Military Aviation – Royal Air Force Puma Retirement (Part 4) – The 1990s and Operation TELIC

Continuing our coverage of the long career of the RAF’s Puma Force, we turn our attention to operations in the 1990s and into the 2000s. Paul Dunn talks to two former Puma pilots to get their perspective on flying the helicopter in combat.

As covered in our previous article, the Puma Force in the 1980s was primarily focused on the Cold War and Operation Banner, the UK military response to The Troubles in Northern Ireland. As the 1990s dawned and the Cold War drew to a close, the Puma squadrons would spend the subsequent decades in conflict zones around the world, with a much greater intensity than operations in the 1980s.

The first time the Puma went to war was during Operation GRANBY, the UK contribution to Desert Storm in 1991. A force of Pumas and crews from 33 and 230 Sqns deployed to the Middle East, being based initially at King Khalid Military City in Saudi Arabia. The Puma force performed sterling work moving troops and supplies and was also tasked with casevac (casualty evacuation) missions before and during the conflict.

The rest of the 1990s was dominated by operations in the Former Yugoslavia and in Northern Ireland. Support for Operation BANNER remained a very large part of tasking for the Puma Force, and indeed, in 1994, 230 Sqn moved from Germany to RAF Aldergrove in Belfast, to provide a permanent Puma presence in the country, joining 72 Sqn, then equipped with the venerable Westland Wessex.

James Cartner came to the Puma in 1997, having previously flown a tour on the Wessex in Northern Ireland. Like Ron Gridd (see Part 3), he found the Puma to be a much more modern aircraft than the one he had come from: “My initial thought was this is a slippery bugger!”

“Compared to the Wessex it was very quick and exceptionally capable but the engine handling on the Mk 1 required an awful lot of care. As the engines were basically TGV train engines, there was no need to have any sort of anticipation of power demands. In a helicopter this proved quite a flaw. So, if you found yourself in trouble and needing power quickly, pulling in a handful of collective would add pitch to the blades, but until the engines detected the slowing of the rotors, no extra power was added, so there were a few seconds of decaying rotor speed and panic until the engines caught up. That caught quite a few of the guys out….”

This limitation would contribute to several accidents throughout the service life of the Puma HC1 including at least one fatal accident in Iraq. It would not be properly addressed until the arrival of the upgraded HC2 version, which featured more modern engines, amongst other improvements. Though the HC1 remained a challenging type to operate, by the mid 1990s, there had been a big change which helped to improve the crew workload.

“Initially it was crewed by just one pilot and a crewman, but in the mid 90s, the powers that be a) thought it better to always have two pilots up front and b) had a load of navigators from discontinued fast jets that they needed to do something with.” From then on, the Puma would be operated by two pilots and a crewman.

Operations in Northern Ireland were busy and varied, as James describes. “NI was all fairly standard army tasking – moving troops, resupply of FOBs, Eagle VCPs (helicopter mounted Vehicle Check Points that could set up surprise checks on country roads at very short notice and follow cars of interest). On quite a few occasions we would under-sling Felix (Army Bomb Disposal) guys in with all their kit to deal with suspicious devices.”

In addition to these normal taskings, although the peace process was underway by the late 90s, and the Good Friday Agreement was signed in early 1998, there were still heinous acts of violence, including a notorious massive bomb attack by the Real IRA, leading to mass casualties and a desperate response from the security forces. “I flew casevac (casualty evacuation) for the Omagh bombing, taking injured from Omagh to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. I also monitored the riots at Drumcree, assisting the police and army with trying to keep the peace.”

After his tour in NI was complete, James spent a couple of years instructing on the Squirrel at the Defence Helicopter Flying School (DHFS) at Shawbury, before returning to the Puma Force as a QHI. One of his first students was Paul McVay, for whom the Puma was his first operational type. Having learned to fly helicopters on the Squirrel and Griffin at DHFS, his first impression of the Puma was rather different to those who came from the Wessex. “At one of the DHFS graduation days, they brought in a Puma, and I remember getting into it and thinking this is ancient inside! Compared to the Griffin which had a modern flight deck, it was so old looking.”

