Baltic Venture

For us the Baltic trip had begun two weeks before the official start date. Being a lowly VFR pilot, I have had too many times when dates and weather have failed to cooperate.
I had taken a weather window and two sunny days to work my way along the Frisian Islands, across the Danish peninsula, to Copenhagen. Texal is fun: as we taxied to the apron a Landrover was pulling a trailer as fast as it could along the runway and a Piper Cub was landing on the trailer. Langoog (in Germany) is rather weird (the Truman Show meets Skegness). As we tracked east, we couldn’t help thinking of all the bomber pilots during the war who had to run the flak gauntlet along that chain of islands that any aircraft would have to traverse on their way to Germany. We parked the plane in Copenhagen Roskilde – a very GA friendly airport about half an hour by train from the middle of Copenhagen and flew home by Easyjet.

Two weeks later we were rather smugly back in Copenhagen in the sunshine while the North Sea was best described as ‘marginal.’ As we bounced our way (microlights can be like that in thermic conditions) towards Ronneby we started to get the Squadron chatter through the cans as everyone funnelled in to the destination.

The welcome from the Swedish Air Force was open and warm and we were whisked into the officers mess for a buffet lunch. General Michael Byden arrived to welcome us – and what an impressive man he is; every inch the general and head of the Airforce. Just after we left he was made, to the surprise of no one in the Squadron, Supreme Commander of the Swedish armed forces. Think of the Captain in Das Boat and you will get the idea. By late afternoon everyone had arrived and we were bussed to Karlskrona.

Karlskrona, Charles’s Crown, is on the sea almost on the south tip of Sweden. It was founded by Charles X in 1680 as the home of the Swedish fleet that had until then been based much further north in Stockholm. The Baltic is brackish – and warm in summer as we and Peter and Sophie Fernandes found out during our early morning swim. The North Sea is about 12 degrees in summer compared to about 18 degrees where we were and you could drink Baltic water: it’s cheaper than Badoit and taste the same. If you look at a map of the Baltic you will see that it’s entrance is narrow near Copenhagen which is on the same latitude as Newcastle.

The far north is just short of the Arctic Circle and fed by countless rivers from principally Finland and Sweden. Stockholm is the same latitude as the Shetland Islands and in the seventeenth century, during a period when even the Thames froze, the Swedish fleet was iced in for the winter – which was something of a disadvantage when you are the then local top dog and are having problems with the Danes. Karlskrona is set in an enchanting archipelago of islands and built with the style and beauty of the 17th and 18th centuries in a grid pattern on one of the islands. This was where we were staying.
It was a fascinating time to be visiting the Blekinge Wing at Ronneby as this is now on the front line of the new ‘Cool War’ in Eastern Europe and the two squadrons based there are on 24 hour alert to deal with almost daily incursions by Russian aircraft operating out of the Gulf of Finland and Kaliningrad, the old Koenigsberg – the capital of East Prussia, and now a strange Russian enclave that is cut off from Russia and sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland. Sweden is not part of NATO and takes its air defences very seriously with over a hundred fighters equipped with Saab built Grippons. During the Cold War they had over a thousand aircraft – for a country of only nine million people.

Ronneby is a station like many in the UK – but it wasn’t always like this. During the Cold War it would have been too vulnerable and they dispersed their aircraft around the countryside, operating off public roads with their own maintenance crews and refuelling in the event of war – a logistical and manpower mountain only possible in an era of conscription. With the end of the Cold War they reverted to a more ‘normal’ airforce base from which they are deployed, like the RAF, to the world’s trouble spots. With Putin’s sabre rattling, they have gone back some of the way to being a front line force on high alert with near instant dispersal plans.

The base was super modern and the pilots made Top Gun look like a film for ugly people. The ladies of the Squadron were very happy.

