Early military yearnings
I was born in Geelong in Victoria and grew up for probably around the first ten years or so in Geelong, went to St Thomas Aquinas Primary School out at Norlane, which is a suburb north of Geelong, and eventually ended up in at St Mary's Technical School in the centre of Geelong itself. We had a break, went up to Wagga for a couple of years and went to Bishop Henschke's Boys Primary School for a couple of years. And then we went back to Geelong, which is when I started secondary school.
Brought up in those early years in Geelong in Norlane. Dad was a World War Two Navy veteran, served both in the Pacific and also the Korean conflict, and he left the Navy in the early sixties and worked at the Shell Refinery, which was a big oil refinery in Geelong, and that's where he settled down. He ended up working in the Ford factory, which a lot of people around that area would know before it closed down.
And yeah, so he was primarily based in Geelong. Mum and Dad split up when I was around about ten, which is what forced us to go to Wagga – Mum my sister and I – and I think I've always had, because Dad was Navy, all his mates were Navy, whenever we went anywhere it was always with a bunch of Navy mates, or ex-Navy mates. So I grew up, I guess, relishing the stories of World War Two. I had the World War Two comics, I collected those like there was no tomorrow. I loved Airfix model airplanes. And I had more of a yearning for flying.
Victorian Air Training Corps
I liked the idea of flying and airplanes and the technical part of that, and I did like physics and science and maths and did well at school, relatively well at school, in those subjects. So when it came time to be back in Geelong, I was about 14, 15 and I joined, I found out about and joined the Victorian Air Training Corps No. 27 flight at Geelong and spent probably about three or four years there before turning 17 and joining the Royal Australian Air Force.
Joined the Air Force as an airframe fitter and initially worked on Mirages at Williamtown, and then one day one of the guys I used to work with spoke to me about the search and rescue flight helicopter, which was flying at Williamtown. So, he said, 'You should go for a flight. Ever been for a flight in a helicopter?' 'No, I haven't.' So I went for a fly in this helicopter and there was this guy sitting next to me opening up the doors and had his head out in the wind and it looked really cool doing this hoisting thing and I went, 'I want that job.' So I applied for helicopter crewman.
Helicopter crewman and loadmaster
Prior to remastering or changing jobs to helicopter crewman in those days to be a pilot in the Air Force, you only needed year 11 or form five. Year 11 with science, maths, chemistry, physics, and I'd done all those and done well in them. And the base education officer had called me in one day and said, 'Ah Rob, have you thought of doing this?' Because I was doing some testing for the helicopter crewman pieces and he said, 'You could be a pilot, you know that?' And I thought yeah I probably could, but this looks a whole lot more fun.
And so that was probably why I didn't go that way. I kind of thought about it a couple of times, but helicopter crewman and then follow on to that Hercules loadmaster were the best jobs in the Air Force … throwing people out on parachutes. And you know, running the back of the airplane, which was what the helicopter crewmen did as well.
Pilot's obviously a very important job, flying either the aircraft or helicopter to and from and getting it safely from point A to point B. But I felt there's a separate world in the back of the airplane, which the crewman or the loadmaster in a Hercules aircraft is in charge of. And that was a real quite a buzz for me.
Training
The helicopter course was run at RAAF Base Fairbairn, which is in Canberra in the ACT, it doesn't exist anymore. There's a defence establishment at Fairbairn, but it's part of the airport. No.5 Squadron was one of the units at RAAF Fairbairn and I commenced course in 1983. Part of the course was also, as you can imagine with any aircraft operation, is this thing about weight and balance load planning. So the first initial part of the course was done in RAAF Base Richmond up in Sydney, and that was all about basic air and aircrew principles around that weight and balance piece.
So a lot of mathematics, a lot of long division, a lot of calculating where – if you think of a seesaw, it's the seesaw effect of if you put too much on that end of the seesaw, the airplane or the seesaw will go like that and vice versa. So you've got to allow for fuel burns and movement of cargo, that kind of thing, as you do your transition around the place.
So although helicopters have a smaller seesaw effect, it's still a vital part of it. So about six weeks in RAAF Richmond doing that basic calculation and weight and balance thing, and then to RAAF base Fairbairn to do the practical hands-on helicopters. So probably, I think it was probably around two or three weeks of what we call ground phase, which is just the technical side of helicopters, how they work, how they fly, the effect that different loads and weights and the roles of everyone in the squadron.
So the pilot, the airmen, aircrew, importantly the maintenance people, and then all those support folks that go around keeping us in the air: the clerks in the orderly room, supply folks, you know, the safety equipment workers. It's just quite a large and eclectic gathering of different trades, different skills and experience to get that helicopter in the air and keep the crew flying and safe. So that's the really important part of helicopter flying. Then it was around about six months of various types of training.
You know, you can imagine the initial first flight: just sit in the back, look out the window, don't touch anything and we'll explain what happens along the way. And then over time, probably the more challenging piece for us wasn't so much the theoretical side, but the practical side. It was a really different space to work in. The office was a helicopter and a lot of it was hoisting. So rescue survivors, there was what we call external loads. So lifting from the bottom of the helicopter on a strap, an external load, and carrying it to a forward base or a unit that needs some supplies.
