Former RAF pilot Matt Doncaster talks us through some of his incredible flying experiences

The aircraft that is closest to my heart…

..has to be the Harrier, simply because it was an absolute honour to get selected to fly and operate such an iconic aircraft. And she just looks right as well! It’s also the only aircraft I ever had my name on the side of (ZG509/80) and that jet is now privately owned and I’ve just been invited to visit her at her owner’s house. That will be a great day out for sure. To graduate from Tac Weapons training in the Hawk, all map and stopwatch stuff with a basic weapons system, to a jet that accelerated like a scolded cat, even at heavy weights, climbed better than a Hawk, and was essentially a flying weapons system for both day and night operations, was like the jump to light-speed, to say the least. As a single-seat fast jet pilot in the ‘90s you could want for nothing more. And whilst the rest of the world’s aviators used to complain about the noise of the Pegasus engine at idle, it was music to my ears (and that of every Harrier pilot on the planet!)

What did taking off in the Harrier feel like?

When you strapped into a Harrier, you knew she meant business – the cockpit was like no other in RAF service at the time because of the McDonnell Douglas influence, all HOTAS, big multifunction displays, a large HUD and a very useful ‘Up Front Controller’ just below the HUD primarily for comms management and data entry. Also, you sat very high up compared to most other aircraft, so lookout was amazing – I could also look down much further that in any previous aircraft I’d flown because of the bulbous shape of the canopy, and this was very useful as you didn’t need to drop a wing as much to see targets or features on the ground from high altitude. All in all, the cockpit was very user friendly having been designed with proper ergonomics in mind, so couple that with what I can only describe as ‘spirited’ performance, it was a joy to fly and operate, operational pressure and stresses notwithstanding. And I think in hindsight, that’s one of my most enduring memories of her – it was an intense working environment because of the tasks we were trained and training for, so there wasn’t much spare time when you were airborne to simply sit back and take in your surroundings and say ‘Wow, this is incredible!’ Which is a bit of a shame really, but when you could, say in the cruise at high level coming back from a low level sortie, or when performing a VSTOL manoeuvre that you knew looked awesome and you were comfortable with, so there was slightly less pressure than normal (hovering never had that feel if I’m honest because you had to be on top of that scenario from start to finish and the slightest error could lead to disaster very quickly – any VSTOL manoeuvre could do the same to be fair, but some were slightly more forgiving than others), it was like nothing else I’d done or have done since.

What was a typical mission?

There wasn’t a standard mission as such as the aircraft was so capable in so many areas of operation. Primarily the ground-to-air, or air-to-air threat dictated how we could fly in a given environment, plus the weather factor of course. Also, the weapon arsenal we could carry was very varied, and constantly evolving, and that drove what kind of delivery profile we would employ, which in turn dictated whether we could fly low level to the target (the preferred option to try and deny fighter interception), or had to deliver weapons such as PGMs from higher levels, or from a high angle dive because the surface to air threat dictated, and so on. So never the same day twice. And then we had the ability to do all of that off the aircraft carrier as well.

What stands out?

Without a shadow of doubt, carrier operations. My last two months on the squadron were spent at sea in 2000 on board HMS Illustrious on Operation Palliser, flying in Sierra Leone, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. We’d deployed to the ship via Malta in anticipation of a two week workup in the Mediterranean prior to a co-operative two week exercise with the French Navy in the Bay of Biscay. However, after about two or three days achieving nothing in Biscay because of the weather, we found ourselves steaming south, fast, replenishing the ship’s stores off Gibraltar before arriving in Freetown harbour some time afterwards to announce our presence. The task was to support British troops on the ground who were primarily manning the airport perimeter and the High Commission, and that support came in the form of us at very low level, literally tree top height, putting down noise in order to upset the opposing forces at the time and make them think twice about any planned actions. Normally we’d plan to avoid villages and towns in the UK for reasons of noise pollution and general military PR, but in Sierra Leone we ‘joined the dots’ and flew from one settlement to another, deliberately flying overhead to invoke communications over their radio and mobile phone network, and it worked. Very quickly the Royal Navy, sat in Freetown harbour with a Signal Intelligence Frigate listening to those communications, built up a picture of who was where in country, and we continued to operate in that way for the five weeks of operations. But flying off the carrier, for me, was the most satisfying and exciting aspect of my time with the Harrier. Luckily, flying off and back onto the ship clicked quickly for me, and I don’t want to blow my own trumpet here, but whilst it was always a challenge, knowing that I could hover alongside and land and be relatively comfortable doing so took a lot of pressure off. I found the carrier easier to land on than a pad back home because I could see it – I was never comfortable landing vertically on a pad that I couldn’t see below me. My last flight in a Harrier was an operational sortie in West Africa, landing on a carrier. Personally it didn’t get any better than that.