The Grippon is a single-engine multi-purpose fighter. It is an economical aircraft that costs about a third of a Typhoon and, with the single engine, much lower running costs. It does air-to-air, ground attack and reconnaissance and we saw all these weapons and equipment in hangers that were pin-clean and organised by ground crews and pilots that looked indistinguishable from their civilian counterparts: many had beards and some had not exactly long hair but definitely not the British military look. There was an easy informality between ranks that was combined with professionalism and efficiency at every level. I sat next to Wing Commander Tommy Peterson at dinner and he was saying how easy his leadership role had become over the last few years: everyone knows exactly why they are there and the job that needs doing. Putin is making that side of his job a breeze.

The Grippon is a relatively easy aircraft to fly. I know this as I had a go in the simulator and pulled a subsonic loop and shot down a Russian who conveniently didn’t move that much and wasn’t shooting at me. But what the pilots showed us is that 90% of what they do is managing the weapons – and doing this while pulling up to 9g. Because of the G forces all the controls are on the throttle and stick – you can’t raise your arms when pulling G: there are 14 and 12 buttons and switches on each respectively. It is like playing the piano with a pony sitting on your lap and your eyeballs feeling as if they want to disappear down your throat – while someone is trying to kill you. The simulator is one thing – but watching a display afterwards where a Grippon was being hurled around the sky was quite another. Ian Macfadyen was telling me about flying Lightnings as a young man. From brakes off to 36,000ft took 90 seconds. Think about that.

Being Sweden, they are operating in what can be, to say the least, hostile conditions. Unlike their more southerly counterparts, they fly happily off snow which they roll and scarify rather than attempt to clear. The Grippon can get in and out of 600 metres and depends on brakes, not reverse thrust. Again, think about that.

The piece de resistance was a ride in the back of jet trainer. Even though it was an old machine, the spooling up of twin jets and the surge to 400 knots was unforgettable – as were the views over the archipelago of islands in the sunshine.

It was a great privilege to be allowed to see all this and as our European front line defences are in the hands of the Swedish Air Force – we are fortunate indeed.

The next day we flew to Estonia across the width of the Baltic where we saw huge blooms of algae that looked from six thousand feet like sandbanks.

Along with Andrew Holman-West in his magnificent Yak, we stopped in Visby on the way. It is a remarkable medieval city that Amanda and I visited on the way back. Gotland is big island – nearly a hundred miles long – just off southern Sweden. It was once very rich and powerful as part of the Hanseatic league, a string of allied trading ports that stretched through the Baltic and North Sea which included Hamburg, Lubeck, Rostock and even Boston in Lincolnshire. This mediaeval wealth has left a beautiful legacy, firstly in Visby its main port and the capital and secondly in the scores of exceptional churches strung across the island.

Visby must be one of the most beautiful and charming towns in Europe.

In the height of summer, as in most of the beauty spots all over the world, it would be overrun with tourists disgorged from cruise ships and herded by guides with flags. In the early autumn sunshine we had it almost to ourselves.

I have never seen anywhere with so many ruined churches – a result of the Hanseatic League’s decline over the past half millennium: when fire or some other disaster occurred there simply wasn’t the money or, after the Reformation in the case of monastic buildings, the inclination to rebuild.

In the countryside this lack of money had the opposite result: the magnificent mediaeval churches were preserved – as there wasn’t the cash to build anything new.

In Estonia we landed at a military base near Tallin from which four British typhoons are operating. There were many tanks parked around the base that are part of the NATO’s post- Ukraine build up in the region. The tension is palpable; not so much in the tourist-drowned Tallin Old Town, but amongst the Estonian military and among ordinary Estonians when we headed out on bicycles to the more Soviet era beaches along the coast. In a restaurant with David Ponte and Casey Norman, our nice Russian-speaking waitress told us that she would like a union with Russia while, at the same time an Estonian woman – who hailed from Loughborough – told us that her grandfather had been taken away by the Russians and her great uncle by the Germans – and she had no wish to see any return to that.

It’s not Donesk yet – but the portents are not good.