Heartstopping flypast ended career of RAF pilot

THERE was something in the air over London in the revolutionary spring of 1968.

A low-level Hawker Hunter jet fighter twisted and turned above the Thames, passing hair-raisingly close to the tops of road and rail bridges as it made its way towards the Houses of Parliament.

What happened next proved one of the most extraordinary episodes in aviation history.

It also ended the RAF career of the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Alan Pollock, the man who ‘shot’ Tower Bridge by flying under its upper span – the only time this has been done by a jet fighter.

The 32-year-old father-of-four was an unlikely revolutionary.

Flight commander of No.1 Squadron

— the RAF’s oldest — Pollock had achieved an ‘exceptional’ rating from Cranwell RAF Training College and had gone on to become a respected combat pilot, but on April 5 1968, Pollock was not a happy man.

He was seething that plans for the official celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the RAF had not included an official flypast over London.

“Monday April 1 was the official anniversary, so I was surprised to find we were on normal duties,” he said in a 2010 interview with BBC Radio 4.

“In fact, most of the pilots didn’t even realise it was the anniversary.”

On April 4, Pollock and three other Hunter pilots flew from West Raynham to Tangmere airfield to celebrate the occasion.

Knowing that their return flight would take them over central London, Pollock decided to make his own unofficial one-man flypast. Breaking away from his companions, he approached the city at low level, his RollsRoyce Avon engine throttled back to minimise noise pollution.

“The plan was really to fly over the Houses of Parliament, make some noise, get court martialled and then just express what was not right,” he said.

“The bridges just past Battersea Power Station were very attractive – [the sight] was transfixing in many ways. London seemed so miniature.

“When I reached Parliament it was almost as if I was in a model village.

“I circled Parliament three times – apparently, MPs were having a debate on noise abatement.”

He then dipped his wings at the RAF memorial.

At that point Tower Bridge had not figured in Pollock’s plans, but at London Bridge he gazed ahead and there it lay, half-a-mile downstream – a 200ft-wide, 110ft-deep frame of stone and steel that gaped invitingly.

“Time stood still,” he wrote later. “It was easy enough to plunge through the middle – but how to do it safely?

“I could see this London bus (on the bridge) and decided that the best way was to get as high as possible and do a kind of bombing run as close to the two walkways as I could.

“There were all these girders and steel just above the cockpit and for a micro-second I thought I had overcooked it and was too close to the top and that my tail fin was going to be taken off.

“Then (passing through) something happened that I’d only experienced once before – my heart stopped for a couple of seconds and then just boosted up again like a fuel pump.”

George Tapper, duty watchman on the bridge that morning, said: “Suddenly there was the most thunderous roar – I looked up and a big silver jet roared by. I didn’t get a chance to see any of its markings.”

Peter Arnold, working on a boat moored nearby, was similarly incredulous.

“I saw the plane swooping down. I thought it was going to crash,” he said.

“Then it straightened out, shot over our heads and flew under the bridge. I thought I was dreaming – it appeared in a flash and was gone in seconds.”

Deciding that he may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb, Pollock duly ‘beat up’ several airfields – Wattisham, Lakenheath and Marham – en route to West Raynham, where he was formally arrested.

Following an RAF Board of Enquiry he was medically discharged, thus avoiding a court martial which would have been an opportunity to explain his actions while possibly causing embarrassment to the Wilson government.

The Met Police took a dim view of the unauthorised flypast: “We do not regard this as a joke,” they said. “It could have had serious consequences. There were pedestrians and vehicles on the bridge.”

A spokesman for the London Port Authority was more forthright.

“It was a bloody silly thing to do,” he said. The only minor casualty, it later transpired, was a cyclist whose emergency stop had caused him to rip his trousers. Although Pollock gallantly volunteered to buy him a new pair, his offer was graciously declined.

Now 82, and living in retirement with his wife

Patricia in Cranleigh, the man who ‘shot’

Tower Bridge insisted this week that the events that followed his low-level run down the

Thames came as something of a surprise even to himself.

“Shooting the bridge was a spur-of-themoment thing,” maintains Pollock, who had been among the RAF pilots who bombed the stricken oil tanker Torrey Canyon with napalm at a height of around 50ft off Lands End in March 1967.

“Any fighter pilot used to attacking targets would have been intrigued by what lay in front of him. It was such an unusual situation – your brain is working so fast.”

In 1982, he was fully exonerated of any wrongdoing for his actions.

Any bitterness he may have felt on his departure from the RAF may have been eased by more than 100 letters of support he subsequently received from the public.

“What on earth is the matter with the youth of today?” spluttered retired Squadron Leader G Plinston in a letter to a flight magazine. “In my day we used to fly whole squadrons of aeroplanes through bridges. At Rouen, all of the No. 1 Squadron Hurricanes flew under the transporter bridge one behind the other.”

In RAF circles, you suspect a number of G&Ts will be raised to Alan Pollock.

Tower Bridge was at the centre of an unofficial flypast in 1968 from a Hawker Hunter (inset)