Red Arrows
On 6 May 1989, exactly 24 years to the day after the very first Red Arrows’ display and my dinner engagement with a BOAC air hostess in Singapore (for that story click here), I went for an interview for what I thought was to be the newly-created post of Public Relations Officer for the Red Arrows. I was in for a surprise.
I had to take a day out from my job at RAF Sealand near Chester to attend the interview. For three years since leaving the intelligence world I had been Staff Officer for the North and West Region of the Air Training Corps: ‘North and West – Biggest and Best’ my Boss there, Group Captain John McMinn, always proclaimed proudly to anyone who would listen. Sadly, a few years later the biggest and best was disbanded in a cost-cutting exercise and the 180-plus cadet squadrons were transferred to other regions and the region itself was no more. Thankfully the disbandment was not put into effect until after John McMinn had reached retiring age.
John and I were both employed as RAF Retired Officers. Unlike officers in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and Royal Auxiliary Air Force, retired officers wore normal RAF uniform with no special insignia. Apart perhaps from the visible signs of advancing years, I was indistinguishable from any active service squadron leader. One of the real perks of being an RO, although not everyone would see it as a perk, was that once appointed the individual could remain in service, should he or she so wish, until the age of 65. This always irked the Civil Service whose own servants were, at that time, required to hang up their equivalent of flying boots at age 60. The Ministry of Defence branch of the Civil Service probably eyed the RO corps with a certain degree of jealousy because we were seen as officers who had passed their sell-by date and who, by hanging on to rank, power and privilege, were depriving real civil servants of jobs where they could hang on to rank, power and privilege. To counter that the Department of the MoD responsible for RO recruitment and careers always aimed to have the job specification for retired officer posts written in such a way that only retired officers were qualified to fill them. I changed that when I came to retire.
From early 1989 I had been on the MoD mailing list of job vacancies. I was looking out for interesting jobs on the eastern side of the Pennines. Not that I was dissatisfied with my job at Sealand: far from it. I was, however, getting homesick for Yorkshire. I believe that all exiled Yorkshire folk sooner or later want to return to God’s own county, and if they don't then they should! It would have been polite, not to say proper, for me to have told John McMinn what I was about but I couldn't bring myself to tell him that I was considering a move. He was a thoroughly nice man and, apart from his habit of chain smoking which subjected me, his driver and the rest of his administrative staff to the unpleasant effects of secondary smoking, we got on extremely well together. Even John, however, would admit that he was rather possessive. Two years earlier he had moved me, with my willing connivance it has to be said, onto his Headquarters’ staff from a lesser post within his command and I knew that he would try to persuade me not to leave Sealand.
Right from the outset there was considerable confusion about what the job at Scampton actually entailed. The paper shufflers had sent me two job specifications for what they presumably thought were two quite different posts at Scampton. I learned much later that there was only ever one job on offer. One of the job descriptions was for a Community Relations Officer, a retired officer post in the rank of flight lieutenant. A number of CRO posts had been created in early 1989 at major RAF flying stations dotted around the country to counter the increasing number of complaints from the general public about low flying aircraft and the noise they generated. The complainants in some parts of the country had been getting more and more vociferous; it seemed almost as though the writers were being orchestrated by some pressure group but, as far as I know, there was never any evidence to substantiate that. The RAF had decided that a group of strategically based CROs might be the answer. These officers would get to know their local communities and would visit some complainants at their homes to try and pacify them and explain why the RAF needed to fly at low level. I had read that job description with only passing interest because I was not at all interested in a flight lieutenant post, nor did that type of work appeal to me.
The other job specification was for a retired squadron leader to be appointed as the Red Arrows’ PRO. That sounded much more appealing. The essential and desirable criteria listed for the post seemed to fit my qualifications exactly: I was a retired squadron leader pilot with media experience; I was, or rather had been, an A2 qualified flying instructor, although it was by no means clear why that was important; and I had graduated from various staff college courses. It seemed to me that a job which involved working with, and writing about, the Red Arrows was just my cup of tea. I was surely just the sort of person they needed and I put in my application forthwith. So that there could be no misunderstanding about which post I was applying for, I included with my formal application a covering letter in which I expressed my total disinterest in the Community Relations job and gave my reasons. To my great surprise an invitation to attend for an interview at RAF Scampton arrived on my desk at Sealand only a few days later, almost indecent haste I thought at the time because things don't normally move very quickly in the retired officers’ world. Clearly Scampton was very anxious to fill the Red Arrows’ post.
While I was in a downstairs office in the Station Headquarters building at Scampton waiting to be summoned for the interview, I was handed another copy of the job description. Scrawled on the top of this form a handwritten note said, ‘Mr Cunnane: for your information before the interview’. Those were the days before word processors were widely used. Reading through the form, it quickly became obvious to me that the typist at Scampton had been told to copy selected elements from the two job descriptions I had seen earlier and type them onto a new form, but the result was a botched job editorially. There were some new items and some old ones and some that had later been crudely altered by hand without the original being sno-paked out. Furthermore, the typist had included the date, May 1988, that had appeared at the bottom of the two original job specifications. The post described in this new document bore only a passing resemblance to the one I had applied for. It was clearly a rush job but at least there was no mention of low flying complaints.
Apparently I was wanted – but by whom and to do what?
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