Originally I'd been selected for Jaguar training
but things had changed in the system
and they'd looked at my abilities
and decided I was probably better suited to the Phantom
which was the best thing that ever happened I think.
I really enjoyed the Phantom.
before I started flying
but once you become involved with the Phantom,
you never forget it.
It was quite an extraordinary airplane.
Hugely powerful.
Brutal.
It was not like the Hawk at all.
It was bigger.
You had to climb up into it.
And it had a lot of systems in it
which I'd never seen before
in an airplane.
It had reheated engines, it had a radar,
it had missiles
and all of that was new
and it was doing a mission
which we hadn't particularly been trained for really.
Any intercept training
was not included in our flying training at all.
There was no way of doing that.
So I was being introduced to something different.
And of course, it had a navigator.
We came to the Phantom much better prepared
than our navigator students, fellow students.
They'd had even less exposure
to that type of training.
The fast jet, they'd not seen a fast jet at all.
They'd flown in the Domini and the Jet Prost
and that was it.
So they came into the back of a Phantom
quite green (chuckling)
and came out of the flight looking
even more green actually the first few flights.
So we felt, the pilots felt quite confident actually
that the navigators were, yes,
exposed to a whole to of new things.
