“You see that button that says ‘Front’ on it,” the fighter pilot said to me.
“Yes,” I answered from the back of the RAF Typhoon, somewhere in the skies above the North Sea.
“Push it, and then tell me what it says.”
“It now says ‘Rear’,” I replied.
“You’re in control,” he confirmed.
Going by “Stuka”, courtesy of a risky diving manoeuvre attempted early in his career, the pilot had racked up more than 2,000 hours flying the Typhoon and was one of the Royal Air Force’s most experienced weapons instructors. I, on the other hand, had never been at the controls of any aircraft, yet here I was now steering one of the fastest and most agile planes ever built, worth more than £100m. The aircraft is also a key part of the UK’s first line of defence against any potential foreign – Russian – aggression.
Pushing hard to one side, I pulled a barrel-roll. Encouraged to “unwind” what I’d just done, I pushed the other way and repeated the trick. Pulling back on the stick, I attempted a loop-the-loop. As my bodyweight felt more like 320kg as a result, and the nausea grew in the compressed pit of my stomach, I failed to complete it at first. Stuka casually took over to save us from flying vertically into the ground.
Sky News presenter Matt Barbet tried his hand at flying an RAF Typhoon (Photo: Matt Barbet/Sky News)“I’m not sure we want to turn into an Exocet missile [an anti-ship cruise missile],” he remarked, affably.
This was fun, but the exercise I’d seen in the hours prior was no game. The serious business of scrambling up and down the North Sea is vital to the UK’s security, while getting to witness it as a journalist from the air, as well as from bases on the ground, had taken over a year of delicate negotiation and planning for Sky News. This kind of access hasn’t been offered to a news organisation for the best part of a decade.
Cobra Warrior is the rather Hollywood-sounding name for the RAF’s top tier training, and engages many of its personnel in repeatedly sending jets on QRAs, or Quick Reaction Alerts. Before I was allowed to indulge in a spot of amateur aerobatics, we’d refuelled in mid-air, intercepted a plane that was pretending to misbehave and escorted said executive jet on to the tarmac of the nearest airport in Teesside.
The RAF won’t reveal how many aircraft take part or how often they do this for real but, as I saw at a bunker at RAF Boulmer in Northumberland from which they monitor the skies 24/7, they practise incessantly. Genuine alerts are occasionally to do with civilian and commercial aircraft forgetting to communicate as they should, the odd hoax or reports of misbehaviour on a tourist flight. The RAF always scrambles to have a close look and decide how to act. Reassuringly, I learned that Russian military aircraft have never flown into UK airspace uninvited, but the airspace the RAF polices is much bigger and, as you’d probably expect, the alert is near constant.
Fighter pilots like ‘Stuka’, left with Barbet, provide the first line of defence of the UK against foreign aggression from countries like Russia (Photo: Matt Barbet/Sky News)Even further afield, the force has been a lot busier. 12 Squadron, who I was flying with, co-operate with allies Qatar and had recently returned from the Gulf where they defended against airborne threats from Iran. The Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Harv Smyth, told me that in previous years their fighter jets might have deployed to a Baltic ally and scrambled about once a week to check on Russian craft. On a recent operation in Romania, it was practically every day. The threat is there, it has increased and it’s closer to us than it’s been for a long time.
The resources have changed, too. Compared to the end of the Cold War around 1990, the RAF now has roughly a third of both the fighter planes and UK bases it did back then. The onus is now on them to be our first line of defence because, as Ukraine has shown, controlling the skies above us is imperative for the security of the population below. Planning in advance of the Government’s Defence Investment Plan was focussed on what things would probably look like in the mid-2030s, but in the words of the air chief, that ambition has since “shifted left”. Clearly, sooner is better.
Back on the ground at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire, after experiencing 4G and Mach 1.5 (more than 1,100mph) in the Typhoon, it was hard to comprehend what I’d been doing for the last couple of hours. It was once in a lifetime for me, but in terms of the complexity of what we’d done, Stuka put it at 2 out of 10. That’s the point. Many of us are relying on the years of practice and the accrued muscle memory these exceptional individuals possess to keep us safe. There will be plenty of other things to think about if, on our behalf, they do have to push themselves further towards danger.
Matt Barbet is a Sky News presenter. His full report is available to subscribers of the Sky News Defence Insider app.
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