Chris talks about his career with the RAF, which lasted a little over 37 years. He joined as a fighter controller, and was posted at Neatishead twice for a total of six years. He’s worked in various roles such as a fighter allocator in the Netherlands, a military observer in Sierra Leone, and in procurement in the Ministry of Defence.
Early life and deciding to be a Fighter Controller
I was born in Scarborough up on the Yorkshire Coast, in a family of six children. I had no military background in my family. My grandfathers were just the right age to avoid the wars and my father was exempt from national service because he’d had a kidney removed. I remember from an early age having a fascination with aircraft, and I always wanted to be a pilot. I was privately educated, and my senior school was Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. There was a cadet corps there which was entirely army. The school was famous for having seven Victoria Crosses from the army, though one of these was from the Royal Flying Corps.
I had a very good friend called Richard Weeks who was also interested in aeroplanes, and we used to spend a lot of the evenings just talking about aviation. After our first few months in the cadet corps, we began to talk about what the Royal Air Force was like. Richard wanted to be a pilot. By then I was wearing glasses and was pretty sure I couldn’t be a pilot. I started investigating the options.
When I was 16, I was thinking I wanted to be either an air traffic controller, who keeps the aeroplanes apart, or a fighter controller, who brings aeroplanes together. I was invited to visit RAF Leuchars. Everyone who showed me around was really friendly. I can remember going into the Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) shed at Leuchars, and seeing an F-4 Phantom jet with all the missiles on, ready to launch at short notice if required. And I can remember putting my hand on this jet and thinking, ‘this is really cool. I want to be involved in an organisation that has kit like this.’ That was when I decided that yes, fighter control was what I wanted to do.
Richard Weeks joined the RAF as a pilot and flew on 32 (The Royal) Squadron.
University Air Squadron
I went to the University of Birmingham, and after my first year there I was successful in joining the University Air Squadron (UAS) on a Cadetship. This meant I would be sponsored for my final three years at university. So, on 20th June 1983, I was commissioned as an acting pilot officer into Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force. I was really chuffed and proud and 40 years on I still remember that day very clearly.
The three years on the UAS were lots of fun. I learnt to fly in Bulldogs. I went on trips to Germany, I spent a week in Berlin, I spent two weeks in Cyprus, we even went to a place called Macrihanish out in the Mull of Kintyre for a couple of weeks.
Training
I went to RAF College Cranwell in September 1986 for my officer training. I graduated from there on 23rd April 1987, and proceeded the following week directly to the School of Fighter Control. At the time this was based at RAF West Drayton, just north of Heathrow.
Fighter control training was, and still is, renowned for being quite difficult. It’s very much an aptitude based skill. I would say that of the people who wanted to do it, maybe 25% were successful, 25% of people would have to go and find something else to do in the air force, and 50% remained in the branch but went onto the surveillance side of it, where they were responsible for identifying the air picture and sharing it.
I finished the simulator course at West Drayton in August 1987, and I hadn’t found it easy. It had been really challenging.
RAF Buchan
Leaving the School of Fighter Control, there were always three places you could go to do what we called phase two, or live training, and then to have your first tour. The first option was RAF Buchan, up at Peterhead in north-east Scotland. This was a place with less busy airspace, and was a much more straightforward place to learn your skills. The second option was RAF Boulmer, in Northumberland near Alnwick. The third option, which is where only the very best weapons controllers got to go for their live training and first tours, was RAF Neatishead, just north of Norwich.
I was very clear in my mind that I was not of the calibre to go straight to RAF Neatishead, and it is fair to say that my instructors were of the same opinion. Some people were naturals at this job, and other people had to actually work quite hard, so I was more than happy to have my first tour at RAF Buchan. Peterhead is not the most attractive place in the world. It was renowned at the time for its high security prison, its large power station, and its Crosse & Blackwell pickle factory. It was also the largest white fish port in Europe. But I had fun there. I remember we had 36 very junior officers living in the mess together, and we worked hard and played hard.
I qualified as a weapons controller in March 1988, and started my career working QRA shifts, which were two days, two nights, and four off. I learnt my skills generally just controlling F-4 Phantoms out of RAF Leuchars.