The thing you need to know about flying the Harrier is..

If she does something you didn’t ask her to do, undo what you last did! This was our VSTOL mantra, and one that got me, and most of my friends, out of trouble in the VSTOL environment at some point in our time of the jet. Obviously because I could move the nozzles by design to vector thrust from aft to downwards, and anywhere in between, depending on which manoeuvre I was attempting to fly, there were a myriad of aerodynamic forces at play as well as engine performance parameters to monitor and manage, and flaps moving in conjunction with nozzle angle (or not if the case dictated). So in essence, a lot going on, and with the best will in the world it was easy to move something inadvertently – the nozzle lever being the biggest potential for disaster – not select something such as the engine water injection system (absolutely vital to increase maximum engine thrust in certain scenarios) or not select the required flap schedule (there were three settings, CRUISE – fixed at 5 degrees, AUTO – anywhere between UP and 25 degrees depending on nozzle angle, and STOL – anywhere between UP and 62 degrees again dependent on nozzle angle). Hence, ‘if she does something you didn’t ask her to do, undo what you last did!’, have a think and try again.

The service or airline I feel closest to is, of course

The RAF. Twenty seven and a half years of service will do that to a person! Never a day goes by without me marvelling at what I achieved and the variety of aircraft I flew and flying roles that I undertook. I never did the same job twice, and whilst I did three instructional tours they were at Basic, Advanced Fast Jet, and the Empire Test Pilot School, so very varied. When I joined the RAF in 1991, I expected to have a ‘standard’ career path of training, probably two tours flying a frontline aircraft, maybe promotion and staff college and a staff tour, then leave after maybe one more flying job. I should have bet a day’s pay on going from training to being an Instructor on Tucanos, then the Harrier, then a Tactics and Weapons Instructor on the Hawk, then a crossover to the C17 because of a neck injury, then ETPS instructing on Hawk, Alpha Jet, Tucano, King Air and Andover, as well as flying pretty much all the types Boscombe Down had to offer including helicopters, with three ground tours woven in for good measure, as I’d be a very rich man now.

Virgin Atlantic is in there as well. I joined them in 2017 after I’d left the RAF, flying the Boeing 747. Another privilege. And despite being made redundant during the pandemic because the airline scrapped the 747, I’m back there now flying the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

My least favourite aircraft of all that I’ve flown is the Grob Tutor. It replaced the Scottish Aviation Bulldog (a quite lovely aircraft, simple to operate and full of character) at University Air Squadrons, and, quite frankly, the Tutor is too sedate and heavy in roll, over complicated in the checks department, and really quite a bit of an underwhelming experience. Would I fly it again – yes, in the Air Experience role as I’d be giving something back to the young people who aspire to join the RAF and become pilots. Would I buy one? Not if it was the last aircraft on earth – I’ll build something from scratch, thanks!

The C-17 is…..

a truly amazing transport aircraft. Again, I was blessed in being able to operate her through a twist of fate that temporarily stopped me from flying fast jets. I sustained a very bad neck injury whilst instructing in the back seat of a Hawk in the summer of 2003 that meant I couldn’t pull high g for the immediate future, so my fast jet flying was over. I was posted to Boscombe Down on a ground tour to look after, edit and publish the Harrier Aircrew Document Set (basically, Flight Reference Cards, Aircrew Manual, and the Aircraft Operating Data Manual) whilst waiting for the RAF to decide what to do with me. Luckily it wasn’t long before my multi-engine crossover took place, and whilst I wanted to go and fly the BAe 146 and HS125 on 32 Sqn at Northolt, there weren’t any slots available that fitted the service’s timescales for me, so they offered me the C17. Having never seen one before, I asked if I could visit 99 Sqn at Brize Norton on a fact finding mission, and this ultimately turned into a trip away to North America on a training flight as an observer, and that was it – I was hooked! The aircraft’s ability to do all that it is asked to do, and more, is already legendary, but to be able to operate an aircraft that had a flight deck designed by pilots and a cargo area designed by loadmasters is simply a recipe for success, and we all loved flying her. I started on the squadron in January 2006 by flying out to Altus AFB, Oklahoma, as the USAF carried out all UK initial training under contract at that time, so that was fun. And on my return I set to with the major task that the squadron had at the time, which was manning the airbridge from the UK to Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 95% of my flying was the airbridge, carrying everything from 9mm rounds to Apache helicopters, the odd Chinook or Harrier (I’m the only Harrier pilot to fly both types and once was the Captain of a C17 bringing home a broken Harrier that was also in my logbook), and of course the critically wounded being recovered to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. There were the odd trips going West and not East, but they were always related to the conflicts in the Middle East, and usually we were picking up something special from the Americans. We all loved the C17 because of her reliability – we didn’t want to get stuck in theatre, nor did we want to be part of the bad PR that other RAF aircraft seemed to feed on a regular basis through either not getting out of Brize Norton, or not getting in on time. We felt safe flying in her as well, and I suppose when flying a large, very obvious and valuable asset like that, that’s important. Lights off, at night, armour on, looking at the world through NVGs and operating with a HUD to increase situational awareness is definitely the way forward.

