"I suppose I ought to say welcome," said he, "but to be honest I've already got dozens like you and could well do without another one. Anyway, just for the form, welcome."
A greeting never to be forgotten. I don't recall him ever saying another word to me before he was posted half way through my tour. He was right, though, about the first tourists on his squadron, which had a somewhat unusual structure. He was a squadron leader: perhaps one of the last operational COs with that rank for, by that time, most front-line units had wing commanders at the helm. The two flight commanders were flight lieutenants and they, together with a couple of QFIs, an IRE and two PAIs (Pilot Attack Instructors — that qualification soon to be renamed Qualified Weapons Instructors), formed the experienced cadre. The remainder of the twenty-two pilots were first-tour flying officers. This lack of balance led to the rest of the fighter force regarding the Bahrain Hunter squadrons as little more than advanced training units. There was a grain of truth in the notion but it wasn't altogether the case, for we did get involved in some limited ops.
The structure was made even odder by the fact that some of the 'top team' were also of flying officer rank. Yes, the two PAIs and the IRE (Ed.: Paul Day, Rod Dean and Roger Wholey). This derived from the apparent view of those three gentlemen that 'real' pilots would rather not get promoted because of the risk of being sent to staff appointments; they simply wished to keep flying. They wore their lowly rank as something of a badge of honour to show that they hadn't taken their 'B' exam. Passing that routine test would have seen them
automatically promoted to flight lieutenant; it was, by the way, quite hard to fail.
Some time into my tour we got a new boss, and he decreed that all his flying officers must take the exam at the next annual sitting. Unfortunately, the exam that year was scheduled to be held at Muharraq slap bang in the middle of our annual live weapons (HE) armament practice camp at Masirah. Now this wasn't a problem for us young chaps — we were sorry to miss the APC, but there would be others. But to dispatch the Squadron on this important weapons event without its two specialist PAIs was a big call. Because I was in Bahrain taking the exam I have no first-hand knowledge of what actually happened down at Masirah, but the bush telegraph did bring word of a couple of incidents that might have been avoided if the experts had been running the show.
Later in my RAF career we took very seriously the setting for a real or simulated operational mission. The political background would be well known to us and would be touched on briefly, followed by the intelligence situation pertaining to the particular mission.