In those days, it would have been very unusual for the Warsaw Pact to just go to war with NATO without any sort of hint. But at Buchan we used to be exercised, which meant the alarms would go off at 5.00am. All you heard on the tannoy was ‘alert, alert, alert, all personnel are to report to their war locations immediately,’ and you didn’t know whether it was an exercise or for real. Not until you got off the bus on the operations site and walked in would someone tell you it was exercise this or exercise that.
Cyprus
In November 1988 I was sent to Cyprus for five weeks to assist with the Phantom operation conversion unit training program. They detached from Leuchars, and I spent five weeks on top of Mount Olympus controlling the Phantoms. I really enjoyed it.
Shortly after coming back, I was informed that I had been chosen to go back to Cyprus in 1989 for six months to cover for a gap in the manning. So, in May 1989, I packed my swimming trunks and left north-east Scotland for Cyprus. I was the watch commander or Duty Controller during my shift. It was basically two days, two nights, four days summer holiday for an unmarried 25 year old for six months. It was great fun, and interesting work.
RAF Saxa Vord
Someone decided, having the experience in Cyprus that I had, there was little point sending me straight back to RAF Buchan. I was actually very disappointed to be told I was posted to RAF Saxa Vord on the island of Unst, at the northern most point of Shetland. I did challenge them because there was an unwritten rule you didn’t post people from Buchan to Saxa Vord. They explained it was a good career move for me! So off I went to northern Shetland. I bought a pair of binoculars, some good walking gear, and a book of British birds.
I didn’t want to go, and 18 months later, I didn’t want to leave. I had such a fantastic time. It was a gloriously attractive place to live, with lovely people; the work was quiet at times but it was the proper job.
Our job was to intercept the Russian Bear reconnaissance aircraft coming around the North Cape and then down into the North Sea. At maybe 4.00am the phone would ring and it would be the Master Controller at RAF Buchan saying, ‘the Norwegians are tracking two suspected Bears. They’re going to intercept them. We are launching QRA One from Leuchars, coming to you straight away, and then a quick reaction tanker (either a VC10 from Brize Norton or a Victor from Marham) is going to pick up QRA Two abeam Leuchars. They’re all going to come to you.’ So there I was, 26 years old, controlling a tanker and two Phantoms, intercepting Russians. And no-one else could see what I was doing, because it wasn’t digital in those days. We just had to tell the Master Controller what we were doing.
It was interesting work, and at the time no-one ever spoke about it. These days you read about it in the paper, or see it on the news, ‘the Russians have come down and the RAF did a marvellous job.’ It’s nothing new, it’s been going on for many years, and I was very much a part of it in the late 80s and into the 90s.
Sometimes, the Bears would do targeting runs against Saxa Vord. Because they were coming directly towards you in a particular profile, you knew that they were simulating firing something at you, but you always sat there and thought, well, I do hope this is just them simulating. We always knew at Saxa Vord that we were the first target.
The Falkland Islands
In September 1991, I thought it was time for me to go to Neatishead. I’d been to north east Scotland, I’d been at the top of the mountains in Cyprus, and up in Shetland. I’d been away from civilisation for too long, I wanted to be down in England proper. They said I could go to Neatishead, but first they were sending me to the Falkland Islands, because I was the only one in my cohort who hadn’t, as I went to Saxa Vord early.
So I went from the most northern RAF unit in the world to the most southern unit. It was a Signals Unit, a radar station in west Falkland on top of Mount Alice. We were 28 guys living on top of a mountain, the only way to get there was by helicopter, it was over Christmas. I wasn’t that impressed, but everyone has to do it, and it was only four months. It seemed a lot longer at the time, though.
First tour at RAF Neatishead
In March 1992, I left the Falklands and moved into the officers’ mess at RAF Coltishall, starting my first tour at Neatishead. The work was challenging, the air space was extremely busy, and there was much more co-ordination with civilian air traffic control. We didn’t really have segregated air space in those days. It was challenging work, but I grew into it. I became much more confident and for the first time I really started enjoying the actual control part of the job.
We had a great bunch of people there. There was a great spirit. A lot of younger officers living in the Coltishall mess were Neatishead single men and women. The Neatishead officers’ families lived down near the airport, in Horsham. There was an old officer’s mess which used to be student accommodation, and we were in the houses behind it. There was a real community there. All us “singlies”, as we were called, were often invited down to come to the parties.