Your worst day at work?

Probably when I was part of a large formation of around 40 aircraft, all fast jets apart from the E-3D AWACS we had in support, running around the North East of England in a ground attack vs air defence with fighter escort scenario, when we all heard ‘Wez, Pull Up, Pull Up, EJECT, EJECT’ followed by ‘Mayday Mayday Mayday’. That was horrible. I thought, as we all did, including Mike who’d put the call out, that Wez (we all had three letter abbreviations of our names and I’ll stick with his) had flown into the ground. In reality he’d glanced forward to see another aircraft coming the other way right in his face, so had instinctively pulled back on the stick, applied full rudder as a survival instinct brace position thinking a mid-air collision was imminent, but that probably saved his life as the jet pulled up and promptly departed controlled flight, such were the nature of his inputs and the speed at which he was flying at the time. He recalled all of this, but also thought it best to eject as the jet was unrecoverable at such a low height, but Mike didn’t see him go out as it was all over in a few seconds. Wez landed in trees just short of where the jet impacted the ground and exploded, so again Mike couldn’t see him, nor did Wez’s location beacon transmit such that we could hear it because of the dense foliage he was hanging in in his parachute. Only after Wez had got himself down from the tree and walked out of the wood onto open ground did we hear his signal on the safety Guard frequency. I can’t recall how long that was, but it seemed like a fortnight – I guess it was probably a few minutes but enough for us to reform the formation in preparation for recovery back to base (there were seven of us initially, Wez was out of the picture, and Mike stayed on scene to manage the search and rescue), but when we did hear his signal, boy was there relief. But those initial minutes were rock bottom, never want to go through that again, horrible minutes. Getting shot at in Afghanistan in a C-17 whilst parked on the tarmac at Kandahar Airport is a risk you accept as part of the job, but being that close to losing a mate during peacetime sucks.

Your best day at work?

Same day. Being met after landing in person by the Station Commander, Group Captain David Walker who alas passed away too young last year, to be asked if there was anything we needed in way of support, as well as being given an initial update on Wez’s condition, was leadership and a half. Apparently we all looked like we’d seen a ghost, which I guess was the aftermath of the stress of thinking a mate had just died, but that soon fell away once we were released from the immediate post-crash management processes and we drove to Nottingham to visit Wez in hospital. To see his smiling face was priceless.

How do you feel about the Andover – and what’s your claim to fame?

The Andover was an aircraft I never in a million years thought I’d ever fly. As a Combined Cadet Force cadet in the ‘80s I’d had a Summer Camp at Boscombe Down and seen XS606 during a hangar visit, but then in 2009 I joined the Empire Test Pilot School as the Fixed Wing Qualified Flying Instructor and Standards Pilot to be told that in due course I’d convert onto the Andover in order to support the delivery of test pilot course sorties that utilised her. So I do have a soft spot for her – yes she was old, but of an era when aviation was still very much the evolving science it was after the Second World War and into the ‘50s and ‘60s. Plus, big propellors and water-meth injection are a combination rarely seen or used these days, so that was something new. She had a museum quality about her because of her age, but all of us who flew her enjoyed the experience. I flew her as far as Toulouse on a visit to Airbus which was interesting since her navigation equipment was ‘60s vintage as well, so standalone GPSs were suckered to various windows on the flight deck to give us a fighting chance. On the return leg we had to fly in t-shirts, flying suits tied off at the waist, from Toulouse to overhead the Channel Islands on the return leg because the air conditioning was asthmatic – how Andover crews operated in the likes of Yemen and its heat back in the day is a miracle. My claim to fame – I was the very last RAF pilot to convert to the Andover before she was retired, and I’m very proud of that fact

Tell me something I don’t know about 747s..

Oh that’s tricky – the 747 is such a venerable old girl, and so much has been written about her over the years. I guess one lesser known fact is that under certain conditions of weight and performance, not only could she continue to destination on three engines instead of diverting in the event of having to shut one engine down due to a mechanical issue, but she could often maintain altitude as well, and in most cases climb higher later on in the cruise on a long haul sector. Now that’s performance worth having when flying over the Himalayas or the Rockies, instead of having to worry about the height of the mountains in today’s large twin-engined airliners where you’re only ever going to descend on one engine.