Troop lift. So troop lifting in and out of combat zones, and various types of scenarios around that normal helicopter operation. It was really quite varied in learning different skills, and particularly – I was 20 years old at the time. So that responsibility of guiding an aircraft into a landing area or a hoisting area in the trees. A pilot's vision, helicopter pilots' vision is very, very limited, as you can imagine, sitting in a chair not unlike this, there's a little window that they can see a little bit of reference to the ground there, a big window at the front, but that's about it.
They're trying to pick a spot on the tree that isn't moving and trying to keep the hover still while the crewman is putting the rescue winch cable down to rescue someone or deliver something. So the eyes and ears of the aircraft pilots are actually the crewmen at the back because they've got the peripheral vision covered for the pilot. They've got the rear part of it, the big tail with a big spinny thing at the back called the tail rotor.
If that goes into the trees then that's going to cause a whole bunch of headaches for everybody. So the helicopter crewman's job was to guide the pilot in, noting the momentum of the speed of the aircraft coming to the spot that they might want to hoist into. So the pilot slowing down and we're calling them in by how far to go, usually from probably anything from 200 to 250 feet out. And then as they're slowing down, you learn the momentum of how quickly the aircraft starts that deceleration and then comes to a stop.
You'll count down very quickly or very slowly. If they're moving slow, it's forward ten, five, four, three, two, one. And then you're hopefully in the spot. Move left, two, one, hold. Move right, five, four, two, one, hold. So you're getting that position right so that we can do a safe hoist perhaps of who we're picking up off the ground. If you can imagine all that stuff and a big rotor making a whole bunch of noise up the top there and probably someone's life on the line down below the aircraft, and the crew on board the aircraft are all relying on one person to keep them in the right spot and make sure the main rotor doesn't go into the big tree there and the tail rotor doesn't go into the bushes down the back there.
And that the aircraft survival sling is getting to the right spot. It's the person's got it on nice and safely and then you're bringing them back up again nice and safely, all waiting for something to go wrong. And in the airman-aircrew's world, you are always prepared for what's going to go wrong. Probably not so much what's going to go right. You hope that it's going to go right, but it's about if this goes wrong, what will I do? As it's all going right, if that makes sense.
So, you know, if the aircraft loses power and dips a bit and the rotor hits that tree and I've got someone on the sling, how am I going to get them safely – as safe as I can – onto the ground while we're rolling to the right? So yeah, you're always doing that kind of thing. So the training was really intense in that sense of the word and something quite different to anything else that anyone could possibly experience, I think.
Monitoring flying time
The Air Force, Navy and Army still do have strict guidelines around how much you can fly per mission, per day, per week, per month, per year. And they monitor that – as individuals you would monitor it anyway and keep everyone aware of it, but certainly the hierarchy within the squadron and then a force element group would be watching to make sure that we're not over extending our crews and our individuals.
But that said, of course, everyone's limit is at a certain level, so there's a lot of reliance on the individuals to be able to put their hand up, and a lot of support for people to put their hand up and say, 'Hey listen, I'm a little tired. I think I need to take a break or I need some assistance in something.' And Air Force, Navy and Army are always there to do that.
Crew Resource Management
The crew of a helicopter was generally two pilots – captain of the aircraft and the co-pilot – and two crewmen, which was there was a left hand crewman and a right hand crewman, obviously. And generally the senior crewman was the right hand crewman, that's the side that the hoist was on. They were the most senior person in the back of the airplane, so what they said overruled people. However, it's called Crew Resource Management, and that's where you use people to the best of their ability to be able to get the mission done safely.
So no navigator per se in a helicopter, but the navigational skills, depending on the type of operation and the environment we're in, would be either generally the non-flying pilot would be navigating. Everyone's always aware of where we are and what we're doing, but map-in-hand stuff, the non-flying pilot and then quite a bit of the time the map might be passed back to the crewmen to be able to navigate from the back of the aircraft. In the Sinai that was one of the primary roles of the crewmen, in those missions was navigation and radio calls back to our main operating base and an agency called Centre North.
Changing aircraft types
When changing aircraft types, it's always challenging but always very exciting. And you bring quite a bit of experience and knowledge with you from that previous aircraft type. The principles are kind of the same, but extensively it's a different technical operating platform. So to move from Iroquois to the Squirrel was quite different. Iroquois big, heavy, clunky, noisy, heavy lift, a medium-lift helicopter.
Squirrel, quite a light training observation-type of aircraft, still had a hoist and could do hoisting and things like that, but certainly not to the capacity that the medium-lift helicopter of a UH-1H would be able to do. So that was initially – for particularly the helicopter school and the helicopter force at Fairbairn – was quite a dramatic change because the majority of people that had been at the squadron for many years, pilots and maintenance in particular, and crewman, had been brought up for we'd had helicopters UH-1H and B, and Delta models, for around 20 years almost and then we had this new aircraft, new platform, quite different.
So there was quite a bit of a transition period and taking it very, very slowly and easily for everybody. Technically it was just something we, as crewman, needed to get used to: that it was a smaller space, couldn't carry as much, there were other effects on the aircraft. I think the biggest change for me came to when we received the Blackhawks, S70-A9 Black Hawk.
