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It was in that instant that I spotted something, which triggered the explosive action, which lies, like a tightly coiled spring, beneath the outwardly calm carapace of the fighter pilot. My worst fears and fondest dreams had, in a single instant, been realised. A mere mile to the east of the tiny vessel was the camouflaged outline of a Skyhawk fighter, hugging the sea and heading directly for the landing craft which had become a very personal part of my existence for the last forty minutes. This was the very thing that we had both been anticipating and dreading so much. Normally it would be imperative to attack such a low level target in such a way as to ensure that your tail was safe from any counter attack. In this scenario, there was no choice. We had already briefed that anyone who spotted a low level target would just throw caution to the wind and go "balls out" for it. There was no time to be careful. Lives were at stake.
I jammed the throttle fully open, shouted over the radio "A4s attacking the boat, follow me down!" and peeled off into a 60 degree dive towards the attackers. As my airspeed rattled upwards through four hundred knots, I retracted my flaps and pushed to zero G, to achieve the best possible rate of acceleration. Dave Smith wrenched his Sea Harrier around after me but lost sight of my machine as we plunged downwards with the airspeed rocketing from the economic two hundred and forty knots on CAP, to well over six hundred knots, as we strained to catch the enemy before he could reach his target.
I watched impotently, urging my aircraft onwards and downwards, as the first A4 opened fire with his 20 mm cannon, bracketing the tiny matchbox of a craft. My heart soared as his bomb exploded a good one hundred feet beyond them but then sank as I realised that a further A4 was running in behind him. The second pilot did not miss and I bore mute and frustrated witness to the violent fire-bright petals of the explosion, which obliterated the stern, killing the crew and mortally wounding the landing craft. All consuming anger welled in my throat and I determined, in that instant, that this pilot was going to die!
The world suddenly became very quiet. I was completely focussed and was acutely aware that this was the moment for which all my training had prepared me. I had flown many hours of mock combat against all manner of fighters but this was to be the defining moment. As I closed rapidly on his tail, I noticed, in my peripheral vision, a further A4, skimming the spume-flecked water, paralleling his track to my left. I hauled my aircraft to the left and rolled out less than half a mile behind the third fighter, closing like a runaway train. I had both missiles and guns selected and within seconds I heard the growl in my earphones telling me that my missile could see the heat from his engine. My right thumb pressed the lock button on the stick and instantly the small green missile cross in the HUD transformed itself into a diamond, sitting squarely over the back end of the Skyhawk. At the same time, the growl of the missile became an urgent, high-pitched chirp, telling me that the infrared homing head of the weapon was locked on and ready to fire.
I raised the safety catch and mashed the red, recessed firing button with all the strength I could muster. There was a short delay as the missile's thermal battery ignited and its voltage increased to that required to launch the weapon. In less than half a second, the Sidewinder was transformed from an inert, eleven feet long drainpipe, into a living, fire breathing monster as it accelerated to nearly three times the speed of sound and streaked towards the nearest enemy aircraft. As it left the rails, the rocket efflux and supersonic shock wave over the left wing rolled my charging Sea Harrier rapidly to the right, throwing me onto my right wing tip at less than one hundred feet above the sea. As I rolled erect, the missile started to guide towards the Skyhawk's jet pipe, leaving a white corkscrew of smoke against the slate grey sea. Within two seconds, the missile disappeared directly up his jet pipe and what had been a living, vibrant, flying machine was completely obliterated in a fraction of a second as the missile tore into its vitals and ripped it apart. The pilot had no chance of survival and within a further two seconds the ocean had swallowed all trace of him and his aeroplane, as if they had never been.
There was no time for elation. As I was righting my machine after the first missile launch, I realised that I was pointing directly at another Argentine aircraft at a range of about one mile; the one I had seen hit the landing craft.
I had heard it said many times, by "arm chair warriors", that war in the air was a cold, sterile, almost esoteric form of combat, where you fought against machines without feelings or personal involvement. How wrong they were! This was not a computer game, I was not destroying machines, I was determined to kill these pilots. They who dared to attack my colleagues - ON MY WATCH! Those same pilots that I would probably have been very happy to share a drink with in different circumstances, now had to die.
Unbeknownst to me, on my entry into the fight, I had mistaken the third Skyhawk for the rearmost man, a mistake that should have cost me my life. As I was about to line up my sights on the second A4, the rear man was manoeuvring in an attempt to spoil my whole day with a stream of 20 mm high explosive rounds. I had made the classic mistake of barrelling into the fight without total situational awareness. As a result, I had nearly collided with the fourth Skyhawk and was now directly in front of him. Purely by chance, Primer Teniente Hector Sanchez had taken some ground fire a few minutes earlier, which had damaged his gun in such a way that it would not fire. He had to watch, helplessly, as his formation fell prey to my deadly missiles.
