HQ but not all have been carefully thought through. One TV company wanted the Red Arrows to perform live over Penzance during the two minutes of darkness when the total eclipse  of the sun occurs on 11 August. We may keep night current but that is ridiculous! When I suggested to the Director that the people on the ground might rather watch the once-in-a-lifetime celestial events than a performance by the Red Arrows that would need night vision spectacles, he gave in. Another request came from a PR executive who wanted individual aircraft to "zoom" along the Blackpool sea front at midnight on the final evening of the 50th post-war Blackpool Illuminations. "Can they fire red, white and blue flares as they have a sort of dog fight?" I was asked.

In one respect the year 2000 will see a reversion to old 20th Century standards when a GR1 and an F3 pilot will be in the Team. When, I wonder and am often asked, will we have our first female Red Arrow?