If the 1990s had been dominated by operations in the relatively familiar conditions of Europe, the 2000s were to bring some rather different operational environments to the RAF and place new demands on what was already an aging fleet. Paul recalls watching the 9-11 attacks during training and realising that this would be an event which would define his career in the RAF, and so it would come to pass for him and many of his contemporaries. His memories of being on the Puma force are characterised as a mix of good times and camaraderie at home in the UK and moments of extreme drama when deployed.

Having been posted to the Puma and completed his conversion training, Paul was posted to 33 Sqn and it wasn’t long before he got his first taste of operational flying – two months after arriving on the squadron, he found himself deployed to Bosnia. By this time, the conflict in Bosnia had ceased, but the operational environment remained extremely challenging, with bad weather and high terrain making it a hazardous place to fly low level helicopter operations. Paul recalls a harrowing experience that happened to him early in his Puma career.

“I was a very inexperienced first tourist pilot and I was flying with a very experienced QHI. Lovely guy, and the crewman was so experienced, he’d actually started flying with the RAF in the 1960s! We were based in Banja Luka and we were sent to Sarajevo on a task, moving Dutch VIPs. We were moving these guys on the next day after an overnight stop in Sarajevo. So the next afternoon we were going to fly back up to Banja Luka. It was about 1700, I’m flying the aircraft and the QHI is navigating and of course we are going from day into night time, so you are starting to lose your visual cues, so we were using a technique called flip flopping, where you bring your goggles up and down as you start to move into the night time environment. We were flying at 250ft up through mountain valleys and it starts to snow. Being so inexperienced, I’m thinking this is really hard work.”

They made their way north towards the mountains in rapidly deteriorating conditions, in search of the valley which was part of the low level route back to base. However, they found themselves in an almost identical valley, but not the one they intended, putting them very much into harm’s way.

“All the time you are flying, you’re flying with reference to the radalt (radio altimeter), so you’re flying at 250ft based on that. But I don’t think either of us noticed that the barometric altitude started to creep up, as we were climbing into this hanging valley. Next thing I know, we are in cloud, in snow at night time, and I remember a cliff face being no more than 100m away on the right hand side. I remember we had talked about safety altitudes that day, bearing in mind it’s really cold and the safety altitude was something like 15000’, so we don’t have a safety altitude we can quickly get to.

“So I call that I’ve lost my references and the QHI takes control. I remember looking across to his side of the aircraft on goggles and I couldn’t see anything out of his side either, but when I looked through the chin bubble, I could see trees through the chin bubble of the Puma. He manoeuvred the aircraft really quite aggressively and we ended up below the line of the trees with the radalt light and the warning going off.”

The situation had frightening echoes of an accident which had happened in Kosovo two years before in similar conditions. A Puma had struck trees at low speed after flying into poor weather, and the two pilots were killed in the resulting crash. The outcome for Paul and his crew was fortunately more favourable, but the challenges did not end there.

“So we got away with it and we stayed in those roles, I was now navigating, the other guy flying and we get into the right valley and we fly into this great plain called Bugojno where there was a Dutch base. I’m thinking to myself as a young inexperienced bloke that we’ll go and land there because the weather is too bad, right? No. We keep going into the low level weather routes again, north of Bugojno. We’re pushing now, we’ve got VIPs on board, we’ve got to try and get them back, so we went into this next valley and I remember in that valley there are crisscrossed high tension wires all over the place. It’s a really hazardous environment and the same thing happens again except this time it’s the other bloke flying, and we ended up turning around again, at night time in a mountain valley, which is quite gnarly and we get back into the Bugojno plain and we get to the HLS.”

After making the decision to stay the night at this base, the senior pilot called the crew together, and acknowledged that they had ended up in an unsafe situation by pressing on when they should have recognised that conditions had deteriorated. For Paul, this was the closest he had come to an aircraft accident and the biggest lesson learned was that no matter your level of experience, if you are not happy with something you must speak up. It was also an early introduction into the risks and realities of low level helicopter operations.

By the early 2000s, the Puma Force had taken part in operations in some demanding and challenging environments, but what was to come would provide the most serious and hazardous test yet. Operation TELIC was the name given to the UK contribution to military operations in Iraq, commencing with the invasion of 19th March 2003. Both James and Paul were to serve several tours in Iraq, and witness firsthand some of the dramatic and tragic events of that conflict.

