Swansong - 899 NAS at Kecskemét

The Royal Navy's 899 Naval Air Squadron was disbanded on the 31st of March 2005, following an eventful history. Before this event, some of the personnel of the squadron had a possibility for a last exercise abroad. One of the two steps of their tour was at Gibraltar, while the other at Kecskemét, Hungary.

The Hungarian Air Force got ready for the exercise in extremely short time. The Royal Navy noticed us on the beginning of February about their intentions - the Sea Harrier FA.2s landed at Kecskemét on 7 of March! Four planes arrived, with two spare pilots, 30 ground personnel and two flight controllers. The later ones were not stationed at Kecskemét but at Veszprém, HQ of the HuAF. The commander of the detachment was Cdr. John Lawler, the last commander of 899 NAS.

On the first day of the exercise there were not only familiarisation flights, but then occurred the first one-to-one clashes with the based MiG-29s. In one of the dogfights the pilot of ZH809 pulled too many Gs to the plane, so the spec deco plane spent the next day at the maintenance hangar. The following days not only 1vs1, but 1vs2 and 2vs2 flights occurred, too. According to the two commanders Cdr. Lawler and Col. Nándor Kilián, in BVR clashes the British pilots had the upper hand with their AMRAAMs, while in dogfights the MiG-29 proved to be superior - not a surprising result. Hungarian pilots admitted that they have got 10-30 percent chance against AMRAAM equipped fighters.

The Hungarian pilots were really unhappy that the British contingent didn't bring any two-seater Harriers. This way only the British pilots had the opportunity to try the other party's fighter - all of them accepted the possibility to fly with a MiG-29UB. Unfortunately the last mission had to be cancelled because of the late winter at Kecskemét. L-30ZOs were to attack the air base with Sea Harriers as top covers, while the resident Fulcrums would have been to stop the intruders. The British contingent left Kecskemét after 5 days, on 11 of March, finishing the very last deployment of the now late 899 NAS.

List of the Sea Harrier FA.2s of the visit:

• ZE692
• ZH802
• ZH809
• ZH812