GROUPS AND SINGLE DECORATIONS FOR GALLANTRY
Instinctively, I lift my feet off the controls as though by leaving them there they’ll burn in the rocket’s tail. Then German calls ‘Contact!’ as he sees an explosion to the right of our aircraft and another RPG flies harmlessly behind us, where it hits the ground beneath and explodes.
‘The Taliban have got two firing points,’ says Alex and I’m thinking, ‘For fuck’s sake, not again. Surely not again?’ Almost unbelievably, we’re away and time reverts to normal speed again. The danger is behind us - for now.’ (Ibid)
Later in the operation, with conditions still hot, Duncan’s wingman narrowly avoided another RPG attack. Duncan then had to contend with the following:
‘We’re not going back to Bastion though; not yet. We have another mission to fly as a four-ship, extracting some other British soldiers from a grid in the desert. As dust landings go, it’s horrible - one of the worst I’ve experienced before or since. A complete dustbowl full of aerials, tents, troops, without any visual reference at all, so having faced a barrage of fire, we have to keep our nerve and execute perfect landings.
There’s nowhere to run on. The landing site is surrounded ahead and on both sides by tents and soldiers. JP and Hannah have already been and gone and in doing so, they’ve left a soft dust cloud behind them for us to contend with. As I fly approach, Stu Hague is tight on my left so I have to fly smoothly to make his life as simple as possible and help get him in. It’s not going to be easy. You might think, ‘Yeah, so what? You’re helicopter pilots; it’s what you do,’ but there’s difficult and then there’s nigh-on impossible, and you don’t get to cry off the really hard ones. This is real life, not a PS3 game - we’re playing without extra lives and we only get one chance.
Twice I tried and twice I had to overshoot as the ground wasn’t visible, even from 40ft. I repositioned for a standard 100ft, 30kts gate in order to trim the aircraft five degrees ‘nose up’ for the descent. Using this technique the aircraft literally flies itself to the ground, ensuring you make all the other gates on the way down.
The landing is so heavy it knocks the air out of my lungs and I’m thrown forward so far that I’m only held in by my straps. We made it. The aircraft is in one piece.... We quickly got the troops on and lifted off.
Then JP calls me on the radio. A point about JP - he never does that. Ever. ‘Black Cat Two Two, Black Cat Two Three, are you ok?’ I look at Alex and he says, ‘What the fuck?’ ‘He must be shit scared for us. It’s not like him at all.’
‘Yeah, Black Cat Two Three, shaken not stirred!’ I reply, and with that we begin the forty-minute transit back to Bastion.’ (Ibid)
Duncan flew his last kinetic op of the tour on 25 May, when he went on IRT to extricate 3 Royal Marines whose vehicle had been blown up by an IED. Landing in a wadi, Duncan once again came under fire before managing to extract two of the casualties. The third, Marine Dale Gostick, had been killed.
The last sortie of Duncan’s tour was an air test, which took place on 28 May. The helicopter concerned was the very one he had almost been shot down in. Duncan got to fly her first air test before her return to service. At the end of his tour Duncan returned to the UK, and after a period of leave, was posted to R.A.F. Shawbury to train as a Qualified Helicopter Instructor in December 2008. Having qualified he was posted as a QHI on ‘C’ Flight, 18 Squadron - the Chinook OCF. Whilst stationed with the latter, Duncan was informed that he had been awarded the D.F.C. - the first for 27 Squadron since they had reformed with Chinooks:
‘I was recognised for the two missions I flew in my 2008 Det - the one in ZD575 when we were shot down, and for Op Oqab Sturga six days later. I feel enormously proud and privileged to have been awarded the D.F.C. for those ops, but I couldn’t have done them alone. My crews on the two missions - Alex, Bob, Coops, Andy and Griz - were as much a part of what happened as I was; so to me, the award is for them to.
Fortunately, the crew was acknowledged by the Guild of Air Pilots and Aviators, which awarded Black Cat Two Two its coveted Grand Master’s Commendation for 2008/09, at a lavish banquet in London’s Guildhall. The Guild had earlier recognised all of us by granting the Grand Master’s Commendation for 2007/08 to everyone at the R.A.F. Odiham Chinook Force.....
I was looking forward to visiting Buckingham Palace on July 15th 2009 to receive my award. When they first wrote to me with the invitation, I replied by return asking whether they would permit me three extra tickets so that I could bring Alex, Bob Ruffles and Coops - the whole crew - along. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they wrote back and said sorry but space was really tight. They did however let me have one extra ticket; so, as he was my co-pilot on both missions, I invited Alex, along with Alison and my parents.’ (Ibid)
A.F.C. - one of the most decorated pilots in the Royal Air Force
Duncan requested a return to operational flying, and rejoined ‘C’ Flight, 27 Squadron in Summer 2010. He redeployed with them, for a fourth tour of Afghanistan, in October 2010. At the end of October he led a formation of three Chinooks, of a force of five, as part of a massive operation against the Taliban’s equivalent of Sandhurst on the Pakistan border:
‘This operation involved more than 800 people in support. There was a US Marine battalion of light armoured reconnaissance vehicles on the ground - basically 150 small tanks. Above us there were two Apaches, two Sea Kings with sensors, two A-10 Warthogs, two F -18s, one Compass Call Electronic Warfare Hercules, one Spectre, two Predators and two B-1B bombers; all that to support us. We inserted more than 130 troops.’ (Ibid)
A huge aerial bombardment prior to, and after, the Chinook landing on the area resulted in 36 Taliban killed, vast quantities of drugs destroyed, ten tonnes of explosives captured and two senior Taliban members killed.
On 1 November, Duncan passed over 2,000 hours flown on Chinooks. He continued to fly mainly IRT out of Bastion for the remainder of the month, with the amount of IED explosion victims constantly increasing. On 4 December 2010, Duncan flew on a night IRT which resulted in an A.F.C. for him and the first ever award of the A.F.C. to an Army Air Corps pilot on operations in Afghanistan:
‘The weather took a turn for the worse today. The wind is routing all the way round Helmand and as it travels it gathers dust, creating brownouts that obscure and mask everything. The dust storms are the worst I’ve ever experienced here and the visibility is down to just 500 metres. I’m on IRT, which is the only type of mission allowed in such low visibility; all other taskings have been cancelled as the weather is deemed too risky for any flights that aren’t about saving lives’ (Ibid)
Earlier in the day Duncan had flown an IRT to pick up a six year old boy who had been shot in the abdomen. With the sun behind the helicopter visibility was increased to 1,000 metres, even so Duncan managed to only narrowly avoid two masts that loomed up en route:
‘I have to manoeuvre the aircraft harshly to avoid two compounds as the HLS is surrounded by woods and the wind is coming from behind. I slam the aircraft on the deck bang in the middle of what would be considered a confined area in the UK, thus requiring at least two orbits to get in. That makes me smile.
The JTAC informs us that fighting is going on one hundred metres south of our position; that wipes the smile from my face. The little boy is loaded and we’re back off to Bastion.... When we get to the airfield it’s difficult to see the runway or the tower until we are on top of them.... I pray we won’t get scrambled tonight as the visibility is going to fall even further - there’s no moon and no cultural lighting so it’ll be red illume. With no ambient light to amplify, NVGs are useless in these conditions.’ (Ibid)
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