James Cartner arrived in Iraq after the initial invasion had concluded – “We had a main operating base at Basrah Airport and supported the army throughout southern Iraq. I remember my ‘area famil’ flight with another QHI on day one and we did a tour of all the Army Bases in Basrah. The other pilot said … ‘OK, let’s go and land at the base to the North – do you see it just left of the main bridge?’ I couldn’t help but say ‘What – the big open square with all that tracer coming up from just beside it? Shall we not? He agreed!”

“Each Basrah stint was about 3 months, during which we carried out loads of trooping, once being asked by a particularly keen and eager Army Captain if we could possibly hover over a suspicious mound of sand. They wanted to see if it was a bomb and whether our rotor wash would blow the sand off and reveal the device. I said I’ll do it if you are on board too! Unfortunately he was so gung-ho that he agreed…”

Arriving shortly after for his first tour in Iraq, Paul McVay, who would later fly the Chinook on operations in Afghanistan, recalls that Basrah was a hazardous place to be at the time – “Afghanistan was much more kinetic in terms of combat but actually in Iraq we lost so many more guys in accidents, primarily because the Puma was an older aircraft and I would probably regard it as harder to fly than the Chinook. The Chinook was much more stable and the level of redundancy was ridiculous, it had more power etc.”

That is not to say that there was no threat from hostile forces at that stage – “I remember going up from Basrah to a place called Amarah, just a day time tasking. I remember we landed on the refuel site and we were told to move to another landing site and as we landed, everyone in the HLS started signalling frantically and running away. We shut the aircraft down really quickly as we had an idea we might have been getting attacked at the time. We got out of the aircraft and put our helmets on and a rocket had been fired right over the top of the Puma blades and just missed us.”

On another occasion, Paul and his crew were informed that troops on the banks of the Shatt al Arab river had observed an RPG being fired at their helicopter; they never even saw it.

Although hostile fire was very much the norm for operations from Basrah, the first loss of an aircraft and pilot did not occur as a result of enemy action, rather the difficulties of operating an ageing helicopter with known engine ‘quirks’ in an environment which was very different from that for which it had been designed.

July 19th 2004 was the last day of James’ first Basrah det. “I was woken up to the sound of the crash alarm going off on the base. Unfortunately one of the Pumas and the crew I had just handed over to crashed that morning and one pilot (Flt Lt Kristian Gover) was killed in the fire. RIP mate!”

The cause of the crash was the crew’s attempt to land downwind. As previously mentioned, the Puma HC1 engines were slow to respond in these circumstances, and given the high temperatures at Basrah in July, the aircraft lacked the performance to recover.

At the time of the accident, Paul McVay had just returned from the Farnborough Airshow and was informed of Flt Lt Gover’s death by his CO. “It was sad because three weeks prior to that, Kris and I flew together through the Docklands of London with another Puma for Dan and Peter Snow for a TV series called Battlefield Britain and three weeks later, he was dead.”

Kristian would sadly not be the last person to die in a Puma accident during Operation TELIC. Two aircraft collided in April 2007 with the loss of two servicemen and in November the same year, two SAS troops were killed after pilot disorientation in brown out conditions resulting in the aircraft striking the ground and rolling over. A further aircraft was lost in 2009 but without any fatalities.

For Paul McVay, much of the blame for these unfortunate accidents lay with the demands being placed on a helicopter which was not designed for the conditions it was being asked to operate in “You’re looking at a helicopter that was brought into service in 1971, which was arguably built for the plains of Europe, fighting against the Soviet Union, green fields and woodlands, that sort of thing. It was a relatively unforgiving aircraft in a very challenging desert environment.”

There were lighter moments during training for the desert deployment. Paul recalls Ray Mears visiting the squadron and going through the contents of his desert survival rucksack in the crew room, with everyone’s complete attention. There was also a briefing from a Tactics Instructor about the SA-7 surface to air missile, where the instructor was struggling to get his point across to the assembled aircrew – “Come on guys, it’s not rocket science!” As was pointed out to him quite forcefully, rocket science is precisely what it is.

As Op TELIC progressed from the initial invasion and occupation, into a fight against insurgency, Puma operations moved north to Baghdad and Balad AB, the sprawling US airbase situated to the north of the city. Both James and Paul spent time in the Baghdad area, undertaking rather different missions.

