Maintaining the aim
Wilfred De'Ath
C'Nn 12 April 1983, I entered Brize Norton V RAF base during a NATO tactical evaluation exercise intended to seal the sta- tion off from the outside world. Without documents of any kind, I boarded an RAF VCIO and flew to Akrotiri in Cyprus and back in one day. Nobody believes me when I tell them this, but it is the truth.
There is a bit of background. Finding myself living just a few miles from Brize Norton and, given the amount of interest in the base during and after the Falklands crisis, culminating in Mrs Thatcher's depar- ture from there immediately after Christmas, I thought that '24 hours in the life of Brize Norton' might make an in- the interesting piece for the Spectator. Last January I duly received a letter of applica- tion from this paper which, on the instruc- tions of the Officer Commanding Brize Norton, I forwarded to the PRO of RAF Strike Command at High Wycombe.
There followed several weeks silence dur- ing which, I assumed, my credentials were being cleared at the highest level, i.e. at the Ministry of Defence. Persistent telephone calls to the PRO at Brize Norton only elicited the response that I might do the story 'but not yet'. The weeks turned into months and I became impatient. Early on the morning of 11 April, the PRO finally telephoned to say that the story was 'off' due to the above-named exercise. Now thoroughly annoyed, having been kept waiting for nearly three months by the RAF, I determined to see for myself what was going on. It was a personal example of what I believe is known in military parlance as 'maintenance of the aim' — the aim, in this case, being to write a basically sym- pathetic tale about RAF Brize Norton which had been stretched to its limits during the Falklands affair and which had done, by all accounts, a very good job.
On the evening of 11 April, around 9 pm, my landlady drove me over to the Brize Norton base from Burford, where I live, a distance of about 6 miles. (The NATO exer- cise, intended to reproduce the conditions of an RAF station at war, had begun at 8.30 a.m. that morning). Dressed in a scruffy corduroy jacket and trousers, I told the main gate that I proposed to take Flight 2711 to Akrotiri. (A telephone call to High Wycombe earlier in the day had elicited the flight number.) A handful of extremely young RAF personnel, dressed up as soldiers and carrying tin helmets and pop guns, looked at us curiously but no one stopped us or asked for any documents or even searched the car. In fact, we were wav- ed through.
Inside the enormous barbed wire com- pound, we drove around in darkness for some time looking for the Gateway House hotel where passengers normally stay the night prior to their departure on an RAF flight. When we finally located it, polite hotel staff informed me that I might have a room on production of a boarding card for Flight 2711 and this I could obtain from the flight departures terminal, a short RAF bus-ride away. I said au revoir to my helpful landlady and set off into the night.
This was the difficult part. I possessed no flight documents whatsover, nor would my name appear on the passenger manifest. carried only an out-of-date 10-year passport (it had actually expired the previous week) and a current British Visitor's Passport which; for reasons still unclear to me, is not valid in Cyprus. The duty movements of- ficer, a very agreeable Scots W.O., looked understandably sceptical when I told him that I wished to board Flight 2711 to Akrotiri. My name was not on the manifest, nor had it ever been. I told him the history of my dealings with the RAF in fairly emphatic terms. What it was that eventually made him issue the precious RAF boarding card I shall never know, but the Wing Com- mander just behind me in the check-in queue said later: 'My first thought, I must admit, was that you must be the most enor- mously brilliant con man, but then I thought no, you must be a bone fide jour- nalist who really has been given a raw deal by the RAF PR system. From that moment, I determined to help you.' The Wing CO. was to be as good as his word. Safely in possession of the boarding card, I returned to Gateway House, arguably the most un- comfortable hotel in the world (it was surely here that Mrs Thatcher caught her famous cold, not in the Falklands). At 2.30 a.m., a ghostly infra-red light fill- ed the room and a disembodied voice in- formed us that our flight would shortly be boarding. We dressed hastily. I had one last checkpoint to cross: passport control. Al this point, the friendly Wing Commander who was going out to Cyprus to play squash and perhaps felt a little guilty about it, tooK command of the situation. He pointed out that I would be making the round trip, fly, ing back from Akrotiri that same day, that, in any case, he proposed to talc,' responsibility' for me. The young RAF passport clerk looked extremely unhapPY about it, but he let me through. A
minutes later, decidedly euphoric at having beaten the system, I boarded the gleaming' silver VCIO which shortly took off into the
night. with dawn
The flight out was a dream, wit
over the Alps, and a superb view of the Greek islands. Seats on RAF planes face
backwards, an important safety factor, and there is no drinking, which matters less than one might expect. Now very confident, I in- troduced myself to the Loadmaster, a delightful Maltese Warrant Officer, who in turn introduced me to the flight deck crew, a couple of charming squadron leaders who managed to disguise their curiosity as to what I was actually doing on their plane. They even invited me on the the flight deck for the landing at Akrotiri.
We spent a couple of delightful hours in the Mediterranean warmth shopping for cheap fruit and duty-free wine and cigaret- tes. The lemon blossom was out and so was the mimosa. I was allowed back on to the flight deck for the take-off.
Back at Brize Norton that same after- noon, a very subdued PRO was waiting on the tarmac to greet me. (He had received a signal from Cyprus.) He even took my box of grapefruiut out of the forward hold and carried it across to the arrivals lounge for me. A few hours earlier, those grapefruit had been growing on a green hillside on the troubled island. At Brize the tactical evaluation exercise was still in progress. Neither of us said a word as we stepped into his car. I had maintained the aim and I felt rather proud of myself.
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