Part of me still couldn’t quite believe what I was doing. I felt like a circus performer who was about to put his head in the lion’s mouth.
When I caught up with him, Palmer started to brief me on the admin task. As he did so, he glanced at my beret and told me something I already knew-that one of his boys was in the Parachute Regiment.
‘Is he in White Feathers One or Grungy Three, sir?’ I asked. 2 Para had sent 1 Para white feathers for missing the Falklands and 3 Para, quite frankly, needed to wash.
He smiled. ‘That would make you Bullshit Two, I guess.’ He knew I was 2 Para from the blue lanyard I had wrapped around my shoulder.
I was about to reply when I saw a shadow racing across the ground between the hangars. I looked up. The first aircraft to arrive at the show was a helicopter. I couldn’t tell what kind. I held up my hand and squinted against the sunlight.
As the machine banked on its final approach, I got my first proper look at it. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen-big, dark and angular, it resembled a menacing primeval insect. It came into a slow hover right in front of the tower and hung in the air. Then, nose down, nodding to a crowd of onlookers that had lined up to gawp at it, it crabbed towards a ground handler armed with two orange paddles before finally thumping down onto the ground.
Chopper Palmer swore under his breath. All I caught was something about Yanks.
‘Sir?’
‘Fly like that with me, Macy, and I’ll mince you up through the fenestron of your Gazelle.’
‘What is it, sir?’ I wanted to get off the subject of going anywhere near a helicopter with him.
‘That,’ Chopper Palmer said, with a tinge of admiration in his voice, ‘is a United States Army AH Sixty-Four Alpha. You ought to be able to tell by the unorthodox approach that it isn’t from around here. It’s known as the Apache.’
It was the first combat helicopter I’d seen up close. The Apache, I knew, was one of four helicopters competing for a UK MoD contract that would see the British Army equipped with a dedicated attack helicopter for the first time in its history.
As things stood, the Army Air Corps was equipped with two kinds of rotary wing aircraft: the Gazelle and the Lynx (not including the special Gazelles and A109s used by the SAS).
The Gazelle was generally employed for training, liaison and reconnaissance, but could be used for emergency casevac and move a couple of lightly kitted-out troops but that was about it-a valuable but limited asset.
The Lynx Mk7 was an anti-tank helicopter armed with missiles on each side. It was seriously underpowered and suffered badly when it came to moving even small amounts of troops. It was also hindered by the fact it needed a door gunner, reducing its load-carrying capacity and restricting the access from one door. The choice was missiles or troops-it couldn’t handle both. And its Tube-launched Optically-tracked Wire-guided-TOW-missiles did not cut the mustard. It was supposed to be our first line of defence against enemy armour, but if it had ever taken on the massed ranks of Soviet T-72s on the West German plains, it would have been massacred. And the lessons of the recent Gulf conflict said that it wouldn’t have fared a whole lot better against some of the lesser equipped armies still out there. Waiting for the TOW missile to be manually tracked all the way to the target, it was a sitting duck.
As a result, the impetus to equip the Army Air Corps with a dedicated attack helicopter, one that had been specifically designed for the role, had gained momentum, and the Apache was the main contender. It was battling for the contract, valued at upwards of £2 billion (and that was just for the airframe, not including the simulators or associated equipment), against three other machines: the German-Franco Eurocopter Tiger, an anglicised version of the US Bell Cobra called the Cobra Venom, and the Rooivalk, an ugly brute from South Africa. The Apache’s presence at the show was a sign that the competition was hotting up.
I’d never seen anything like it. I was totally mesmerised.
Later, I asked Mr Palmer if I could take a look at it up close. He did better than that: he walked straight up and asked if I could sit in it.
The pilot, looking bored in a pair of mirrored Ray-Bans, was only too happy to oblige. Seconds later, I dumped my camera on the grass and was hauling myself into the rear cockpit-the pilot’s position.
Glancing around the cockpit, I could see that it was a world away from the small, flimsy, plastic analogue world of my Gazelle. The Apache was huge, robust and instead of all of the normal instrumentation it had the bulk of its data displayed in the centre of the instrument console.
‘Smile, son.’ I looked out to see Chopper Palmer pointing a camera at me.
I wasn’t sure what had made me happier-sitting in a machine I swore to myself I’d fly one day, or knowing that Chopper Palmer wasn’t the Dark Lord after all.
The gunner’s position in the front was dominated by a big metal block jutting above the MPDs that looked like a cross between an inverted periscope and something you’d find at a coin-operated peep-show. ‘This,’ my tobacco-chewing Texan friend told me, ‘is something we call the ORT: the Optical Relay Tube. By lowering your eyes to the ORT it allows you to see the enemy using direct viewing optics.’ He showed me a pink lens that covered the right eye, ‘Look through that,’ and then pointed to the MPDs, ‘or at them, and you see what the Apache sees.’ He spat out some tobacco. ‘You can see the radar picture, the image projected by the gunner’s thermal imaging system or his daylight camera, the pilot’s thermal system…well shit, son…any one of ‘em, at any given moment, all at the flick of a switch.’
‘Fun’s over, Corporal Macy,’ Chopper said. ‘We have some marshalling to do.’ He walked off, forcing me to run after him again.
Three days after the show ended, we were back in the classroom again, preparing for our last few sorties before the dreaded Final Handling Test.
Before we knew it, it was late June. WO2 Bateman was putting the flying programme together. He was attempting to avoid pairing particular students with a particular Aviation Standards Officer if they had a good reason for not wanting to fly with him. The floor erupted. ‘Not Chopper Palmer, sir, he hates me…’ ‘Don’t give me Darth Vader, I’ll pay you any money…’
I hadn’t shared my belief that Palmer’s bark was worse than his bite; I knew no one would have believed me. I stuck my hand up and announced that I wanted to fly with Chopper on my Final Handling Test.
The laughter was immediately replaced by a silence you’d only expect to find in libraries and monasteries.
‘That’s good, Corporal Macy,’ Mr Bateman replied, ‘because Mister Palmer has asked to fly with you.’
Catcalls, wolf-whistles and cries of ‘teacher’s pet’ bounced off the four walls and Sammy called me a brown nose.
‘I wouldn’t be so quick, marine,’ Bateman said. ‘You must have been right up Mr Palmer’s arse with your Para mate here, ‘cause he’s asked for you too.’
The lads had seen me getting on with Darth Vader, but Sammy hadn’t been within thirty yards of him. Sammy called what he thought was Bateman’s bluff.
Bateman replied, ‘I think Mr Palmer said it was something to do with “Para Para in the sky”…’
I was off like a shot with Sammy hard on my heels, calling me every name in the matelot’s dictionary of profanities.
I walked out to the aircraft nice and early on the day of the test. It was a beautiful summer’s morning. An old Battle of Britain airfield, Middle Wallop had remained the largest grass airfield in the country and was as perfect a setting for an air base as you could imagine. The sun was just poking through the trees on Danebury Ring, the site of an ancient hill fort to the east.
I usually loved this time of day, but I felt troubled. It wasn’t simply