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 that this was the day I’d find out whether I had what it took to become an army helicopter pilot; I was seriously worried that I’d underestimated Palmer. Moments earlier, as I’d been briefing him on the flight, he seemed to have reverted to his old ways. As I’d scribbled away on the whiteboard in the briefing room, recounting what I’d be doing on the sortie, Darth Vader had just stared at me – the laser stare that everybody had been so alarmed by when we’d first arrived. Gone was the genial bloke who’d opened up the Apache for me and taken my picture. In his place was a big, taciturn bear that looked like he was eyeing me up for breakfast.
‘Any questions, sir?’ I’d asked when I’d finished the briefing.
‘No.’
‘I’ll see you at the aircraft then, sir.’
‘You will, Corporal Macy, you will.’
After walking around the aircraft, I clambered into the cockpit and tried to focus on my pre-flight checks. When I’d got all my maps ready, I set about programming my navigation aid. When I’d done that, I went over everything all over again.
Glancing back at the hangar, I spotted Palmer, larger than life, helmet on, visor down, striding across the grass towards me.
His gait, his whole demeanour seemed to be saying: don’t screw with me; don’t even talk to me.
My name’s Chopper Palmer and I’ve got a reputation to protect.
A reputation he’d flexed only yesterday morning when he failed one of our course before they’d even taken off.
You arsehole, I said to myself, you requested this guy – and now he’s going to fail you.
He walked round the aircraft, opened up the flimsy little door and began to position himself in the commander’s left-hand seat. He was so big that he bounced me out of mine, but he didn’t seem to notice. He squashed me against the perspex as he leaned over to put on his straps and he didn’t notice that either. How was I supposed to fly this thing?
As I continued with my checks two things dawned on me.
The first was why he’d been nicknamed Darth Vader. He sat completely immobile, head forward, visor down, and had the scariest breathing I’d ever heard: a long, slow, deep, throaty breath in, a pause too long for a mere mortal to survive, and then a rush of air out.
The second was why he chopped more students than the rest. I was nervous, worried and my hands were visibly shaking. If we were having a fight I’d be in my element, but sitting here in this cramped cockpit knowing that he held the power to end my long quest was becoming unbearable. I was about to fail because I was struggling to hold it together. He was a chopper because students just dissolved in front of him.
I fired up the Gazelle’s single engine – no problems there – but my first real test came when I needed to check behind me to ensure no one would be decapitated when I engaged the blades. Palmer was so big I couldn’t see past him.
I spoke into my intercom. ‘Can you check left please, sir?’
‘No.’ Palmer continued to look directly in front of him, his visor hiding any expression he may have had.
Parts of me were starting to die. What the fuck was this? ‘Unless I check left, sir, I can’t start the blades. I might chop someone’s head off.’
He squashed me again as he grudgingly looked left. ‘Clear.’
My sense of foreboding deepened. I thought of everything I’d been through – grading, a whole year spent learning how to fly – and it had come to this: cramped in a tiny cockpit with a gargantuan instructor who seemed hell-bent on failing me.
Somehow, as we made our way over the Hampshire countryside, I forced myself to concentrate. I simply had to do my best; I had to hold it together. For most of the rest of the flight I was somehow able to zen out Chopper Palmer’s brooding presence, despite the fact that I remained squashed into my side of the cockpit by the man’s enormous bulk.
Bit by bit we completed the test, until, right at the end, we came to the clincher: Practice Forced Landings. I carried out several PFLs that I thought were pretty good. Then, as we were approaching the airfield with the test minutes from completion, he suddenly said, ‘I have control’, chopped the engine and we plummeted earthwards.
As emergency landings and autorotations went, it was the best I’d ever seen; so expertly done, in fact, that he bled away the last reserves of energy in the Gazelle’s freewheeling blades in a beautiful flared landing that ended in the helicopter’s skids literally kissing the grass.
As we slid to a standstill I was so awestruck by this textbook display that I failed to take on board what he said next. It was only when my mind replayed the instruction that I realised he’d asked me to take off again and given me a grid reference.
I’d missed it.
He’d suckered me, the old bastard. I’d thought the test was over.