Wings

WINGS

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Patrick Bishop, 2012

The moral right of Patrick Bishop to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84887-892-1
E-book ISBN: 978-0-85789-981-1

Printed in Great Britain
Atlantic Books
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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26–27 Boswell Street
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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To Tim Harris

1 Pilots of the Purple Twilight

2 A Wing and a Prayer

3 Archie

4 The New Front Line

5 Death, Drink, Luck

6 The Third Service

7 Jonah’s Gourd

8 Arming for Armageddon

9 Into Battle

10 Apotheosis

11 Flying Blind

12 Seabirds

13 Wind, Sand and Stars

14 No Moon Tonight

15 Air Supremacy

16 Jet

17 ‘Fox Two Away!’

18 Per Ardua ad Astra

The encounter lasted little more than three minutes. It took place in the violet-blue skies of a midwinter dusk, over the Falkland Islands, 8,000 miles from Britain. It
happened more than thirty years ago and it is very unlikely that anything like it will happen again.

On 8 June 1982, at 3.50 p.m. local time, a Sea Harrier fighter jet piloted by Flight Lieutenant David Morgan took off from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier HMS
Hermes
, on station
about ninety miles north-east of Port Stanley, the capital of East Falkland. Another Sea Harrier, with Lieutenant Dave Smith at the controls, followed two minutes later. The pair set course for
Choiseul Sound, the sea channel separating a stretch of wilderness called Lafonia from the rest of East Falkland, where they were to mount a CAP – a combat air patrol.

Earlier in the day two ships moving soldiers forward for the final assault on Port Stanley had been attacked by Argentine air force jets while the troops waited to disembark. There were
no aeroplanes to protect them and no missile batteries in place. The bombs killed more than fifty men. CAPs had been flown over the areas since the catastrophe. While there was still
light there was still time for another Argentinian attack.

As Morgan approached the scree-covered hillsides of the island, which were turning purple in the setting sun, he saw ‘a huge vertical column of oily black smoke’ rising from the bay
at Fitzroy settlement, where the stricken ships lay. The rescue operation was still under way and landing craft crawled back and forth, loaded with wounded. Morgan wrote later that he was
‘gripped by an awful sense of foreboding’.
¹

The two jets settled into a pattern, ploughing a parallel furrow a couple of miles above the scene, cruising at 240 knots (276 mph), flying for ten minutes into the sunset, then turning back
again. Sea Harriers were equipped with Blue Fox radar for looking downwards. It was designed for use over the Arctic Ocean against the Soviet air force but over land it was ‘useless’.
Instead the pair relied on their eyes. The dusk was in layers, shading from light to dark as it neared the earth’s surface. Staring into it was tiring. After a few minutes both pilots began
to experience ‘empty field myopia’, losing their middle and long-range vision. Morgan and Smith fought it by focussing on each other, then on their forward radar screens, before
resuming their visual search.

As they headed west along Choiseul Sound Morgan noticed a small landing craft making its way eastwards. He radioed the air controller aboard one of the ships in the area, who told him it was a
‘friendly’, transporting troops to the inlet at Bluff
Cove, further up the coast. As he passed it on each leg of the patrol he looked down and ‘imagined the
crew, cold and tired in their tiny boat and . . . wondered if they had any idea we were watching over them.’

For forty minutes they flew back and forth, nursing their fuel, not talking, ‘both feeling a burgeoning impotence’ at their detachment from the scene below. At about 4.40 p.m. Morgan
made another turn to the west and checked his fuel gauge. He had four minutes flying time left before he would have to head back to the mother ship,
Hermes
. The landing craft was still
butting eastwards, with white water breaking over its bow.

Then Morgan noticed a shape emerging out of the dying light of the western sky.

‘A mere mile to the east of the tiny vessel was the camouflaged outline of a . . . fighter, hugging the sea and heading directly for the landing craft, which had become a very personal
part of my experience for the last forty minutes,’ he remembered later.

He jammed open the throttle lever, shouted to Smith to follow him down and pushed his Harrier into a sixty-degree dive as the air-speed indicator shot up from 240 to more than 600 knots. As they
hurtled downwards the jet closed on the landing craft. It was a delta-winged A-4 Skyhawk, and he watched it open fire, ‘bracketing the tiny matchbox of a craft’ with 20 mm cannon fire.
Then a dark shape detached from the wing. Morgan was relieved to see the bomb explode at least a hundred feet beyond the vessel. But then he saw another A-4 running in behind the first attacker.
The second pilot did
not miss and he watched ‘the violent, fire-bright petals of the explosion, which obliterated the stern’.