That was around '88 and I was up at No.9 Squadron in Amberley at that stage where No.9 Squadron before that were operating the UH-1H and the Delta models and were had a secondary duty as gunship. So was trained on that, having a great time and then we got the Blackhawk purchase happened. So the Blackhawk again was that next generation, it was like coming out of the, well, the Hueys were a '50s design, introduced in the '60s as a thousand-hour throwaway aircraft for the Vietnam conflict primarily.
And then we went to this S70-A9 Blackhawk cutting edge aircraft, which just blew everyone's minds away. It was a very forgiving airplane, whereas the Iroquois wasn't as forgiving. So, I think that was probably the biggest leap of technology and capability and just situational awareness requirement that I had ever experienced. Even going from helicopters to Hercules training, I think that was probably the biggest transition for me and others.
Deployment to the Sinai Desert
The advice that I was going on the deployment to the Sinai Desert was quite short compared to what is a normal. Usually a couple of months or quite a few months out people would get into a rotation of, 'You're on the next rotation'. They were six-month rotations as well. So we knew that when it was going to happen, well and truly scheduled.
But fortunately one of the other crewmen who was over in the Sinai injured himself and had to come home early. I was given, I think it was probably about two or three week's notice. I was a single guy living on base, had very, very few cares in the world. It really didn't make any difference to me, which is why they asked me if I would go.
So it was a very quick two or three week period of, there was a whole bunch of qualifications that I needed to make sure I had before I left, things that were going to expire while I was away, for instance. I had to get around and get things done really, really quickly in a bespoke kind of manner, rather than like 20 of us go in the room and do this course. 'Rob, you're in the room with maybe one other person, let's get this done quickly.' So yeah, it was very short notice and then before I knew it, I was sitting in the back of a C-130 Hercules departing and flying around the other side of the world.
El Gorah Base, Sinai Desert
They loaded up a Herc, an E Model Hercules and it was – there were probably about, I'd say probably 20 or 30 of us on the rotation. And again, that was everything: pilots, crewmen, maintenance, safety equipment, supply clerks, cooks, you name it. We had it going over there … The majority of it was Air Force, but we also had Army comms people with us and we had some Navy crewmen and pilots with us.
I don't think we had any maintenance from Navy, but they operated the Bravo model helicopter. It was very similar to the H-model. They just did a quick conversion and came over with us. So we probably had two or three Navy crewmen, two or three Navy pilots, and Army, we probably had a half a dozen other operators working with us.
And then we also had a headquarters area which had a smattering of Army, Navy, Air Force people, which weren't part of the helicopter operation, but doing other things for the ACMFO … First of all when we left Australia with the RAAF base at Richmond in the back of a C-130 Hercules E Model, and off we went and the first stopover was, pretty sure it was Darwin. And then we scattered our way across the Pacific.
We ended up, we were at the Maldives, spent a night in the Maldives and then into country basically. Took us about, I'm going to think it was probably five or six days to get there and, you know, spread out across a Hercules, as you can imagine, for that amount of time … So arrival at the base at what was called El Gorah, it was a shock to the senses, remembering that we'd come out of a very green Canberra, Sydney, Australia and into the desert.
And it was the desert. Everything was sandy-covered, go figure, with a dead bush somewhere every now and then, or rolling across the airstrip when the wind blew. The base was quite spread out and sparse. It was a previous Israeli super base when the Israelis owned that part of the Sinai, and there were reported to be multi-levelled hangars beneath the ground, but we never saw them and they were quite dangerous apparently, so we didn't venture in there and were all blocked off. But there was the headquarters area for the RWAU – Rotary Wing Aviation Unit – and it was basically a couple of demountables – smaller buildings, single level; and a tarmac area for the parking of the helicopters.
And then we had, obviously it was right on the edge of the airstrip. So normal operating footprint, what you could imagine a helicopter base would look like. We had, and in there we had all of our support. We had a hangar or two, and we did, we had a more permanent hangar and we had what we called the rag hangar, which was made of tarpaulins. It was quite a large one, you could fit four or five helicopters in there.
So we're talking a large rag hangar, which eventually burnt down somewhere along the line, caught fire and burnt down. But it was separate to the living area of the base. There was also, so up that end of the base we also shared the tarmac area somewhat with the French, and they flew an aircraft called Transalls. They flew the Transalls out of there. They were basically like a twin-engine Hercules transport airplane.
And they did the more medium-distance lifts in and out of areas around to the purpose-built airfields around the peninsula. So we had a close, very close working relationship with the French. They shared part of the headquarters building with us as well. And also with us, I met one of my first New Zealand friends. We had New Zealand helicopter crewmen and pilots attached to our unit as well. So it was the Anzacs. That's what we proudly called ourselves.
Australian Iroquois on rotation
They were Australian Iroquois that we operated in the MFO and throughout the Sinai and they were basically the squadron aircraft that were painted white. Because they were camouflaged green in Australia for obvious reasons, and over in the Sinai they were painted white and had a large MFO decal on the side of the doors so that they could stand out, obviously, as MFO aircraft.
Quite often an aircraft would come up for a major servicing and the maintenance teams would pull it apart, take the rotor off, and when the Herc came over with a rotation, they'd push the Iroquois into the back of the Hercules, load it all up, put the rest of the people who were going home on the rotation flight back home again and bring the new one over, obviously. So that's how we maintained the aircraft operability for the time.
