SKY’S THE LIMIT FOR TORNADO TOP GUN MANDY
PILOTING a Tornado GR4 jet fighter plane over enemy territory in Iraq, Mandy Hickson kept her cool as bright streaks of anti-aircraft fire lit up the skies over Baghdad. She knew she could take a direct hit, but the pistol resting in her combat survival waistcoat might save her life if she had to eject into the night sky and risk falling into the hands of Saddam Hussein’s soldiers.
“All the surface-to-air missile cells had woken up and were firing randomly,” she recalls. “Sparks flashed from the guns of vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft batteries hidden in the pitch-black desert, their tracer rounds streaking up into the sky like Roman fountains.
“I didn’t feel particularly threatened as I could see they weren’t targeting specific aircraft but you’re always a bit nervous – because they only have to get lucky once.”
On that night in 2002 her job was to make sure another jet in the joint British and US formation attack would have a clear view to the target.
When her guarding mission was up, a Paveway laser-guided bomb was unleashed by another jet and scored a direct hit.
Arriving back at the Ali Al Salem airfield in Kuwait, Mandy shook hands with her navigator Andy as a ground engineer told her: “Well done, ma’am. Sounds like a good one.”
Then she went to view infra-red footage of the attack, taken by a US drone. “We saw the figure of a man coming out of the building clutching a mug with steam wafting up from it,” says Mandy, now 47.
“He had a cigarette and took a few sips before throwing the dregs to the ground, opening the door before going back inside. Literally at that moment the bomb entered the building and exploded. “Unbelievably, what was left of the door opened and the man ran out, jumped into a car and screeched off in a straight line through the compound fence and into the desert as the building collapsed behind him.” While her male colleagues loudly celebrated a direct hit on the target, Mandy – whose book, An Officer, Not a Gentleman, chronicles her time as a fighter pilot – found herself relieved the Iraqi had escaped alive. However, on another mission to enforce the no-fly zone over Iraq in the early 2000s to try to curtail the military ambitions of Saddam Hussein, Mandy herself came perilously close to being blown up. She was due to fly home the next day.Tanned and dreaming of the new dress she was planning to buy for an emotional reunion dinner with her now husband Craig Hickson, a civilian airline pilot, Mandy’s daydreaming was interrupted. Suddenly the urgent voice of her navigator broke her reverie: “Break right, Mandy. Missile launch, five o’clock.” Reliving the terrifying moment one of Saddam’s surface-to-air missiles locked on to her Tornado, she describes it as, “like the split-second delay before the onset of pain, the enormity of the situation is flooding my brain. “Wooah! This is very, bloody… urgghh… real. The G-force is pinning me into my seat, squashing my face