Hawker Hunter flies under Tower Bridge

This year’s 100th anniversary of the Royal Air Force will doubtless be celebrated with suitable pomp and reverence. Unlike the 50th anniversary in 1968. You would have thought a grateful nation, or at least its leaders, would mark that occasion with events and flypasts, especially over London. But the authorities ruled that ‘flypasts over the Capital would be inappropriate’ and a parade was deemed sufficient. To many in the service, this seemed an insult.

With the quiet outrage going unnoticed in the corridors of Harold Wilson’s government, it fell to one pilot to remedy the situation as only he knew how. Senior Operational Flight Commander Alan Pollock from No 1 Squadron (the oldest squadron in the service) and three of his colleagues had been flying their Hawker Hunters around the country on what was being called Anniversary Week. Over southern England’s RAF airfields they had been dropping leaflets in ‘Dummy Raids’ as a form of celebration. On the return flight to West Raynham from one such ‘raid’ on 5 April 1968, Flt Lt Pollock, on his own admission, ‘acted on impulse’, broke away from the other Hunters and headed at low level for central London.

Throttling back his Rolls-Royce Avon turbojet, he flew straight for the Thames and the Houses of Parliament, which he circled three times before heading east down-river towards Tower Bridge. ‘It was easy enough to fly over it,’ he later said, ‘but the idea of flying through the spans suddenly struck me. I had just 10 seconds to grapple with the seductive proposition which few ground-attack pilots of any nationality could have resisted. My brain started racing to reach a decision. Years of low-level strike flying made the decision simple.’

He flew straight through the bridge at 350 knots – and a legend was born.