Recreation and accommodation
The social activity on base was great, particularly for a 20-year-old young guy. I was quite surprised. I thought it would be more primitive than what it was. We had a lot of contingents, which you probably researched. We had, as I mentioned, we had the New Zealanders and the French with us, but we also had infantry battalions, which was the Colombians and the Fijians.
So they provided the infantry power that we needed, and we lifted them with us and took them into what we called observation posts. They would go out in teams of five, six for a period of time, a few days or a week. And the helicopters, one of our roles was to take them out, drop them off into the observation post, pick the people who'd been out there on duty, pick them up and bring them back home again. That was one of the many roles that we did out there. So yeah, the landscape was pretty sparse.
The operating area was very separate to the living areas. Up in the living areas, it was probably about – I'm going to say maybe a kilometre and a half to two kilometres drive from the operating area – and the accommodation was actually pretty good, shared two to a room, and you know, just a normal room that you would imagine on a deployment, nothing flash but it had a roof on it and had an air conditioner in the wall, which was great over there. And two folks to the rooms and common shower blocks.
There were probably maybe 10 or 15 rooms per block. They were probably, in the Australian piece, there was probably I'd say four or five blocks, a big shower, common share, a toilet block that you'd walk out to in the morning and do your thing and all that sort of stuff. And then each, so each contingent had it. The Fijians had a similar set up, the French had a similar set up, the Colombians had a similar set up, the Americans had a similar set up and the other multinational forces had the same sort of deal.
And each contingent had their own bar area as well. We had the Anzac Bar or Surf Club, as we called it, and there was a lot of work had gone on before I arrived to make it as homely as possible. Because you've got to remember, we're there for six months away from home. No internet in those days. We had a phone call probably once a week.
We had a phone that you could use and you sort of got in line and used it. And we had mail twice a week, so mail would come in, which was quite exciting, and it was a bit of a 'do' down at the Surf Club, at the bar, to hand out letters and see who got letters all the time. I was actually probably pretty famous because I kept on getting mail just about every week from the family back here in Australia and my girlfriend at the time.
So I was very, very lucky. You can see I'm smiling because it does bring back a lot of fond memories of the Anzac surf club. We also had, as part of the surf club, we had an outdoor cinema, very Australian. And the other thing that we built was a gutter, so we could have gutter parties. But we had this outdoor cinema and we often have, each of the contingents would have a themed night throughout the week where, you know, the French might have a themed French night and the Aussies would have a movies and drinks night or a barbecue night, that kind of thing. So it was a really very, very sociable spot.
Roles of the helicopter contingent
One of the other roles of the helicopter contingent was to carry around the multinational force of observers. They were generally retired military, relatively senior people that had experience in those areas of operations, and we'd carry them around to different sections within the Sinai Desert. And then depending on what the agreement was between the Israelis and the Egyptians, there would be a certain amount of troops, Egyptian troops in that area, or a certain amount of tanks or a certain amount of weaponry.
So when we would pull into the observation post or the landing area, the observers would get out and walk away and do that actual audit or count of how many people. 'That's right. You've got 100 here. That's 100. You got two tanks. That's two tanks.' That was one of the primary parts of the role. So the Sinai was sectioned into that. Now, every now and then there were these shows of force from both sides.
Primarily, I would say the Israelis more so, and particularly along their immediate border. If there was a crossing of the border by an aircraft – and it could well be, it was quite often an Iroquois from the Rotary Wing Aviation Unit, which would maybe do a border-hugging patrol, which was part of our thing with the observers, looking out, making sure everything's okay.
And if we got too close to the border or to the airspace, we'd be buzzed by Israeli A-4 Skyhawk jets with a, 'You are coming close to the Israeli airspace, please move away.' And then all the normal sort of chatter that you would get across the radio from that. Did we ever feel any threat? Not really, but there was a threat there and we had to be conscious of it and we had to make sure that they knew exactly who we were and what we were doing there.
But again, I always felt and we felt it was more a show of force rather than anything else, but things happen, accidents do happen, and so we were very conscious of what was happening there. Egyptians, not so much. We always found them very cooperative, as we did the Israelis. You know, everyone was playing by the rules. I think the biggest threat for us came from – as helicopter crews – came from the local Bedouin people who would not enjoy helicopters flying around or perhaps the peacekeeping mission and we had aircraft that took ground fire from Bedouin shepherds.
And quite often you would fly – as we did, very, very low, 100 feet off of the ground in some instances – across the top, or we'd always go around, a Bedouin settlement. And often you'd see a man in garb run out pointing something at us, which we could tell was a weapon of sorts. Probably not fire, shake the fist, point the weapon.
But there were aircraft that took rounds as well in primarily the tail boom area. And the other big threat over there was, being a single-engined aircraft helicopter, if an engine fails in a helicopter it's quite safe because you can actually auto-rotate and kind of land relatively safely. We're well trained for it and it can happen. The Sinai Peninsula, though, is the most heavily mined – land mined – part of the world. And there were a lot of demining activities going on while we were flying around.
