t’s 0730hrs and pilots
stream into the main
briefing room at No
29 Squadron, the Typhoon
Operational Conversion Unit
(OCU), for the morning ‘met
brief’. As the name suggests,
this is based around the day’s
weather, but it also takes into
account the available aircraft
for the flying programme
and any admin that needs
to be addressed. Flt Lt
Craig (surname omitted for
security reasons) is already
on a tight timeline. He’s well
into the planning cycle for his mission today.
With just a few weeks of the Typhoon
course remaining, today Craig has got his
‘offensive VID’ (visual identification) sortie.
With take-off at 0950hrs, there’s always
one eye on his watch. While he’s talking
to the engineers about available aircraft,
printing off the domestics card and paper
maps, his instructor is on the phone toNo 100 Squadron at Leeming,
North Yorkshire, to discuss the
day’s learning objectives. ‘The
Ton’ will be providing a ‘target’
Hawk for Craig to intercept.
“The meat of our formal briefing is
the air exercise that I am flying,”
says Craig. “I will be flying up to
an unknown target and identifying
it as necessary. So, we will go
out as a pair [with an instructor
in the lead jet], police a piece
of sky, find something on the
radar and then check it out.”
With another quick check of the
watch and little time to spare,
he’s off to the secure mission planning room.
AFM caught up with Craig post-mission.
“We walked [to the jets] about 45 minutes
prior to our planned take-off time, then flew
for an hour and ten minutes and we worked
with a Hawk from No 100 Squadron. The
first run he was friendly and simulated an
airliner with a comms issue, but the second
run he was hostile, so I had to engage, fightTraining a
t’s 0730hrs and pilots
stream into the main
briefing room at NoOperational Conversion Unit
(OCU), for the morning ‘met
brief’. As the name suggests,
this is based around the day’s
weather, but it also takes into
account the available aircrafton a tight timeline. He’s well
into the planning cycle for his mission today.No 100 Squadron at Leeming,
North Yorkshire, to discuss the
day’s learning objectives. ‘The
Ton’ will be providing a ‘target’
Hawk for Craig to intercept.
“The meat of our formal briefing is
the air exercise that I am flying,”
says Craig. “I will be flying up to
an unknown target and identifying
it as necessary. So, we will go
out as a pair [with an instructor
in the lead jet], police a piece
of sky, find something on the
radar and then check it out.”
With another quick check of the
watch and little time to spare,
he’s off to the secure mission planning room.I
and ‘kill’ him. Then I had to put the horns
away, fly through cloud and land back here.
We’ve just debriefed, which took as long as
the sortie itself, and the majority of that was
focusing on how the task went. Each trip is
graded, so it shows trends in each student.”
With a scale of 0-5, a score of two indicates that
a student will have scraped through, although
in this case Craig ‘aced’ it. While lower grades78 // MAY 2018 #362 http://www.airforcesmonthly.com