I was on 1 Squadron, and I think my first time squadron commander was Archie McCallum, who I’d worked with at Buchan. Justin Wilde was another of my squadron commanders. We were working those days above the ground, in what is now the museum at Neatishead, and we were using the equipment that you can see there today.
During the summer of my first Neatishead tour, I met my future wife. So, I actually spent a lot of my weekends down in London. I also decided that it was time to get on the property market, and bought a little maisonette on Grove Road in Norwich, near the hospital. It was nice to live in the city. It was much closer to our favourite pub, called the Ribs of Beef, where we would always meet up. Route One: go to the Ribs, and then go to a curry house, and then come home. In those days, there were so many curry houses in Norwich that you could get a full meal and a couple of pints for £10, which is always a good thing.
The UK Air Defence Region
In those days, air defence was all about NATO air defence. NATO divides up its airspace of sovereign airspace for countries, which comes up to their border or out to 12 miles over the sea. But it also declares internationally that it has an interest in airspace that goes beyond territorial waters.
Being a member of NATO, the UK was responsible for a huge amount of airspace, including right up to a Danish radar in the Faroes. It was called the UK Air Defence Region. When we built the air picture at Neatishead, our identification and surveillance officers would have had to identify every aircraft flying in this region. This picture was then shared across NATO, so everyone could see what the NATO airspace was like. You could set filters on it, so they wouldn’t see the entire picture, only aircraft of interest, and other countries did the same. Warsaw Pact aircraft were of particular interest.
Since 2001 and 9/11, things have changed much more towards national airspace protection, but the NATO part continues on today.
End of Neatishead first tour
I was really enjoying my time at Neatishead, and we were about to transition from the interim fit above ground back into the R3 bunker to work with new equipment. The whole UK air defence system was being upgraded with the UK Air Defence Ground Environment Command and Control System, or UCCS. It was state of the art in those days, a big screen with a more television like picture than the old fashioned orange bright-up screens we had, which you could only see properly if it was really dark.
We had to go down to RAF Ash, near Sandwich in Kent, to do the course on this new kit. It was four weeks, and it was a lot of fun. We were all staying either at Manston or at Deal barracks, and we worked hard and played hard and learnt all we needed to know.
While I was there, looking forward to getting on to using this kit, I got a phone call from my desk officer, who brought up the fact I’d been volunteering to go to France on an exchange tour. I was very excited, and then she said, ‘well, I want you to go to Holland instead.’ I could speak a bit of French, but I didn’t know any Dutch. That was alright though, because I was going to be sent on a six month language course first.
So at the end of January 1993 I was still administered at Neatishead but I’d stopped working there, and I went and I just learnt Dutch. I could walk to the little language school from my house, and I was doing three hours of lessons a day, five days a week, for six months. When I wasn’t in the lessons I was listening to Dutch radio, because you could pick it up on AM.
Exchange Officer in the Netherlands
In July 1993 I packed everything up, got lodgers in my house, and drove off to the Netherlands. I lived there for three years. In April 1994, Katy and I were married back in Yorkshire, and she came straight out and lived with me in the Netherlands, so we had almost a two and a half year honeymoon.
I was doing exactly the same job I’d been doing at Neatishead, but I was doing it with the Dutch air force controlling their F-16s in Dutch air space as the exchange officer. It was a great NATO exchange program. There was a Dutch officer over at Neatishead working with the Brits, and I was over there working with the Dutch. We also had an American exchange controller at Neatishead, and a Frenchman. Boulmer had its own exchange officers, as did Buchan. It was a great scheme.
In my final year in the Netherlands, I was trained to be a fighter allocator. The term came from the war role that would allocate weapons controllers to particular targets, but in peace time it was the guy who manages the weapons controller team. Generally, I think it was no more than four controllers that you had to supervise. You had to make sure they were staying in their airspace, that they had all the support they needed, that they were doing things correctly. You also had to plan the flying programme, talk to the squadrons, make sure that everything had somewhere to go and that it was all managed safely and efficiently.