But whenever we would fly over kilometres and kilometres of desert and the wind would blow sand across and would expose thousands of anti-tank mines, particularly up valleys, which we would fly in because, you know, over the World War One, World War Two and other conflicts, where are they going to put the mines? In the valleys, because that's where the tanks are going to drive. So one of the biggest threats for us was if we lost an engine or we had to make an emergency landing, finding a road or something that looked like a road that we hope didn't have a mine on it.
Danger close to the border
A few times a week you'd hear, either be part of or you'd hear something, 'Oh yeah, we got too close to the border and they buzzed us again.' Or they'd shoot off flares which was another one of those things. They would fire flares into the air, quite powerful you know, up to a couple of thousand feet into the air and then illuminate, illuminating flares, just to illuminate the border. And of course if you're in a helicopter flying through that kind of thing, that could be quite dangerous as well.
So, it wasn't so much – besides the Bedouin piece, being shot at – but a mistake being made either in a flare dropping into a rotor or some overzealous Israeli or Egyptian ground personnel using some quite heavy calibre shell to shoot at what they think may well be the invasion from the other side, which was the UH-1H helicopter. It didn't happen, but we were always conscious of that as well.
Challenges living on base
Living on the base there were always challenges. And some of those challenges were around power supply. You can imagine again we were a fair way out and away from a major town, a couple of hundred kilometres at least. And power supply was self-generated at the base as well. So there were always intermittent power blackouts and you know, particularly it was always on an extremely hot day or hot night because everyone that were lucky enough to have air conditioners in their rooms would be cranking up the air conditioners and just the power suck and surge would fail and we'd lose complete power.
Water and sewerage was an issue as well because the pipes that we were using had been there for quite some time. And just the conditions, there were often breaks in water and sewage. It wasn't a regular occurrence, but it did happen. I think probably the main thing for everybody everywhere, both aircraft and people, was the dust and the sand.
The types of sandstorms that we'd get were just things you would see in movies. They'd come across the base and even just operating the aircraft in that dusty environment – everyone's seen a helicopter land and it's got that rotor wash that just wooshes everything everywhere. So you can imagine landing in what could be a nice soft landing pad in the middle of a desert with lots and lots and lots of loose sand is going to generate that swirling effect, which of course, as it pushes down and up, gets sucked back into the rotor blades again. So there was a lot of abrasion on the leading edges of the rotor blades, which you don't want to fail ever, by the way.
The maintenance teams were always hot on rotor damage and the tail rotor as well, of course, but also just general dust and grit getting into inside the aircraft which had a lot of moving pieces in it, but also had a lot of technical electronics in it as well, which again, getting dust and dirt in. I know the maintenance teams were always working overtime trying to get the aircraft clean enough to be operated in a safe manner … I probably didn't see one Hercules on one of those rotation resupply missions come in without a rotor blade box in it, which would have a few rotor blades on board, because it was a constant change. Lots of monitoring.
You're right, you don't want it to fail because what happens when – you wouldn't want it to get too thin, but if it does get too thin – it would start to peel away as it went through the air. And as it peels away, of course, you lose your lift and it's not a good day for anybody after a helicopter loses its lift, as I mentioned before. And that would be quite a catastrophic event for the aircraft and for the crew. So lots of maintenance, lots of rotor changes. That was probably one of the biggest things that we had happening there. So yeah, it was something that everyone was conscious of.
Servicing and maintenance
A standard maintenance cycle within any squadron, be it on deployment or back here in Australia was, you know, there's generally the front line aircraft and – depending on the size of the squadron and the operations there – that's generally the majority of the squadron. In that instance we would have had six or seven aircraft available per day, and every morning we would have what we call morning brief. In the morning brief you hear about the weather, the crews, any threats, enemy threats on the ground, any conditions we need to know about, admin stuff, aircraft maintenance and availability, and the senior engineering officer would say, 'We have eight jets or aircraft' – I should say eight helicopters – 'on line, but we have two in for servicing which are unavailable and we have five for immediate availability. And we have another one that could be three or four hours available.' So that's how it's generally run in all squadrons. But over there we generally had, we could have anything from, we probably required at least five a day out of the eight. And we had a very high success rate, high percentage of, you know, 80 to 100% serviceability on aircraft. But again when we find an aircraft that's starting to get a little bit too dirty, then it would be taken offline and maintenance crews again would work crazy hours to get it back up to fill that position.
A typical day
Typical day, if you're going, depending on what time your sortie was scheduled for and depending on what sort of mission it was. It could be an observer mission, which was generally quite a long mission. You might be flying from El Gorah up to right through the Sinai Peninsula, up to any part of the Sinai, which could be five, six hours duration away doing a refuel.
There was a North Camp and South Camp, so we were North camp. South Camp was a primarily American operating base. And if we flew down there, you know, big refuel, a lot of gas and then fly back up and do. So you could be gone for quite some time, say leave early, come back late. If it was an observation post changeover, they could be only 20, 30, 40 kilometres away, so it could be as quick as all over and done in an hour.
There was quite an extreme in the mission profile. But a typical day would be a couple of hours before the sortie was departing, up over to the mess for breakfast or you'd have breakfast in your room. You'd sort that yourself from the night before if it was a really early start and you weren't able to get into the mess. Over to meet the crew at the Surf Club, at the bar area, just gather there.
