I get a new appointment - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

In January 1975 I left 55 Squadron and was appointed Officer Commanding Victor Standardisation Unit (VSU). My new unit lodged in a tiny office on the top floor of one of the hangars at RAF Marham. It made sense for the VSU to be lodged at Marham, because all the RAF’s Victor tanker aircraft were based there, but I now reported directly to the Air Officer Commanding No 1 Group (the AOC) then based at RAF Bawtry, 100 miles away near Doncaster, and from time to time that caused small administrative difficulties and embarrassments. This was a truly amazing appointment for me because only nine years earlier, when I was still an Air Electronics Officer but about to start my own pilot training, I sat in on a very heated staff meeting where a new commanding officer for the 3 Group Standardisation Unit, the predecessor of the VSU, was being discussed. (Read that story here.)

As the AOC made abundantly clear to me at a one-sided interview when he appointed me, I was responsible to him alone, and not the Station Commander at RAF Marham, for all aspects of Victor tanker operations. To do that I and my three specialists, a navigator, a navigator radar/refuelling operator and an air electronics officer, had to carry out regular flight and ground checks on the crews of the three Victor squadrons (55, 57 and 214) and additionally make recommendations to the AOC on any matter affecting tanker operations that we saw fit.

The first thing I noticed after taking up the appointment on 1 January 1975 was that I am my colleagues could no longer pop into any of the squadron crew rooms just for a coffee and a chat. “You and any member of your team may call in for a social visit,” OC 57 Squadron, Wing Commander  Al Sutherland, told me one day in my first week, “but you must ask me in advance so I or one of my flight commanders can be present. Look at it from my point of view: you work for the AOC – I work for the Station Commander. I need to know  what you’re up to!”  I could see his point.

During my time as OC VSU I usually gave squadron aircrew about a week’s notice of the impending flight check. I was supposed to fly with every captain once per year and supervise a flight simulator sortie once per year with each of the simulator instructors. In addition to those duties I also had to renew squadron flying instructors’ QFI categories annually (on behalf of the Commandant of the RAF Central Flying School then based at RAF Little Rissington) and there were sundry other tasks concerning checks of flight supervisory officers. Like all captains, I had to renew my own Instrument Flying rating and other qualifications once per year. For those purposes I flew with a squadron captain who was authorised to carry out those tasks - and I always had sleepless nights before them! It could all have been a bit nepotistic because I could choose which checking officer to fly with - but it wasn’t. I knew that if I did not meet the required standard in any test, then I would be in big trouble – and the reverse was also true. The same principles applied to my three colleagues.

Once per year my entire unit had to descend on a squadron HQ for three or four days and examine everything in minute detail from the cleanliness of the buildings to the correct maintenance of the multitudinous order books. To make sure everyone realised it was the formal annual inspection we had to turn up on the Monday morning dressed in our best blue uniform. That always seemed well OTT to me but it had, so I was told, been the practice in the V Force for many years. The VSU's annual formal inspection was a worrying time for squadron commanders.

I tended not to flight check co-pilots unless there was a special reason for doing so because I could leave that to the Squadron’s own qualified flying instructors. I flew mostly in the right hand seat, carrying out the co-pilot’s duties, unless I was flight checking a captain who was himself a squadron flight checker and who was, therefore, authorised to fly in the right hand seat. I welcomed my left hand seat trips because I needed to keep myself current in handling the aircraft from either seat.

An unsatisfactory flight with any VSU member was inevitably reported straight up the command chain to the AOC – by me on the telephone immediately after landing if there was something serious to report.  As well as a narrative report I was supposed to assess each pilot under a long list of headings as either: Unsatisfactory, Satisfactory, Commendable, or Exceptional. It was a bit of a daft system because the narrative adequately said all that was required. If I awarded an ‘Unsatisfactory’ to any crew member it could have serious career repercussions. As a result the aircrew under test were always in a state of anxiety during the flight checks and indeed, if they were like me during my years as an squadron captain on Victor tankers when I had 6 annual VSU flight checks, they had probably spent an anxious if not sleepless few nights.

Typical VSU sorties before I took over the job had always started with some sort of emergency on or immediately after take-off which would lead to a heavyweight asymmetric circuit and overshoot on 3, and sometimes 2, engines. This was an academic but very demanding exercise for the under-powered Victor K1 aircraft. It didn't make any sense, in my opinion, to put two engines on the same side to idle almost as soon as the aircraft left the runway - especially in an old aircraft at maximum all up weight! That type of emergency had been introduced many years earlier when it had been thought likely that a turbine failure in one engine could cause damage to the adjacent engine. I thought that sort of thing was better tested, and a darned sight safer, in the flight simulator so I tried to be more realistic. I tended to simulate an engine failure several thousand feet in the climb. That was actually more difficult to handle, particularly in bad weather, because it involved the entire crew: there was the problem of returning to the airfield, perhaps losing height rapidly, and then feeding into the always busy circuit at Marham. It also got the ATC controllers out of the habit of expecting a simulated emergency as soon as my wheels left the ground.

Soon aircrews got used to my way of doing things but I always told them at pre-flight briefings, that I was not trying to catch them out; I was simply looking to see how they handled the sort of emergencies that could occur in normal operations. VSU trips had not been like that before.

My typical VSU flight checks would involve refuelling either a group of fighter aircraft or another tanker, a simulated emergency that would require an unplanned diversion to another airfield and then a return to base for a variety of circuits and landings. The object was to see how the 1st pilot and his crew reacted to both normal and emergency situations. The first question crews always asked each other when they returned from a VSU check was “What did he give you?” or “Where did you go for your practice diversion?” At one stage, well into my tour of duty, I jokingly threatened that I would start introducing practice diversions to either Heathrow or Gatwick but, of course, I couldn't do that – and not only because the RAF would not pay the airport handling fees! However I discovered later that some crews had started looking up Heathrow and Gatwick approach and departure procedures, just in case.

There was one over-riding principle of any tanker operation: the receiver(s) should always get from us the fuel they needed to complete their mission. For Pirate Trail A26, starting on 24 February 1975, the mission was to escort a single Royal Navy Buccaneer from the UK to Florida to replace a Buccaneer that had ‘dropped over the side of the aircraft carrier and been lost’, was a case in point but it didn’t go as planned.

Advance to the story of the Pirate Trail