Return to Neatishead
I loved being in the Netherlands, and in 1996, when I had to come back to the UK, I’d been preparing Katy for the inevitability of a posting back to somewhere we might not enjoy as much. Instead, I was delighted when they told me that I could have what I wanted, which was to go back to Neatishead.
We packed up and drove back, moving into Embry Crescent in Horsham, number six I think it was. That was the start of four fantastic years back in Neatishead. I had to redo the UCCS course which was now based in RAF Boulmer, because I’d forgotten it all by then. Then it was back into 1 Squadron again as a weapons controller, and I very quickly found my feet. I was doing day shifts in the evenings now which I enjoyed because you weren’t sitting around all night with nothing to do. You were always controlling.
Press Relations Officer
By this point, I was thinking I needed to progress more in my career. I was becoming quite a senior flight lieutenant now. This meant I needed to find a secondary duty that would raise my profile and I was asked if wanted to be something called the press relations officer (PRO). These days it’s media and communications. I thought it sounded interesting, so I agreed and was sent on a course. They taught me how to deal with the media, gave me a bit of practise at TV and radio interviews, and a few tips.
My job as the PRO was to raise the profile of RAF Neatishead locally, but also nationally if possible. We certainly tried to get ourselves into the RAF News, which was where you wanted to be.
Fighter allocator again
After about nine months back in the UK, I had to get a local endorsement to be a fighter allocator at Neatishead. I trained for that, and qualified. At that point they put me back onto the QRA shifts, the two days, two nights, four off. It was quite nice actually, because I was the lead controller and there’s a lot of responsibility with that. I was to lead the weapons specialists, and I worked with a great team. I enjoyed it. It’s fair to say that you don’t find many bad or boring people in the fighter controller branch. We had a bit of a spirit about us, and a bit of a reputation!
Personnel on a night shift
On a night shift at this time, typically there would be a fighter allocator, a weapons controller, and each of those would have an assistant corporal and an airman. Then there’d be the track production officer, which is nowadays called the surveillance officer. This was the equivalent of a fighter allocator in the surveillance side of things. There’d be maybe two identification officers, and then a whole lot of the trade group, someone who’s a data link specialist, other assistants. You’re talking about 20 people in the ops team, and then another ten engineers. Engineers would be working under a sergeant as their watch controller.
Considering the amount of airspace Neatishead was responsible for, it was quite a small team. RAF Buchan had a similar crew, but RAF Boulmer had stopped doing night shifts by then.
Neatishead’s closure scare
I think it was in 1998 that the air force decided it was going to keep RAF Boulmer, but it was going to close either Buchan or Neatishead. It was going to do a study to choose which one to close, and interestingly part of this study was to ask the people in the branch which was their favourite. It would be fair to say that Neatishead got more votes than Buchan.
It did cause a stir in the local media. People were concerned about what the closure of Neatishead would mean for the local community- North Walsham, Horning, these places. My Station Commander told me that we need to be on the front foot. I had to organise people to come and look around, to answer questions, and be very open about what’s going on. I was very busy doing that.
Eventually word came through that it had been decided Neatishead would remain open and Buchan would close. I sent press releases off to a few people, and within minutes I was told that I was going to be on BBC Radio Norfolk in five minutes as part of their news programme. I remember just finding an office and putting up a sign on the door saying ‘Do not come in, radio interview in progress.’ I did the radio interview, and was able to reassure the inhabitants of North Norfolk that RAF Neatishead was going to survive.
Ironically, what actually happened eventually was that Neatishead closed before Buchan. They changed what they wanted to do, as always. But at the time, it was great news, and we really saw a future for RAF Neatishead.
Dinghy Sailing Club
I was the officer in charge of the dinghy sailing club. We had a few little dinghies down at Horning, and I used to be able to organise events. One of these events was a competition between the station commanders of RAF Honington, RAF Marham, RAF Coltishall, and RAF Neatishead. They were given a competent crew and a dinghy, and had to try and sail them around for a bit of fun.
Birth of Patrick
The highlight of my second tour at Neatishead is that in May 1998, our son Patrick was born in the old Norfolk and Norwich hospital, just at the end of Grove Road where I used to live.
