Peter Iain Campbell

“One of the things that was completely unique to Tornado was the night low level flying, where without a doubt, your heart was racing, even when you became comfortable with it. It would be racing almost the whole time. In your first ever night low level trip in the aircraft, you used the Terrain Following Radar {TFR}. You’d be at about 5,000 feet and you’d do a series of checks with the navigator and then press a series of buttons, which essentially engages the auto-pilot, which then uses the radar out of the front of the jet to fly it all the way down to 250 feet. I’ve done it flying through Glen Coe at night and you’re hands off – the jet is flying with cliffs going by you on either side. It’s pretty terrifying on that first trip when you’re not allowed night vision goggles and it’s basically, to give you confidence in the system.

After that first trip, you’d start flying with night vision goggles and just like binoculars, you effectively get a single cylinder that you end up seeing – it was like looking through a toilet roll tube and you can only see where this is pointing, plus it’s in green and black, so you get no depth perception at all. They work off ambient light, so if it’s a totally dark night, they were almost useless. If the moon was out and it was a starry night, they were phenomenal. Where the jet became incredibly capable, in its day, was the mix of flying with night vision goggles and TFR. Although, I don’t think I ever got fully chilled-out, comfortable with it. People had died from it, but we had learnt so many lessons over the years, it felt pretty safe during our time and it was thrilling… and that’s what I really miss. It was like jumping on a motorbike and driving on black ice.”

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“I remember 15 bird strikes that I had while flying tornado. The one I remember the most was when we were flying around Devon at low level and we see a big flock of seagulls and we pull up, but we don’t manage to miss the flock – we go through the top end of it. They later estimated that we probably hit about 27 of these seagulls. So, you get seagulls down the engines – all you can smell is fried chicken, as the cockpit conditioning comes from an engine bleed. The whole canopy goes red. Essentially, pureed seagull. It’s hit us so hard that it also blows the pressurisation in the canopy and with Tornado canopy, the split is over the pilot’s knees. Within ½ second, the pressurisation blows – you can hear it go, “BANG”, and then all this goo starts dripping into the aeroplane over the pilot’s knees. The smell of this stuff is disgusting. Pureed seagull smells like the worst kind of rotten fish. I’m pissing myself laughing in the back. We came out of all these birds and all the shuddering and shaking with the impact, but now we can’t see anything. The entire canopy from front to back is completely pureed seagull… It’s dangerous not to be able to see. We would have to use up all the fuel we could to see if any of it cleared from the canopy and failing that, we would probably have to eject and park the jet in the sea somewhere.”

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“Saying 250 feet and saying 100 feet doesn’t sound like a big difference – it was massive. Going down to 100 feet, the Tornado pilot was only ever allowed to look between 10 O’clock and 2 O’clock. You weren’t allowed to look any further, because all you had to do, was not hit the ground. That was your sole purpose – do not hit the ground…”