Farewell Tornado, our trusty ally forged in fire
East. Point the nose east. That’s where the dragons lay. And if not dragons, then certainly the Soviet Bear, Serbian paramilitary goons or thugs from a collapsing caliphate. Tornado was built for one purpose only: to race to a target as fast as human ingenuity would allow and deliver death and destruction to the Queen’s enemies.
She did it magnificently, practising in Germany for the Soviet tanks that never came, or doing it for real from Italy and Cyprus, into eastern Europe, Iraq, Libya and Syria. A steady reminder to dictators and bullies that actions have consequences.
And what better way to deliver the message than faster than the speed of sound? By the time they heard it, they were an irrelevant historical note.
Designed in the era of Dan Dare, this aircraft, although fantastic, was no science fiction fantasy but an expression of engineering excellence and operational single-mindedness.
Sleek and deadly, Tornado eschewed the smooth edges and stealth of the nouveau riche upstarts, like the F-35 meekly poking its stubby nose from the hangar next door at the Norfolk base they shared.
The new F-35, pretender to the English Electric Lightning’s throne – Tornado’s cousin and another abuser of physics – may have the kit, but Tornado had the pedigree.
Hugh, travelling from Swindon to pay his respects, saw his first Tornado as a boy aged six in the Lake District. You saw nothing then, Bang! It was over your head, he says, fingers in your ears stuff, happy times.
She was daubed with shiny baubles over the years – thermal imagers, laser designators, clever things designed by cool, detached minds – so that, by the end, she was more “Trigger’s broom” than the original designer’s vision. But underneath, unchanged over her four decades of service, Tornado was the same beast: forged in fire, when metal was cut to hurt and the only right angle was exactly that.
At low level, trees and fields disappearing underneath her stubby little wings in a smudgy green blur, pilots said Tornado was smooth and quiet; a comfortable office.
Older pilots would talk of their “primary lines”: the individual routes they were tasked to fly from Germany into the Soviet Union, carrying conventional bombs to wipe out the SA-5 missile sites, waiting to ambush the bigger Nato airborne control planes. Or, before the role was given to the Navy’s submarines, they could be armed with nuclear weapons.
Crews practised flying towards targets in the expectation of being dazzled by nuclear bursts erupting to left and right. We faced east and that was where we were going, says the navigator flying on the last sortie. His map would be annotated with notes saying things like “don’t look right for five miles” as they came abeam targets for their squadron mates.
In later years the fight got more precise. With new weapons like Brimstone and Paveway IV it was not a question of how many aircraft it would take to drop a bridge, but how many bridges one aircraft could drop.
Troops in Afghanistan were reassured when they had a Tornado on the end of the radio. Other nations had “red lines” that restricted their use, long after legal and moral considerations had been met. But the RAF, barrelling in at 400 knots, would take the mission, record the nine-line brief from the soldier on the ground, then release the appropriate weapon. Insurgents came to understand that if they drove a vehicle and a Tornado was nearby, they were gone.
The engineers, too, loved her. They might say she was a needy aircraft, and the younger ones would express surprise at the use of VHS cassettes in the aircraft to record voice and cockpit screens – in 2019! – but while they might grumble about leaky hydraulic seals after a week in a cold hangar, there would be tears in the eyes by the end of the day, and not just because of the wind whipping across East Anglia.
And then she was off. The last Tornado to drop bombs, ZA463, the last Norfolk land shark – named for the enormous tail fin often glimpsed just over treetop height – taxied and lifted for the final sortie. Three passes over the base, low, aggressive, wings swept back; the noise hitting your chest after the grey blur has blasted over at 100 feet. Car alarms wailing.
Then a vertical climb on afterburners; the supreme expression of power in the skies, and a bank lit by the last sunset, leaving just a contrail, heading east.