Return to the Falklands
I was told I had to go back to the Falkland Island for four months in October 1998. I said, ‘this is my son’s first Christmas, are you sure?’ They said, ‘yeah, we’re absolutely sure. You’ve got to go.’ So in October I left a six month old with Katy in the quarter on Embry Crescent, and went off to 303 signals unit at Mount Pleasant airfield down in the Falklands for four months.
It was pretty rotten, I wasn’t happy at all, but I did the job well. The boss was happy with me, particularly when he had to go home for two weeks. His house was burgled, so he was sent on a compassionate home visit. I was left in charge of the entire air defence system as a flight lieutenant for the two weeks he was gone, so that was a good opportunity.
Ops One
I came back from the Falklands in 1999, and I was moved into a job I’d been angling for. It was called Ops 1, and it was a flight lieutenant staff role in the Controlling and Reporting Centre (CRC) at Neatishead. I had to ensure the operations system ran smoothly, and that all the order books were up to date. I was generally the project officer point of contact for national and NATO exercises, which meant I got to travel quite a bit. I had to do exercise planning and make sure the CRC was ready and able to take part in major exercises.
A lot of people enjoyed these sorts of jobs because they were known as day jobs. You didn’t work shifts. The bus used to pick us up at about 7.20am off the patch to take us to work, and it left shortly after 5.00pm. It was a nice routine to have.
One of the first days I was sitting in the office, with a sergeant, a couple of corporals, and some airmen and airwomen. Some new airmen had been posted into Neatishead, and the corporal showing them around bought them in to the operations support office and said ‘this is operations support. This is where you come if you want any posters making. You know, if you’re having a party or you’re organising something, this is where they’ll do your posters.’ We had one of the few computers and printers probably in North Norfolk at the time. And I thought, well this isn’t right, because actually operations support is quite important, and it’s not about doing posters.
It was a good job, and at that point I’d started doing a Master’s in Business Administration with the Open University. One of the first assignments we had to do was ‘in your current place of work, assess the types of activities that are done and whether they could be done better.’ I really worried the staff by coming in and giving them a questionnaire and telling them to write down what jobs they did every day.
What we actually ended up doing was refocusing operations support into actually doing operations support, so guess what, we supported operations a lot better than had been done previously.
The Millennium Bug
Just before we moved onto 2000, there was a thing called the millennium bug that everyone was really concerned about. The concern was that when computers moved from year 99 to year 00, the computers would think it was 1900 and stop working. My view was, and still is, that it was a lot of fear generated by people in the industry. But being good military folk we had contingency plans for it.
One amusing story was that we spoke to the air traffic controllers down at West Drayton. I rang them up and said ‘as part of our business continuity plan, if the system breaks down on 1st January, we’re going to come to you, is that alright?’ And they said ‘well that’s really interesting, we might wave at each other on the road, because we’re coming to you. So well, okay, let’s hope at least one of our systems work.’
By then all the air defence radars in the UK, and a few civil traffic air radars, fed the radar pictures digitally into this single place at Neatishead so we could see everything. But if the computers stopped working, we could always send controllers to the radars. Our contingency plan was to have controllers available on New Year’s Eve in particular locations. I said ‘well, I’m going up to Yorkshire for Christmas and New Year, so I’ll do Staxton Wold.’
It had been decided that if we got through to 8.00pm and no other air defence system in the western world had failed, including Australia, then we were probably going to be alright. We were told ‘until 8.00pm you have to be sober enough to drive to a radar unit to be there to defend the UK.’ Thankfully, we got to 8:00pm and I called the duty controller down at Neatishead and he said ‘no, no, we’re alright. Go and have a drink.’ So that was the millennium.
End of Time at Neatishead
It was the beginning of August 2000. I think it was the old Queen Mother’s birthday. And I can remember walking to work from the quarter with a colleague called Mark Hinde, who lived next door to me. As he came past my front door, I was coming out, and there was little Patrick waving goodbye to me. I headed off to the bus stop, and Mark said, ‘that’s lovely, isn’t it.’ And I said, ‘you know Mark, I could do this job for the rest of my career. I’m loving what I do, I love the people, I love the place.’
