My brother’s spirit borne on a wing
How the F-111 came to personify lost pilot
BEFORE my brother died, I wasn’t very interested in airshows. It wasn’t a case of take them or leave them, it was simply leave them.
Then Jeremy, a 26-year-old F-111 pilot in the RAAF, was killed with his navigator, Mark, on a simulated bombing mission over Guyra in NSW. That night — September 13, 1993 — changed everything.
It also began my love affair with an aircraft as graceful in the air as it was cumbersome on the ground.
In air force circles, the F-111 was known fondly as the “pig” for its ability to keep its long snout so close to the ground courtesy of terrain following radar, but it was its airborne power and elegance that had held Jeremy in its thrawl.
“A beautiful, deadly stiletto butterfly,” he presciently called it.
Avalon’s first airshow, in 1992, may have passed me by, but I was there with my family in 1995, called by the F-111 siren song — that deep thrum morphing from an ominous rumble into a prolonged mindpurifying thunder.
I picture us, a wan, hauntedlooking quartet weeping as our aircraft blasted overhead, making us feel more alive in those moments than we had in nearly two years.
I also remember feeling like a prop as I sat in the pilot’s seat of the F-111C on display, smiling bleakly for a photo op with the Air Commander Australia, a man representing an air force trying to make amends for the unmendable.
After that, my family and I kept going to the airshow, usually on the Friday night so that we could see the F-111 in full flight. Sometimes we couldn’t actually see it because of low cloud or, one year, because a commentator’s misdirection had the entire crowd looking stage right as the jet came through from stage left fast enough to reduce me to tears of joy and despair.
But at least on those occasions we could still hear it — feel its intoxicating might — and the glow of the dump and burn warmed our cheeks.
Over the years, I tried to look at the other aircraft at the airshow, to find something captivating in the Hornet and Super Hornet’s pale grey livery. I watched fireworks drip from the wings of a glider and the massive military transport aircraft heft skyward, and I tried to feel more. I really tried.
But the F-111 was an inexorable link to Jeremy — to his life and to his death — and my love and loyalty were unwavering.
The 2009 airshow was a watershed. About 165,000 people turned out that year, but I doubt any were filled with greater dread than my family and I. The RAAF was retiring the F-111 in December 2010 so this was to be the Avalon farewell performance.
The weather was rubbish. The Friday night commentators were hard to hear and had too little to say about — for me — the world-stopping significance of the stiletto butterfly’s final flight.
It marked my last airshow. Now the sounds over Avalon bring a twist of pain as I yearn for that sublime thunder I will never hear again.