David J. Rose

By djrose007

RAF 1151MCU RTTL

No, it's not a cryptic title. It's Royal Air Force 1151 Marine Craft Unit Rescue and Target Towing Launch.

I run a couple of websites for RAF Masirah and RAF Luqa and 1151 MCU was based at Marsaxlokk in Malta (RAF Luqa was in Malta, it's now the international airport).
Someone that worked on 1151MCU sent me some photographs recently and this one, 2771, is the one that I  spent a few hours on in 1973.
There was a radio problem in that as soon as the launch was out of the bay we had to revert from Voice communication to CW (Continuous Wave (Morse Code)) so I wangled a 'Jolly' on the pretext of checking out the radio. I was an operator at that time, not a technician.
We set off to do an exercise with a Nimrod so we were towing a Sled which sent up a plume of water. To the Nimrod tactical radio it looked like a conning tower of a submarine. The Nimrod made a couple of passes over us, after finding us first of course. It was all very exciting until we stopped to wind in the target sled. We then started to corkscrew on the gentle swell and I had my first experience of how violent sea-sickness is!
I didn't expect this as I was a very experienced  dinghy sailor of many years but I guess that in a dinghy you are too busy to feel seasick.

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