Two hours later, I was called up to see Wing Commander Paul Chambers, who was OC Operations Wing. He shook me by the hand, congratulated me on my promotion to the rank of squadron leader, and told me I was being posted to RAF Halton six weeks later. It was great, I’d waited a long time, I’d worked hard, I’d tried to impress people, and it was rewarded eventually with a promotion to be a senior officer in the RAF.
And that was the end of my Neatishead career. I served a total of six years there, and Katy and I still say it was one of the nicest quarters we were in, it was certainly the best patch we ever lived on. Very, very happy memories of the neighbours, the place.
Training Design and Development
I spent two years in the Training Development and Support Unit at Halton. As part of that I was asked to look at making the weapons control training better. As I said at the beginning of this, it’s a difficult course, and over the years it had become more and more complex. People were taking many months to qualify. I ran a whole project to find a better way of training, and we came up with something we thought would work. And the air force said ‘okay, clever clogs, you designed this now you go and deliver it.’
I was posted up to RAF Boulmer as officer commanding A Squadron in the School of Fighter Control. My job was to take novice officers from Cranwell and train them to be fighter controllers, either on the weapons or the systems side. Because the training at Boulmer was only on the simulator, I had to have what we called agents, who were instructors working directly for me, at Neatishead and Buchan, training the students on the live phase of their training. So I did go back to Neatishead and Buchan a few times with that.
It was always interesting seeing the competition between the units. You know, we’re a proud bunch of people, and the people at Buchan always thought they were better. It was always ‘oh we’re a lot more professional than the people at Neatishead, and of course we have much more QRA activity and Neatishead never has anything to do.’ And at Neatishead they’d say ‘well of course our airspace is much more difficult.’
Sierra Leone
I did two and a half years at Boulmer, and towards the end they wanted to send me on another operational tour. So, I was seconded to the United Nations as a military observer for six months in Sierra Leone, where they were recovering from a very vicious civil war.
I had a two weeks training course where we learnt off-road driving and lots of first aid. Then, in January 2005, I flew off to Freetown for six months. It was one of the most rewarding six months of my career. I worked with an eclectic bunch of military officers from all over the world, not just NATO. The team leader of our little team up at Port Loko was a Ukrainian pilot. He actually used to fly the tankers that refuelled the Bear aircraft that I then intercepted with my fighter jets out of Saxa Vord, so that was a nice link. We also had Bolivians, Egyptians, Thai, a lot of Africans.
It was a really interesting job. Driving around in a white four-by-four collecting information for example about how the schools were doing. We used to sit in on the civic community committee meetings, just helping people get the country back on its feet. It was extremely rewarding, and I have very happy memories. I’m still in contact with an orphanage out in Port Loko, and we help them where we can.
Ministry of Defence
In the summer of 2005, I went from driving round the jungle to working in the Ministry of Defence with a suit and tie on. What a change. I worked in procurement for two and a half years, procuring command and control systems. We were also looking at a replacement for the system that had been at Neatishead, and replacements for the mobile radar units as well. It was an interesting job to have as a squadron leader because the capability areas had the money. We were called the Capability Customers. I learnt an awful lot, and I enjoyed the opportunity to live in London. I had a flat in Canary Wharf. I used to take the train every Friday afternoon back up to Alnmouth up in Northumberland, where my family still were, and then back down on Monday morning.
Kabul, Afghanistan
In 2008 I was posted to what was called the Air Support Operations Centre. We were part of the Joint Force Air Component Headquarters that was seconded into Army Headquarters. This meant if the army were to deploy, we would go with them as the air experts, and to assist in the delivery of close air support to troops on the ground.
As part of that tour, I found myself out in Kabul, Afghanistan, working in an American unit. I was the nighttime director for the Air Support Operations Squadron (ASOS), and I spent three and a half months delivering close air support across Afghanistan for 98 consecutive 12 hour night shifts. I never had a day off. It was pretty brutal actually, and some of the things we had to deal with weren’t very pleasant. We had people calling us up on the radio through satellite communications that were actually being shot at and mortared, and we had to try to get aircraft over to them as soon as we could. You could hear the fear in these controllers’ voices. I needed a break after that.