I mashed the lock button again, with a strength born of righteous anger and my second missile immediately locked onto the jet efflux of the next A4, as he started a panic break towards me on Hector's call. As I was about to fire, the homing head lost lock and the missile cross wandered drunkenly onto the sea, some fifty feet below him. Cursing, I rejected the false lock, mashed the lock button again, obtained the chirp and fired, the missile whipping across my nose and taking a handful of lead to the left, to head him off.
He obviously saw the Sidewinder launch, because he immediately reversed his break and pulled his aircraft into a screaming turn away from it. This was, without doubt, the best possible evasive action he could have tried, as it made the missile expend a huge amount of energy and control power to reverse its course. His best efforts were to no avail, however, and the thin grey missile flashed back across my nose and in seemingly slow motion, pulled lead to the right and impacted his machine directly behind the cockpit. The complete rear half of the airframe simply disintegrated, as if a shotgun had been fired at a plastic model from close range.
The pyrophoric warhead of the AIM9-L is a fearsome piece of engineering. It has a blast/fragmentation action, which produces a large pattern of high-speed fragments that make mincemeat of airframe and engine components alike. A few nanoseconds later, a disc of zirconium is detonated, which becomes a circular, fan-shaped pattern of white-hot metal scorching through the debris. This normally results in a catastrophic and instantaneous explosion. Very few fighter aircraft have ever survived an AIM9-L hit.
The air was soon filled with the aluminium confetti of destruction fluttering seawards. I watched, fascinated, as the disembodied cockpit yawed rapidly starboard through ninety degrees and splashed violently into the freezing water. I can vividly remember the detail of the cockpit, with the stubs of the wings still attached, as it impacted the waves.
I felt a terrific surge of elation at the demise of the second A4 and started to scan ahead, in the murk, for the others. I had just picked out the next one, fleeing west, his belly only feet from the water, when a parachute snapped open right in front of my face. The pilot had somehow managed to eject from the gyrating cockpit in the half second before it hit the water and he flashed over my left wing so close that I saw every detail of the rag doll figure, its arms and legs thrown out in a grotesque star shape by the deceleration of the silk canopy. My feelings of anger and elation instantly changed to relief and empathy as I realised that a fellow pilot had survived. An instant later, immense anger returned as I started to run down the next victim before he could make good his escape in the gloom.
I learned later that Teniente Arraras had not survived. I suspect that he was victim of the Escapac ejection seat fitted to his aircraft. This seat has a ballistic spreader, which opens the parachute immediately, no matter what the speed of the aircraft. This can result in massive injuries during a high-speed ejection and would have almost certainly rendered him unconscious before his entry into the water.
Now that I had launched both missiles, I had only guns with which to despatch the remaining Skyhawk and as I lifted the safety slide on the trigger, I realised that my HUD had disappeared and I had no gunsight. This was a well-known "glitch" in the HUD software and could be cured easily by selecting the HUD off and then on again. This I duly did, but in the ten seconds it took for the sight to reappear, it was all over.
The A4 broke rapidly towards me as I screamed up behind him with a good hundred and fifty knots overtake. I pulled his blurred outline to the bottom of the blank windscreen and opened fire. The roar of the 30 mm rounds leaving the guns at the rate of forty per second filled the cockpit. I kept my finger on the trigger and relaxed, then re-applied the G, in order to walk the rounds through him as best I could. Air to air gunnery at fifty feet is not easy at the best of times and without a gunsight, in the semi-darkness it was verging on the impossible.
Suddenly, over the radio came an urgent shout from Dave Smith, "Pull up, Pull up, you're being fired at!" All he had seen of the fight up until now, because of the failing light, was two missile launches followed by two explosions. He then saw an aircraft, only feet above the water, flying through a hail of explosions and assumed it to be me. By now I had run out of ammunition and at Dave's cry, I pulled up into the vertical, through the setting sun and in a big lazy looping manoeuvre, rolled out at twelve thousand feet heading northeast for Hermes with my heart racing.
In the vertical climb, I looked back down over Choiseul Sound and saw a white trail appear, accelerating towards the fleeing A4. The trail was so low to the water that my first crazy thought was that it was a torpedo! I soon realised, however, that it was a missile and watched mesmerised as it headed for the enemy fighter. About halfway to the target, the rocket motor burnt out and for a few maddening seconds, I thought it had been fired out of range and would drop into the water. Dave had not misjudged it though and after some seven seconds of flight, there was a brilliant white flash as the zirconium disc in the warhead ignited. The Skyhawk target was so low that the flash of the warhead merged with its reflection in the water of the Sound. A fraction of a second later, the aircraft disappeared in a huge yellow-orange fireball, as it spread its burning remains over the sand dunes on the north coast of Lafonia, near Hammond Point.
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