Then either we'd have a car or the car would come and pick us up or the bus would come pick us up and drive up to the flight line. Up into the flight line for a mission briefing, or as I said you could make the morning brief, which gives you everything that happens throughout the day. But if you're going away flying on a mission, we'd have a mission brief with what we had to do: we're going to do an observation post, change over or whatever it could have been.
Then the pilots would go and gather the weather information, do the maintenance sign off, the fitters would come and make sure everything was okay. They'd start to prepare, the maintenance people would start to prepare the aircraft, the crewmen would start to do the walk around, our walk around of the aircraft. That's primarily the back of the airplane. Make sure there's nothing obvious outside of the airplane.
Pilots would do their walk around as well and prepare for the mission. If it was an observation post changeover, then there would be six to 10 either Fijians or Colombians waiting to be briefed. So you'd go through a safety brief just like you would on a Qantas jet, and generally their English was very poor so we'd have an interpreter. So the crewman would have to talk through the interpreter and the interpreter then interpret it.
It could be quite a long and lengthy briefing, but we got there eventually and load up the airplane, go through the start sequence and depart the aircraft. In Australian operations the crewman would sit in the rear part of the aircraft operating the door guns, the machine guns, and the troops would sit in the middle part of the aircraft, and the pilot's obviously at the front.
But in the Sinai we had, generally it was one crewman in operation and two pilots in the Sinai we had a what we called a jump seat, which was just a seat, a normal one of those primitive aircraft seats which the crewman would sit on almost between the two pilots. So the pilots were directly there, crew man was here. And we would do the radio calls departing El Gorah for whatever our destination was or our first waypoint.
And the crewman would primarily make sure everyone was sat in the back, seat belts, normal sort of safety, close the doors, aircraft takes off departs from the airfield, and the crewman starts their role of navigating and radio calls. So obviously the safety radio calls for search and rescue response if we needed it, and we spoke back to our people in El Gorah, which was made up of Army and Air Force air traffic type of operations folks.
And then we flew and navigated, telling the pilots where to go, what to do, that kind of thing … atmospheric conditions can change very quickly. In the desert, though, it was fairly flat in most areas. However, generally it's quite a flat, sparse space and you could see a sandstorm coming and we could generally climb ,either climb over it or scoot around it or turn and go back home again if it was that drastic.
The threat of landmines
There were occasions where in particular I mentioned before landmines and local Bedouins wandering around, tending to the herd and families. So, you know, children would, anyone from a family, would stand on a landmine and cause death or injury. We were quite often called out for medical evacuations. The Fijian and the Colombian battalions that would be out there could have an accident.
They were all very well trained. Everyone was trained around mines and safe operating and movement through around the desert. I can't recall any mine fatalities or injuries for the peacekeeping force but there was an incident at Christmas. It was actually Boxing Day morning. I was on search and rescue. We had a SAR standby, you got it for a week – two pilots and a crewman. SAR stand by which meant you couldn't drink, had to be been an hours' notice to go, so aircraft was set up for you.
The aircraft was on the pad, ready to go with your gear in it, so if something happened, search and rescue needed, you were there and airborne very, very quickly. So yeah, so we'd had Christmas Day and I was on SAR standby and we got the call that there had been an accident where mines were being cleared by a mine clearance team.
And what had happened was they had found a very old mine that a lot of people hadn't seen before from World War One. And there was a bunch of trainee clearance people on it as well. These were some Egyptian forces and there were 13 of them, 12 plus the instructor basically, and he'd got them to come around the mine to watch him make it safe. They were gathered around it and it exploded, shredded, just about everyone to pieces.
Sporting activities
The base was mainly operated by the Americans. So, as they say, if you're going to go to war, go to war with the Americans because they take everything. And they had a great mess, they had great sporting facilities, a big gymnasium and a base exchange which is the shop that they have on there as well, which was kind of duty free constantly. You got some really cheap stuff and good stuff.
But physical activity, they had a great gym there. We would use it quite often and each contingent would do their own game of basketball or game of cricket or game of whatever. And every now and then we would verse the other contingent. Obviously the UK contingent, the Australians would often have cricket matches and we'd play for the Ashes, the Desert Ashes and that was, that was one bit.
With the Americans I learned a bit about Gridiron and the American football piece, I really enjoyed that. I had a couple of muck around games with them as contingent and really enjoyed that part of it. But bike races was another one of them. A lot of the contingent had their own contingent push bikes, which you know, were always lavish with their Australian flag or the French rooster on the side of them.
It was good sport to actually steal the other contingent's bikes and hide them for a while. But we'd often have the Sinai Rally with the bikes basically around a dirt track, which there was some horrendous injuries where people would come off and hurt themselves. But all in the name of good fun. So yeah, that was kind of the sporting thing. Played my first game of volleyball over there as well. That was another big game over there. And the contingents did have competition in some of those sports.
In an ancient land and international travel
It was taxing the six months. We were lucky enough where quite often, as you know, the Sinai Peninsula and that part of the world is the most ancient part of the world and there's some magnificent historic landmarks throughout that area. We got Jerusalem just up the road, was a few hours' drive, and Tel Aviv and Cairo. You could catch trains all across to Cairo and spend time over there.
We were lucky where the contingent commanders would allow us to go away and have a break. And when you're in that part of the world, why wouldn't you? And it was great. And I was brought up, as I mentioned at the start, in a Catholic system. So I knew the history of the Beatitudes, the Dead Sea, Jerusalem, the Stations of the Cross. I'd been brought up with it.
