Scram! Read Free Page A

was inevitable, Tidd hauled in power with his left hand and flared the aircraft nose up with his right to cushion the impact. The tail and left wheel of the Wessex hit the snow at about thirty knots, sheering away the undercarriage and causing the aircraft to come crashing down on its left side. The aircraft slid onwards for fifty yards. The left side of the cockpit filled up with debris and snow as the windows imploded. Had a co-pilot been sitting in the left seat, he would undoubtedly have been killed, crushed between the missile sight and the ice below.
    As the helicopter ground to a halt, the inertia crash switches in the aircraft’s nose automatically shut down both engines. Tidd still had no real idea whether or not they would survive. Lying on his side, he reached down to turn off the fuel cocks and electrics to find the central panel and entire left side of the cockpit submerged under snow and broken glass. The only sounds were the howling wind outside and the cockpit windscreen wiper squeaking vainly up and down. Through the relative silence, Wilson’s distant voice shouted up from the back: ‘Everyone seems to be in one piece.’ Tidd slid open the flimsy cockpit window, now unfamiliarly above him, and clambered up onto the side of the aircraft to help Wilson open the rear cabin door.
    From their position on the ice further up the glacier, Ian Stanley and Stewart Cooper had watched helplessly as the Wessex helicopter disappeared into the front edge of the snow storm ahead before banking left and sinking into a dip just before the ridgeline. Stanley’s only words were ‘Oh shit!’ as he saw Yankee Foxtrot’s rotor blades plough into the snow and the aircraft then crash and slide along on its side.
    The snow shower passed as suddenly as it had appeared. Visibility improved once more. ‘Yankee Alpha, I’m going to hover-taxi up to them. Follow me and take care,’ radioed Stanley to Ian Georgeson as he lifted gently away from the ice and taxied the few hundred yards down the glacier. There was now no shortage of visual cues. Bits of Wessex tail rotor and other assorted debris lay dotted on the snow.
    As the helicopters landed either side of the stricken Wessex, Georgeson’s aircrewman Jan Lomas jumped out and headed off to inspect the damage. Wilson and the SAS troops clambered up out of the wreck. Miraculously it appeared that nobody had been killed. The only injury was to one SAS staff sergeant who had been cut above his eye by the cabin machine gun.
    Dazed, Tidd wandered over to the Wessex 3. Stanley’s crewman Fitz Fitzgerald plugged Tidd’s helmet into the cabin intercom. ‘God you’re a messy bastard,’ said Stanley from the cockpit above. ‘You’ve left the windscreen wiper on.’ It was the words of an experienced leader easing the pressure from the situation.
    â€˜If you can find the fucking switch, you go and turn it off,’ replied Tidd with feeling.
    Out on the snow, the two crewmen Fitzgerald and Lomas divided the soldiers between the two remaining helicopters. The SAS troops were not at all happy about having to leave their kit behind and keep only their side-arms. But they were given no choice. The helicopters were already at maximum weight and could lift no more. While Georgeson jettisoned fuel directly onto the glacier to reduce weight further, Tidd and two troops squashed into the back of Stanley’s Wessex 3. Wilson and the remaining four troops went with Georgeson’s Wessex 5. With ten people now crammed into the Wessex 3 and fourteen people in the Wessex 5, Stanley radioed Georgeson to ‘follow me’. The depleted formation rose to the hover once again.
    The shocking scene on Fortuna Glacier just after Mike Tidd’s Wessex 5 crashed on its side. The engine is still smoking. Ian Georgeson’s helicopter is in the background. This photo was taken from the cockpit of HMS Antrim’s Wessex 3. The SAS