Alpha Jet versus Hawk?

Everyone in the last 50 years who has passed through RAF fast jet training has flown the Hawk. It’s a lovely, sports car of an aircraft, simple to start, operate and fly, with very few handling vices. I flew it as a student, as an instructor, at low level learning and teaching ground attack, at high level learning and teaching air combat and basic air defence techniques, as a bounce aircraft trying to attack formations as they tried to get to a ground target, I dropped my first weapons from a Hawk at Pembrey Range, and it was the one and only aircraft I’ve fired a cannon from, the 30mm Aden. It will always have a place in my heart as an aircraft that was honest, fun and sometimes challenging to operate – some of the best flying I ever did was as an instructor at RAF Valley.

Not many people in the RAF have flown the Alpha Jet. In fact, the number is probably less than one hundred over the time the jets were based at Boscombe Down, and that includes the ETPS students whose convertion to it for their test pilot courses I was in charge of, about 25 in total during my time there. It was a very tidy jet, compact, low to the ground, with sharper aerodynamics compared to the Hawk, and a much more purposeful look to her. Of course she was twin-engined, so in terms of power to weight she was much better placed than the Hawk – initial climb rate was akin to a clean Harrier if I’m honest as we flew the Alpha Jet at Boscombe Down with no external stores or even pylons, even though the wing could carry four. So in essence she was over powered in the role fit we flew, but that’s not a bad thing. We did fly Alpha Jet vs Hawk air combat, and on paper you’d think the Alpha Jet would win hands down due to her extra performance, but so long as you didn’t get slow in the Hawk, say less that about 300 knots, you had a fighting chance because the Hawk could pull more g (we had a training maximum limit of 7g) versus the Alpha Jet which had a limit of 6g. So you could out (turn) rate the Alpha Jet in a Hawk but you had to be careful and patient – the Hawk bleeds energy very quickly if you’re a bit over zealous and aggressive towards your opponent, and then the Alpha Jet’s ability to regain energy, but more importantly sustain a turn at slower speeds without slowing down, would be the downfall of the Hawk. I always tried to merge into combat fast in a Hawk, at least 400-450knots, and go vertical to try and get lost in the sun and then come back down on the Alpha Jet from above, assuming he hadn’t come up with me. Turning flat at the merge, even with a speed advantage was tricky because of the Hawk’s speed bleeding issue, unless the base height for the combat was lowered to 5000ft above the ground where the Hawk’s Adour engine produced more thrust, but that was a rare occasion – our normal base height was 10,000ft and that made a huge difference to the Hawk, less so to the Alpha Jet with its two engines.

Overall, it was never a ‘I’m in the Alpha Jet, I’m bound to win’ scenario – air combat should always be flown to maximise your own advantages, never those of your opponent, and that’s what we did regardless of what we were flying or what the outcome might have looked like on paper.

The most overarted and underrated aircraft I can think of – please explain

Overrated – Oh what a difficult question. I think I need your help there! Maybe we should get together and discuss this one question and see where it takes us? Good idea, let’s do that

Underrated – The Hurribomber I think. The long forgotten stalwart of The Battle of Britain that went on to become a very successful air-to-ground aircraft in North Africa prior to the arrival later in the war of aircraft such as the Typhoon and Tempest, and the family of American air-to-grounders. Overshadowed but wrongly so in my opinion. Or maybe the Tucano – I loved flying the Tucano, others didn’t, but I think it did excellent service as a basic trainer for the 30-odd years it did so. Such a shame they all got sold and shipped abroad – I’d have loved to have had the chance to put a syndicate together and buy one.

What should I have asked you?

What are your future aviation plans? I’ve got a plan to finally get a civilian flying instructor’s rating this year, which will allow me to fly with Ultimate High at Goodwood, and Aero Legends out of Compton Abbas which is only 20 minutes from my house. I need to have some more dynamic flying back in my life, and formation flying and air combat with Ultimate High will be the conduit for that. Aero Legends have recently re-established the training base at Compton Abbas following the sale of the airfield to Guy Ritchie at the end of 2022, and they also operate one of their Spitfires and Harvards there over a number of weekends in the summer months. Obviously I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in flying warbirds at some point in the future, and I think I’ve got a suitable CV to allow me to do that, but the warbird scene is definitely a right place right time scenario, but I’m hopeful that by starting with Aero Legends as a PPL level instructor on their fleet of PA-28s an opportunity might present itself in the future. Fingers crossed!