And what I say, getting quite bored with it at school thinking, 'I don't know what this is', and then I was there at 20 years of age, so it was really, just really life changing to be able to go. That's where Jesus ascended to heaven, so they say, but it was really, really educational. And so we got out quite often to have that break from operations, which was great.
And then also partway through your deployment, you could take a few weeks off and travel. My secondary duty, which is a duty you do outside of your normal stuff, was as the travel agent for our contingent. People would come to me go, 'Well, Rob, I want to go on a Contiki tour around Europe for two weeks.' I'd then negotiate with the people in Tel Aviv in the travel office in there, the civilians, and organize and arrange travel.
It's actually good fun, I really enjoyed it. And my team – there were four of us that went to England and drove around England and Scotland and then caught the boat across to France and went to Paris. So, we did that. We had a really good break midway through or just probably a little bit after midway through the deployment. By the time we were heading home we were certainly tired, and we wanted – and I think probably having that break and going back over to England probably wasn't a good idea, because then you had to come back and spend three months in the desert again.
But anyway, so, by the time we got on the Herc and we got home again we were ready for Australia. We were pining for going to the shops and getting a pie and, you know, turning on the tap and having clean water, no doubt, and just doing those things that we take for granted in Australia. And certainly before I left I took for granted.
And then living and operating in some of the environments in the Sinai where we would sometimes overnight in an environment or we would pull up with the observers and spend four or five hours while they went off and did their auditing. We'd sit with the locals and drink tea with them and share some of their stories and hear and watch and see. As a 20-year-old coming from the very well catered-for Australia, to sit and watch and listen was just again a life-altering experience for me, to understand how lucky we are to live in the great country that we live in.
Exploring the region
We could travel into what we'd say the local towns and that was Jerusalem, Tel Aviv – Cairo was a little bit further because it was across the peninsula. Cairo was a regular mission for the French Transall aircraft. I think two or three times a week they would fly from El Gorah, our base, to Cairo, drop stuff or pick stuff up, come back again.
So we could actually catch one across on Monday and catch the other one back on Friday. Yeah, I think I had three days. I went across on Monday, came back on the Wednesday. And so that was available if you could arrange your missions and the requirement for being there. Again, the bosses were really great. If we could get people out, we would get people out.
And the Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and also just around through the whole of the peninsula, I went to Masada, climbed up Masada, went for swim in the Dead Sea, Beatitudes as I said, that's just near the Dead Sea. So everyone would do generally – in your six months, you'd do a Cairo trip, going to see the pyramids and stuff, and then you would probably get into one of those towns a couple of times each, half a dozen times in six months you'd get in there.
I was very lucky because as I said, I was the travel agent. So quite often when I could I needed to get into town to take cash in for people's tickets – in those days we didn't have the Internet to book things – so I had to get the wads of cash and take it in, pay the people, get the actual physical tickets to get on the airplane, take them back. I was a regular into Tel Aviv in particular, but Jerusalem quite often as well.
So yeah, there was lots of opportunities to be able to go and explore. And even flying and operating – my great great uncle was in the last charge at Beersheba, in the cavalry charge, and Beersheba was one of our landing spots. So I got to, we got to land, the observers go off and do their couple of hours, whatever they were doing.
And we could walk around Beersheba and look at where the encampment was and where the charge started from and, of course, we're flying over the top of it anyway at 100 feet as fast or slow as we want and pointing out, 'That's where that started'. I can't think of the name of the valley, but it's the purported story of Moses finding the valley in the middle of the Sinai during the 40 days or whatever it was they were wandering in the desert.
And he tapped the rock and the water came out. That valley is there. So you can imagine flying along kilometres and kilometres and kilometres of sand and then slowly you see this big green belt and a river running through this valley – and that's where the valley is. So that was really quite, again, I'd read about it in a book somewhere, and here it was.
Post-deployment reflections
Whilst we fly around the Sinai, there was always wreckage from various conflicts over the years: from World War One all the way through to the most recent Israeli-Egyptian conflicts. Generally – the desert is such a moving landscape, the wind blows through and it exposes a whole new battlefield or minefield and there were a lot of what we call dead tanks, artillery pieces, convoys that had driven somewhere or been ambushed, generally in a field or a valley.
Every now and then you'd find aircraft, helicopters that were operating in the area that had been left out there. And there was another famous – and this was not far from the base – it was a little settlement called El-Arish, and there was a famous train. It was the last train to El-Arish that was bombed during World War Two, I think it was.
And I've got photos of that as well, which I'll share with you. But yeah, there were – for a military history, as well as just ancient history and biblical history and recent history, it was just a magnificent place to be for a 20-year-old. Probably would have liked to have gone there when I was 30 years old and appreciated it a bit more, but really did appreciate it even as a 20-year-old.
Return home and resettling in
After the deployment and the five day trip home – I think it was good that we had the five day trip home to settle back in again, because we had the opportunity for four or five nights to be able to stop in a place and talk and have a drink with and talk to other people that were coming home with us, that had come over with us generally, because you did a rotation as a group.
