Les Hurst
Les Hurst
“From the very start of being commissioned into the Royal Air Force, I had a great yearning to fly a two-seat, fast-jet aeroplane,” Les Hurst reminisces, cup of tea in hand. “Since a very early age, I just wanted to fly – but to be able to fly the F4 Phantom had always seemed an impossible dream.”
We are sitting together with his wife Linda in their house in Dartmouth, where the couple have lived for the past nine years. The house is perched atop the precipitous Ridge Hill, a spot that affords them magnificent views out towards the Dart estuary.
Les joined the RAF in 1960, straight from school. He wanted to join the Air Training Corps at the tender age of thirteen, but his hopes were temporarily quashed by his father. This was because the Second World War had only recently ended and his father was concerned that Les was signing-up for military service. His son’s ambitions were not to be restrained for long and Les spent most of his teenage years as an Air Training Corps cadet before being selected for Aircrew Training.
After initially training to be a pilot, Les retrained as a navigator. His first role was flying a Victor Bomber in the V-Force: “My job was the navigator-radar. There were two navigators on the aeroplane, and my job was to identify the target on the radar and set up the aeroplane for an automatic release of a free-fall nuclear weapon. Had we been ordered to attack our targets, in what was then the Soviet Union, it would probably have been a one-way mission.”
The Victor aircraft were converted into in-flight refuelling aircraft after Les’s first bomber tour. Still unable to fulfill his two-seat dream, Les spent another tour as a navigator-radar on the Victor tanker. He then went on to do a further tour as a flying instructor at the RAF College at Cranwell.
“It was at the end of that tour, after almost twelve years of military service, that I finally got my wish and was posted to fly the F4 Phantom, which I did for seven years,” says Les. He is clearly proud of his achievements, but never boastful.
During his first tour since his long-awaited Phantom conversion, Les volunteered to go to the Royal Navy; he spent two years on board the Ark Royal, flying the Phantom as part of 892 Naval Air Squadron. “Carrier flying is probably the most exhilarating form of flying anyone can do, especially at night”, Les tells me, “And probably one of the happiest and best tours I had in flying.”
Happy it may have been, but some of Les’s experiences during this time would be enough to scare the daylights out of your average chap.
Les recalls a rather unusual ending to one of his sorties: “On one particular day, we were flying back to RAF Leuchers (the temporary shore-base at the time for 892 Squadron) with a hydraulic problem, which meant we had lost braking and steering. We touched down with the arrester hook lowered, planning to catch the wire stretched across the runway. Unfortunately we missed the wire and the aircraft started to leave the runway (what Les calls ‘going agricultural’). With no steering capability I felt that, at 140kts, anything could happen – so I just pulled my ejection seat handle and left the aircraft. Although on the ground when I ejected, the rocket seat shot me up to a couple of hundred feet, but before I knew it, and in what seemed a matter of seconds, I hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. Fortunately I landed on the grass, I stood-up, realised I was still alive and lay down again. I was back flying four days later.”
Following his stint with the Navy, Les returned to the RAF and was posted for a short while to No. 29 Air Defence Phantom Squadron. He then transferred to the Phantom Operational Conversion Unit as an instructor. This was a hugely significant posting for Les. He had gone full circle from being a student on the OCU to being an instructor – a fitting end to his career in the RAF, which he left at the age of thirty-eight.
“At that point I was very fortunate. I started a second flying career with British Aerospace at their Warton fast-jet facility near Preston in Lancashire. In fact, they still build the Typhoon there today. I went there initially as the Project Navigator for the Air Defence Variant of the Tornado. So after leaving the RAF I was able to spend another fourteen years test flying the Tornado, as a civilian,” grins Les.
Les retired from British Aerospace (now BAE Systems) in 1993 as the company’s Chief Test Navigator. His claim to fame is that he did eight hundred and ninety-nine Tornado test flights and a total of twelve hundred hours on the aircraft. Les also clocked the same number of hours on the Phantom out of a total of 6,500 flying hours.
Perhaps even more impressive is another of Les’s achievements whilst at British Aerospace: “We flew the Tornado from Goose Bay in Labrador to Warton, un-refuelled and unaccompanied. It was the only time a British fighter aircraft has ever crossed the Atlantic without being refuelled or escorted!”
In the past, many of us will have been lucky enough to see the ‘swing wing’ Tornado in all its splendour above the Dart estuary as part of the Dartmouth Regatta air displays. For the past few seasons the Typhoon has replaced the Tornado on the roster.
After Les retired in 2005, he and Linda moved down to Dartmouth from Lytham St. Annes in the Northwest. I ask Les if he found it difficult leaving everything behind for the comparatively quiet Devon life: “It was one of those situations both for the RAF and for British Aerospace where someone paid you to do your hobby – the Queen for the first part and British Aerospace for the second. But having spent such a major part of my life flying a fast-jet aircraft, I didn’t miss it when I came down here and nor did I have any regrets. I was at the point when I would have been behind a desk anyway.”
“We have some friends whom we met on holiday who lived in Dartmouth and it was coming to see them that I thought I would like to live here. Linda was not so keen to start with and felt we shouldn’t leave Lytham. But there’s a lot more to do in Dartmouth – sailing, Food festival, Music festival etc – there’s plenty to get involved in. Linda volunteers at reception for the Flavel and is a trustee of Dartmouth Caring.”
Les himself acts as a race officer for the Royal Dart Yacht Club, where he helps to run the racing on Wednesday nights. The role seemed a perfect way of getting involved with a club at the heart of the Dartmouth and Kingswear community. During the busy Regatta period, Les works together with an international race officer to take care of race management and ensure that everything runs smoothly.
I ask the seasoned fast-jet navigator if he’ll be bringing home any silverware in one of Regatta’s popular races. Les laughs: “Believe it or not, I’ve never sailed a day in my life!”
By the Dart August 2014