Tony Cunnane's RAF Years

This page is adapted from the final chapter of my book 'Red Arrows - the inside story' (published in 2001, now out of date but still sometimes available from Amazon and the like). Except where otherwise indicated in the caption, the images are my own.
Clicking on the images will pop up larger versions.

In the middle of March 2000, when I thought I had but four months to go until retirement, I had a couple of telephone calls from reporters at the Mail on Sunday newspaper. An ‘RAF source’ had apparently told them that the Red Arrows were flying off to Cyprus the next day because they had invented a new corkscrew manoeuvre that was so dangerous that the pilots needed to practice it in secret in Cyprus. I was intrigued.

Although there was absolutely no truth in the story the newspaper was entitled to follow up their information and I was interested to find out the basis for it. I thought at first that the manoeuvre in question was the Corkscrew which had been around for several years, but it soon became apparent from the reporter’s description that the story referred to a new manoeuvre called, provisionally, Mirror Image Barrel Roll, in which the two Synchro aircraft start off from crowd right with Red 6 inverted close over the top of Red 7. The two aircraft then fly a synchronised slow barrel roll which means that Red 6 has negative g applied all the way round. Only experienced pilots can really appreciate the difficulty of flying such a manoeuvre and the pleasure that it can give to the pilots executing it.

The tip-off to the Mail on Sunday could only have come from someone who had been watching the Red Arrows practise overhead Scampton but that someone did not know what he, or she, was talking about. I explained to the reporter that the Red Arrows go to Cyprus every year in Spring for final polishing of the new season’s display routine and that there was nothing secret about that.

‘All our manoeuvres require skilled pilots,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing dangerous about the Mirror Image Barrel Roll, it just happens to be a new manoeuvre for the next display season – one that your informant has presumably never seen before and doesn’t understand.’

By this time it was common knowledge amongst the media and the general public, but not officially announced, that the Red Arrows would be leaving Cranwell and returning to Scampton sooner rather than later. All that remained to be decided was the date. Off the record those within the Red Arrows knew that the move could not take place before the Spring of 2001 because the essential works services needed at Scampton could not be completed any earlier and there were other associated unit moves into and out of Cranwell and other nearby stations that were financially and logistically interdependent. From the Red Arrows’ point of view there were only two periods in each year when a move was practicable: one was in the three-week end-of-season leave period in October and the other was in April when the Team was away in Cyprus on Springhawk. Trying to move during the display season would be very disruptive operationally and very awkward for the families. Trying to move when the winter training season was already underway would create huge problems for the engineers because that is the time when a lot of scheduled maintenance is carried out on the aircraft. Heavy ground servicing equipment and the bulk store of spare parts cannot be in two places at the same time and having to split resources between Cranwell and Scampton would be very expensive in terms of both manpower and time.

A few days after talking to the Mail on Sunday, I heard that the Minister for the Armed Forces, John Spellar, would be making an informal visit to the RAF College at Cranwell on 29 March 2000. Such a visit was not all that unusual in itself; Ministers and other government officials regularly visit the College. What was a little unusual was that the Minister had decided to give a press conference at the end of his visit. When a Minister decides to give a formal press conference, rather than an off-the-cuff Q and A session, it is usually because he has something to announce. Because the Red Arrows belonged to the RAF Central Flying School and not to the RAF College Cranwell and since the Red Arrows were away in Cyprus on Springhawk, it was assumed that the Minister’s visit was nothing to do with the Team. It had also been assumed in London, naively in my view, that the media would obediently confine their interest to the subject of the Minister’s visit and not ask any questions about the Team.

How wrong could the advisors be?

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