And the other really important bit for the folks that were from Rotary Wing units was – we were going to be with probably 15 of those 20 people that were with us – we're going to be back at work with this in a few weeks after we've taken some leave. The majority of people in our squadron had done a rotation, so it wasn't like you would dropped back into some foreign group of people didn't get what you were on about.
However, some of those people that came back with us that were the clerks or the suppliers or those other more bespoke trades or experiences, employment groups, they would go back to a unit that no one possibly had been deployed or even outside Australia wouldn't know. I felt for them and I always felt that it was like going to the movies on your own and then trying to explain the movie to someone else.
I've felt that way myself over the years as well, when you're kind of out of the squadron and in the family environment, for instance, or with your civilian mates, trying to explain what you've been through, is a very difficult thing. When they – scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, you know, you've got to go and see it and do it, I can't explain it to you. It's just so different.
But the settling-in period, I don't know that you ever settle back in. There's always parts of you that will reminisce. Even all these years later, almost 40 years later for me, just thinking about the different things I did brings a feeling of – I'm not sure what it is, something that I experienced that is now in the past and I can't explain it to you really, as best I try. But I think getting used to, again, having the freedom to go and do things that you couldn't do on your own or in the Sinai.
Part way through my deployment, there was a bunch of school children from around Australia – but mine was in Victoria, from a school in Victoria – had sent letters. So the teacher got them, I think they were around probably 10 or 11 years old, got them to write letters to the troops on deployment in the Sinai, and they're just asking really great questions. 'Where's the local shops? Can you get an ice cream over there?' Just those really simple things.
And Sun Yui was the young girl that – I've got the letter at home still. And, you know, some of questions she was asking about: 'So do you get a chance to go up to the shops and buy a drink?' that kind of thing. And I had to explain to her what we did and how we did it. It did remind me then that – particularly in the eighties, early eighties to mid-eighties – the world was a really big place; unlike today where you could jump on the internet and google Sinai, and you probably even Google Earth 'El Gorah' and have a look at where everything is.
But trying to explain what this place was to people, young Sun Yui or my mum or my girlfriend or my brother or my mates was really – could be unsettling at times. 'Why don't you get it?' So yeah, it probably took just to physically settle in, I would say, a few months to get used to. One of the things that we all really had to get used to was – and I found this on my other deployments, to Afghanistan in particular – was green.
The shockingness of greenery, green grass, green trees. Our surf club, of course, in the outdoor cinema area, we grew a patch of grass. The only bit of grass in the Sinai, but we grew this patch of grass which was tenderly looked after and mowed and clipped to finery. But, I think that was the settling in bit for me as a 20-year-old, was getting used to being able to get in my car and just drive down the street and not having to do a bomb check on the car, for instance, before I got in it.
So in the Sinai while we were there, while I was there on my deployment, terrorists had blown up and killed a vehicle which one of the UN officials was driving in and was killed. So we were always – if we parked the car anywhere before you got in a car, off the base, you had to crawl, one crawled underneath, looked around, just made sure there's nothing there.
Lift up the bonnet, check inside, do a bomb check basically … and I think that probably even started my hyperactivity approach to life. Again, I mentioned before that as, I think as aircrew and I think as military in general you're always looking for a threat. And that was probably the beginning of my, 'Maybe I do need to keep an eye out for threats'.
A life altering experience
What really made my deployment to the Sinai – and subsequent deployments, but certainly about Sinai – what really made it was the relationships and the people that I was deployed with. Not only the Aussies in the team, and we had a very close knit team around us, but the experience of, as a young 20-year-old, meeting my first person from the UK and from France and places like Colombia, places I'd only ever seen on a map.
And here were these people. Having the opportunity; I've always been pretty much an inquiring mind kind of person, and being able to spend a lot of time – because we were there for six months – establishing relationships and understanding what their life was back in their country. Because I was just gobsmacked with some of the stories I was hearing, saying, 'But isn't it like Australia?' Don't you – like Sun Yui, the young girl saying, 'Isn't it, can you just go down to the local shops and buy yourself this?' You can't do that in Colombia? 'No'. This is what Colombia's all about, or Fiji.
So I really think the highlight for me – there were just some magnificent places I'd been to, Mount Sinai. I mean, the Beatitudes was one of the things that had the greatest effect on me, I just felt some sort of connection there as I sat at the temple and looked out across the Dead Sea. Masada, which, you know, the Masada movie had come out not long beforehand so I kind of knew what it was and climbing Masada was, wow.
So there were these great experiences and particularly, having a look at the Sinai from a helicopter perspective, was so life altering for a 20-year-old bloke from Geelong. But certainly, I think, the biggest effect came from the people that were around me. Dealing with the different multinational forces people there and the regular contacts that we had, particularly the French contacts and the Americans.
But the close folks, the close-knit community that was the Rotary Wing Aviation Unit, that was what really – it was like a tribe. We in there together, we were experiencing the same things, whether that be on a mission or an operation or going to Jerusalem for the weekend, and it was almost like being in a movie and being this cast. We all got on famously well, there was never a cross word.
So I think that's probably the biggest thing that I take away from my first ever deployment: the friendships and relationships and the people, salt of the earth folks they were as well. They really worked hard. The maintenance teams, Australian helicopter maintenance teams, just worked endless hours to keep us in the air and safely in the air.
