INTERVIEW
HURST By the Dart INTERVIEW
LES
Interview by Giles Nuttall FORMER RAF NAVIGATOR
“F
rom the very start of being commissioned into the Royal Air Force, I had a
great yearning to fly a two-seat, fast-jet aeroplane,” Les Hurst reminisces, cup of tea in hand. “Since a very early age, I just wanted to fly – but to be able to fly the F4 Phantom had always seemed an impossible dream.” We are sitting together with his wife Linda in their house in Dartmouth, where the couple have lived for the past nine years. The house is perched atop the precipitous Ridge Hill, a spot that affords them magnificent views out towards the Dart estuary.
Les joined the RAF in 1960, straight
from school. He wanted to join the Air Training Corps at the tender age of thirteen, but his hopes were temporarily quashed by his father. This was because the Second World War had only recently ended and his father was concerned that Les was signing-up for military service. His son’s ambitions were not to be restrained for long and Les spent most of his teenage years as an Air Training Corps cadet before being selected for Aircrew Training. After initially training to be a pilot, Les
retrained as a navigator. His first role was flying a Victor Bomber in the V-Force: “My job was the navigator-radar. There were two navigators on the aeroplane, and my job was to identify the target on the radar and set up the aeroplane for an automatic release of a free-fall nuclear
weapon. Had we been ordered to attack our targets, in what was then the Soviet Union, it would probably have been a one-way mission.” The Victor aircraft were converted into in-flight refuelling aircraft after Les’s first bomber tour. Still unable to fulfill his two-seat dream, Les spent another tour as a navigator-radar on the Victor tanker. He then went on to do a further tour as a flying instructor at the RAF College at Cranwell.
“Since a very early age, I just wanted to fly – but to be able to fly a Phantom or a Tornado had always seemed an impossible dream.”
“It was at the end of that tour, after almost twelve years of military service, that I finally got my wish and was posted to fly the F4 Phantom, which I did for seven years,” says Les. He is clearly proud of his achievements, but never boastful.
During his first tour since his long-
awaited Phantom conversion, Les volunteered to go to the Royal Navy; he spent two years on board the Ark Royal, flying the Phantom as part of 892 Naval Air Squadron. “Carrier flying is
probably the most exhilarating form of flying anyone can do, especially at night”, Les tells me, “And probably one of the happiest and best tours I had in flying.” Happy it may have been, but some of
Les’s experiences during this time would be enough to scare the daylights out of your average chap. Les recalls a rather unusual ending to one of his sorties: “On one particular day, we were flying back to RAF Leuchers (the temporary shore-base at the time for 892 Squadron) with a hydraulic problem, which meant we had lost braking and steering. We touched down with the arrester hook lowered, planning to catch the wire stretched across the runway. Unfortunately we missed the wire and the aircraft started to leave the runway (what Les calls ‘going agricultural’). With no steering capability I felt that, at 140kts, anything could happen – so I just pulled my ejection seat handle and left the aircraft. Although on the ground when I ejected, the rocket seat shot me up to a couple of hundred feet, but before I knew it, and in what seemed a matter of seconds, I hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. Fortunately I landed on the grass, I stood-up, realised I was still alive and lay down again. I was back flying four days later.” Following his stint with the Navy, Les
returned to the RAF and was posted for a short while to No. 29 Air Defence Phantom Squadron. He then transferred to the Phantom Operational Conversion
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