THIS PILOT HAS BALLS OF STEEL AND A MESSAGE TO DELIVER
In April 1968 the Royal Air Force was struggling with massive budget cuts and morale was at rock bottom. When the politicians would not even mark the 50th birthday of the storied service with a flypast, pilot Alan Pollock took the matter into his own hands.
On 4 April the Flight Lieutenant climbed into his fighter and took off with several other aircraft heading for Norfolk. He left the formation immediately and passed a friendly base at extremely low level. Meanwhile he reported to his section leader that he had “trouble with the radio” and had “lost visual contact with the formation.”
Then he set course for his real target, the place to give the RAF the birthday it deserved: London. Again he flew low over the city, then circled the Houses of Parliament three times with his engines thundering, to protest against the budget cuts and to let the politicians “know that we still have a fighting air force,” as he himself described it. After Pollock had flown over the RAF Memorial, which commemorates the pilots killed in the First World War, the famous Tower Bridge suddenly appeared in front of him:
“Up to that moment I had not given a thought to the fact that the Tower Bridge would of course be there. Flying over it would have been enough, but suddenly the idea came to me to fly through the bridge spans. I had ten seconds to weigh up that tempting proposition, one that few ground-attack pilots of any nation could have resisted. Years of fast low-level flying made the decision easy.”
After that breathtaking maneuver the commander paid visits to many more bases before he shot past his destination airfield inverted, landed and was placed under arrest. The politicians knew that Pollock would win a lot of public support once he explained his flying, so they did not put him on trial. They had him discharged on “medical grounds” instead. The proud RAF pilot went public anyway and got backing from every side.
Experts are still unclear on how a pilot with balls that big fits into a cockpit.
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