The CAOC didn’t want to send us to the mountains. Our task was to deal with 32 Brigade and not get knocked down. So we got on with the 32 Brigade gauntlet in Zlitan and the coast west of Tripoli.
By the end of July we had flown twenty missions into Libya. Along the way, over those two months, ten more had been cancelled. From the outset the CAOC was clear – they would not allow us to launch unless they were certain we had a valid target to strike. All ten of those cancellations resulted from target uncertainty. A rate of five per month was acceptable and it demonstrated to us that we were being given serious consideration in the CAOC. But it also demonstrated that reconnaissance or other ‘find’ assets were in short supply. These are the frustrations of resource-finite operations. The lower flying rate didn’t change the tempo for our soldiers and engineers. They still had to provide mission-ready aircraft every day, right up to the late night mission cancellation. They endured a monotony of hard work throughout the day, only to see unflown aircraft returned to the hangar late at night. To their credit, not one mission or sortie was lost due to lack of aircraft readiness. They gave us exactly what we needed to fly every day and night of the embarkation; and they went unrewarded with any Operational Allowance.
With ‘finding’ the target out of our control, we were becoming frustrated with the cancellations. We wanted a new place to strike, a new interest to give us the assets we needed for the decision to let us launch. Nick wanted to see what the mountains were like.
By the end of July there was change in our team in the CAOC. Chris James had returned to the UK to take up a new post in the Ministry of Defence and Glen Parker had come out from the School of Army Aviation to replace him. Glen was another deeply experienced Army flyer. He had bounded through the ranks from private soldier to major and had been a helicopter instructor for the last fifteen years, with operational experience in every theatre of conflict the British Army had been to in the past twenty-five years. Six of our ten aircrew had flown with him or alongside him in Afghanistan the previous winter. He knew the Apache and operations but he was about to endure the shock of capture that only a combat operator can suffer when catapulted headlong into a staff job! PowerPoint, email and telephones were not his usual weapons, nor was he used to tolerating the egos of men in flying suits who sit behind desks. After a brief period of orientation, during which he witnessed three of our mission cancellations, he set about finding new Apache targets in a fast jet community. He settled on the mountains…
After the week of the 27 we had a period of maintenance aboard Ocean. We were also in the boredom phase and to stay sharp we got on with everything weapons. With no missions planned for five days we recalibrated the 30mm guns in the air and also fired our own personal weapons from the quarterdeck. Mark Hall gathered the aircrew and went over our guntape, pointing out the best and worst of the footage with lessons on how to improve. We conducted our six-monthly personal fitness tests and got our Operational Record up to date. The flip-flop was busy, but it wasn’t mission planning, it was administration. We wondered if we had run out of opportunities.
Glen Parker scheduled a call from the CAOC and broke the silence. It was Nick’s turn to command the mission and at the given time he picked up the phone, with the rest of the aircrew coincidentally in the stiflingly hot flip-flop.
I sat close to the phone and listened in to the conversation.
Glen dispensed with the polite chitchat: ‘Stop sunbathing and listen in. Do you remember that possible mission to the Nafusa Mountains mentioned last month?’
Nick nodded and said ‘Yes’ while pointing to the mountains on our map. His indication to the rest of us caused an audible cessation in work. Weapon cleaning, report writing and morphine counting stopped, and the aircrew moved in close to hear the conversation.
‘Well, the FLF commander is still there, and an Apache mission is being discussed here on the floorplate as an option. That is if you think it’s still feasible?’ He knew it was feasible and was taunting Nick.
‘What’s the target set?’ Nick replied. ‘More importantly, it’s a long way and our time at the target will be limited, so who will be cueing us on?’
‘Sadly, same detail as before. You’re unlikely to get a Pred, still all booked up on other tasks in Tripoli. However, the Int guys are confident that the area’s been a stalemate for several weeks, and the front line is well defined. Target sets will be much the same, checkpoints and technicals, however there are known to be a few Armoured Fighting Vehicles still operating in that region.’
Glen thus gave him a little hope, although we all thought it might come to nothing without the Pred. We had heard similar before, so we accepted it but didn’t expect much to develop. Our best hope was that because we hadn’t operated there before, Gaddafi’s forces were likely to have remained in the same locations for extended periods. Where NATO aircraft had operated in the same area for more than a couple of days Gaddafi’s troops had become cautious and would move checkpoints frequently in order to thwart the targeting cycle.
Nick’s call was background noise now in the flip-flop. All eyes were on the maps, the numbers and the weapons load. Nick talked the detail with Glen; the rest of us ran the plan.
Little Shippers brought up the maps on the mission planning system and began drawing planning lines – cigarette packet calculations in modern wiggly-amp ways. He was looking for places to cross the beach, how to find the right approach and identify the wires, the best escapes, emergency landing places and water sources. From this he could give a time estimate to the target, time available at the target and the fuel we would need to get home to Mother. Little Shippers was faultless with numbers – time, fuel and aircraft performance were his specialities.
‘Feasible’ could only come from the CAOC. If they could get something to validate the target so their rules on launching us were satisfied, then we would be good to go. The chances of launching were entirely down to how much the CAOC wanted us to fly.
With the phone call done, Nick briefed us:
Possibly two missions on different nights. Just a pair of aircraft for each. One lot of targets here near this town [he pointed at Bi’r al Ghanam, just 45 miles south-west of Tripoli and clearly on the main road between the capital and the mountains]. The other is here at this random desert road junction and the airfield nearby. It’s being used as some sort of staging point sending troops down to the front line. [He now pointed to Okba airfield, deeper into the desert]. Mission one on the night of the 4th. Mission two the following night or perhaps a couple of nights later, depending on how the first one goes. The initial target packs should come through tonight or tomorrow. The reconnaissance photos are quite old, but it’s all we have to plan with. Once we’ve come up with the outline route and timings we should have more recent imagery. They are apparently going to do some overflights with photo-pods tomorrow.