James spent time at Balad, supporting Op CRICHTON. Even 20 years on, he is understandably reluctant to discuss in detail much of what was achieved in what remains a sensitive operation, supporting special operations forces, including the SAS and SBS – a story which is very well covered in Mark Urban’s book Task Force Black.

The Puma was valued by the special forces as it had a decent load carrying capability, but was much more subtle than the Chinook and more suited to covert tasking. James summarises his Op CRICHTON experience thus: “We (with a little bit of help from the ‘Hereford Door Kicking Club’) ended the careers of quite a few Al Qaeda terrorists over that period. We also rescued a few hostages (including Norman Kember and the CPT) and hopefully prevented a fair bit of bloodshed.”

In 2005, Paul was based in Baghdad, with a Puma detachment assigned to supporting the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) – “We were a small group, there were two crews, so that’s 4 pilots, 2 crewmen and a small group of engineers and we were living in tents by the side of Baghdad Airport.”

The work involved flying FCO staff around the area, and meant regular visits to Balad AB. As well as the SF Pumas, there was also an RAF Hercules detachment at the airbase, and Paul knew one of the pilots from his early days in the RAF – “There was a guy called Andy ‘Smudger’ Smith, who I was in training with, we kind of knew each other, I’d seen him and passed some pleasantries in the ops room”. The two planned to meet each other for a coffee next time Andy was in Baghdad.

On the afternoon of January 30th 2005, Paul had just returned from a tasking when he was given some concerning news. “One of the movers came out and said we’ve lost contact with a HILTON, which was the Hercules callsign. These guys were flying between Baghdad and Balad at low level.”

“There was another Herc there and I remember going over to chat with the captain about organising a search, so they said they’d climb to 15-20000ft and see if they could see anything. We decided to ingress at low level, as a pair of Pumas. We went out at about 1730-1800 and it was just about to get dark. We got out in the desert north of Baghdad and I remember seeing these orange life rafts, you could see them from miles away because of the bright orange panels. I could see them and then I went ‘fuck, is that a tailplane?’

“There was the tail of a Hercules just sitting in the desert. So we got to it, and we landed. We had two crewmen on my helicopter, one on the other, the guys got out and walked through the wreckage.” It was readily apparent that there were no survivors. HILTON22 had been shot down by insurgents; there were 10 men on board, at the time the largest single loss of life suffered by the British military during Op TELIC. Amongst the dead was Andy Smith.

The immediate concern for Paul and his comrades was their own security. “It was getting dark and it was close to a village and I remember villagers coming out and standing around and we knew there may well be a threat coming from there. An American Apache was there as well, and they gave us top cover as we were pretty exposed.”

The site was secured by USAF Parachute Jumpers (PJs) who relieved the Puma crews, and were later joined by a force of US Marines. Twenty years later, the memories of that day still persist for Paul – “This was the most dramatic thing I’ve ever seen in my flying career, to see this crash site for a transport aircraft that’s been destroyed and we were the first folk there.”

Paul McVay’s time on the Puma came to an end shortly after. He would later serve several tours in Afghanistan flying the Chinook, along with a period instructing on the Tucano, before leaving the RAF and commencing a career in the airlines. Despite the tragic event he witnessed, he remembers his time on the Puma fondly – “It could be unforgiving, but it was a real joy to fly. It probably took at least a tour, maybe into your second tour to become really capable with it.”

After almost a decade of Puma operations, James Cartner also left the RAF for a career in airline flying. He also recalls his time flying the aircraft with pride – “Because of the ‘single pilot’ ethos, Pumas were regarded as one of the tougher aircraft to operate.With far less capacity than the Chinook, Puma crews used to try to make up for it with flexibility, speed and generally making things up as they went along. It evolved from a pure battlefield helicopter into the capabilities that it had by the end – winching and SAR, firefighting, special forces support, casevac”

The Puma would go on to be upgraded to HC2 version and give further sterling service in Afghanistan as part of Operation TORAL. In the next instalment of our Puma coverage, we will get a different view of Puma operations as we talk to a crewman who served on the aircraft both in Northern Ireland and Afghanistan.

Our thanks go to James Cartner and Paul McVay for sharing their time and memories of the Puma Force.