J7
In 2009 I got another very pleasant phone call promoting me to wing commander, and sending me to the Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood to work in the training part. It was called J7, J for joint, 7 for training. I was there for two years. I was responsible for ensuring that people going on operations like Operation Telic in Iraq and Operation Herrick in Afghanistan were properly trained in joint action. It included influence, fires and targeting process (that’s fires as in shooting stuff), and battlespace management. We also helped to design and deliver exercises for the Joint Force Headquarters, which was the Deployable Headquarters. I got back to the Falklands for three weeks on that, to exercise the British Forces South Atlantic Islands Headquarters.
Washington DC
In 2011 I got one of the best phone calls ever, which was ‘How do you fancy going to Washington DC for three years?’ ‘Oh, alright then. Just let me check with Katy.’ And of course she was delighted. In September 2011, we headed over to Washington. Paddy was already in boarding school then, at the prep school up at Stonyhurst, but we all went over before term started.
My job was Five Eyes Interoperability, so that’s with the Five Eyes nations. I worked in an office with an American, a Canadian, an Australian, and a New Zealander. We were the secretariat managing a lot of Five Eyes working groups across ten different specialisations. We got to live in Washington, on a road called Tally Ho Lane in Alexandria, Virginia. We had to go to lots of meetings, and I got to fly around the world on a number of occasions. I was working for a boss at High Wycombe, 3,500 miles away. I had a really good time there.
Manston
In 2014 I was sent to Manston, and I was the Commandant of the Defence Fire Training and Development Centre. There I trained both RAF fire fighters and MOD civilian fire fighters. I did that for two years.
Leaming
I got a great tour in RAF Leaming where I did four years designing and delivering training to the expeditionary air wings, who go out and enable airfields anywhere around the world for the RAF. And as part of that we delivered the first NATO capability evaluation that the air force had done for 15 years. We just managed to squeeze it in before Covid, it finished at the beginning of March 2020.
End of regular service
In November 2020, I left the regular service after 37 and a bit years commissioned. I now do a bit of work with the Reserves, and a bit of work as a civilian contractor back down at the Northwood Headquarters, effectively doing the job I used to do when I was there from 2009-2011. I still meet up with ex-colleagues at various events twice a year, sometimes three times a year. We always have a good time reminiscing!
Final thoughts
I joined the RAF as a fighter controller, but the last time I was a front-line fighter controller was 2000. That’s over half my career not being a front-line controller.
It was a good career, and I have so very many happy memories of North Norfolk and Norwich. Everyone says Norfolk is flat, but it isn’t, because I’ve cycled around there and it’s not flat. It’s a complete fallacy. The only thing with Norfolk, you don’t pass through it you have to go there, and the roads aren’t that great coming from the north. I think the A11’s a bit better than it used to be, but I haven’t been that way for a long time. Train service was pretty good though.
Neatishead was a very special time. Coming back from the outer islands to Neatishead at that time with those people, proving that I could do the job well enough to be there. Meeting Katy during that tour, and then coming back for Paddy being born, and still having lots of fun and loads of responsibility and getting promoted out of it. As Katy says, best house we were ever in, best patch certainly.
I think social media and computer games have changed the culture completely. But I can remember sitting in the crew room at Buchan with officers who joined the air force before I was born telling me ‘it’s not like it used to be.’ I didn’t sit around in the mess at Leeming years later complaining to people ‘well, it’s not like it used to be,’ because clearly it isn’t.
In my reserve work I’ve come across young officers who are waiting to start their fighter control training, which is called air operations control now. And these people join the air force with their eyes wide open, they know what they’re joining, it’s a job they want to do, and they can have a beard now if they want, which most of them do. I tell them some of my stories and give them tips about the training and their careers. They’re all very enthusiastic and looking forward to their careers, and I’d like to think they hope to have one as interesting as I had. Sadly they can’t go to RAF Neatishead anymore, which is a shame. They can only go to Boulmer.
I visited the Neatishead museum a couple of years ago, and it just felt exactly the same. I could clearly remember the excitement when I had to go onto the console and I knew I was going to be controlling a couple of Tornado F-3s out north of the Norfolk coastline.
Chris Thorpe talking to WISEArchive on 3rd November 2023 by Zoom from York. © WISEArchive 2024. All rights reserved.
