Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother had contacted the Commandant Central Flying School after reading the two stories in the Times to express her sorrow that the Red Arrows were soon to be made homeless and asking how she might help. The Commandant would not tell me what he had advised the Commandant-in-Chief to do.
Another telephone call to me came from Ronaldsway Airport on the Isle of Man. They wanted to offer hangarage for the Red Arrows' Hawks once they were mothballed. Soon afterwards we learned of another plot, and I put it that way deliberately. We were not officially told of the new plot but the gist of it simply emerged; no-one I asked could remember where the story originated but we had all heard it. The Red Arrows would, according to this new plot, move to Marham as originally planned but all the training flying would take place at Sculthorpe, a base with a very long runway that had been used by the US Air Force for many years but was now inactive. There was a major flaw to that plot that we at the Red Arrows could see immediately but no one outside the Red Arrows had apparently thought of it. The idea was that the Red Arrows would take off for the first slot in the morning, practice overhead the airfield at Sculthorpe and then land there. In the meantime, the ground crew would have left Marham as soon as they had seen off the Red Arrows and travelled to Sculthorpe by road aiming to be there in time for the Red Arrows when they landed about 35 minutes later. The problem was that the distance between Marham and Sculthorpe as the Hawk flies is 15 nautical miles but the distance by road, narrow twisting Norfolk roads, is 27 miles and would take very nearly an hour. It was an ill-conceived idea and we heard no more about it.
There was an official announcement on 26 August 1995. The Red Arrows were to be based temporarily at the RAF College Cranwell for up to two years while the MoD searched for a permanent home for the Team. One very curiously worded report stated, "The team will not, however, be able to fly over Cranwell. Instead, they will be accompanied by fire engines and ground controllers to their old base of RAF Scampton, Lincolnshire, which closes next month, to practise their precision aerobatic routines. The team, which needs a six-mile wide cone-shaped area free of all other aircraft in which to fly, originally planned to move to RAF Marham in Norfolk, but other squadrons complained of a possible clash with training. After the transfer, a daily convoy of fire engines, emergency trucks and ground controllers will leave RAF Cranwell to drive the 25 miles to the deserted base at Scampton and stand by in case of problems. They will then drive back to Cranwell where the Hawks of the Red Arrows will land and the crews return to their quarters."
An MoD spokesman that day said, "The aerodrome and buildings at Scampton won't be disposed of until 1998. Most of the family quarters will be retained by the RAF for people working at Cranwell and Waddington. The Arrows can only do their intricate manoeuvres over RAF premises in the interests of safety. Keeping the Scampton runway open as a stand by will cost an extra £1.6 a year."
By and large the population close to Cranwell were delighted by the news. The problem with Cranwell was the same as with all the other airfields: the station could not afford to stop its own intensive flying for six 30-minute periods daily to give the Red Arrows sole use of the skies overhead. And, of course, there was now the delicate PR problem of explaining why, if Scampton was to be closed because it was no longer needed, the Red Arrows were going to continue their training flying there - and at some considerable expense. Curiously, the local media never asked that question, probably because they were so pleased that the Red Arrows would still be flying over Scampton. Nor did the media question the cost of maintaining the runway at Scampton, necessary in case any of the Red Arrows needed to use it in an emergency. The media might also have asked how the MoD hoped to sell off the base to business concerns when the Red Arrows would be roaring overhead six times a day in winter. But they did not.
It was clear, to us in the Red Arrows at least, that the decision to close Scampton had been taken hastily and without giving due thought, or any thought, to the consequences. One very senior officer (two-star) whom I met socially several years later cornered me and asked, "Are they still blaming me for closing Scampton?" I was forced to be honest and say that many people were but of course that didn't mean that they knew the inside story of what led to that decision. "Suffice it to say," replied the very senior officer with a resigned look on his face, "it was not my decision. I tried to warn people of the difficulties that it would create but I was over-ruled." I looked at him with raised eyebrows but he merely smiled and refused to be drawn. It was that famous need-to-know principle at work again.
Had a decision to disband the Team been taken at the time the Defence Costs Study was published, I think the MoD would have got away with it. However, so much publicity about the Red Arrows was generated once the announcement that Scampton was to close was made that it was then too late to tell the great British public that the Red Arrows would be disbanded. There would have been an outcry – and not only in the UK. The statement that the Red Arrows would move to Cranwell as a temporary measure was, I suspect, made in desperation just four weeks before we set out for the Middle East and South Africa on the first part of the autumn tour. At least we would now have a home to come back to.
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