Reaper Force - Inside Britain's Drone Wars. Peter Lee M.

desert heat hits me and I almost laugh at the extreme sensation. Such a temperature has never been experienced in my native Scotland. I am wearing a short-sleeved shirt and after a few seconds my pale forearms feel like they are being assaulted by the sun’s rays.

      It is only a few yards to the entrance to the first of four sand-coloured GCSs. They are lined up and spaced out with military precision, all under a canopy that tries to protect them from the direct heat of the sun. An air-conditioning unit hums gently next to the first container, where I will spend most of the next ten hours. Black arteries snake into the GCS carrying electricity, audio and video signals, telephone lines and millions of digital 1s and 0s per second that make up the complex, secret computer coding that makes it all work. For the most part.

      Over the years I have seen many, many pilots and other aircrew walk out of their squadron buildings to their aircraft. From Norway in the Arctic Circle to Scotland, England, Gibraltar, Cyprus and the Falkland Islands the pattern is largely the same. Some similarities stand out as I watch the Reaper crew walk to the GCS. The Reaper guys are wearing standard flying suits with 39 Squadron patches and relevant rank slides. They carry themselves with the kind of confident nonchalance that has been the mark of aircrew for more than a century. The same confident nonchalance that bugs the crap out of non-aircrew the world over. Some differences stand out: they do not have flying helmets; nobody is wearing the G-suits that help fast jet crews resist the effects of gravity; and there is no waterproof layer. This Reaper crew will not be crash landing or ditching in the sea if there is an in-flight emergency.

      But something about them is off, doesn’t make sense. Something does not quite fit as the three of them file in to the metal container ahead of me. As I follow behind my subconscious dredges the answer from somewhere. Two of the crew are actually carrying cold weather flying jackets with them, in 100 degree desert heat that is quickly turning my pale blue shirt into a damp, dark blue dishcloth.

      As I step inside, the temperature drops 40 degrees to around a steady 17°C (620F). For me this is pleasant; for the acclimatised Reaper crew it feels like winter and a jacket is an essential requirement. The temperature drop is accompanied by a sudden gloom as I enter what I first imagine to be the inside of a giant computer from a 1980s sci-fi film. A wall of computer equipment faces me in the narrow corridor that runs about 15ft from the pilot and SO who are taking their seats to my right, to the MIC who is sitting in front of his own screens to my left at the back of the cabin.

      The SO beckons me to a seat in between, and just behind, him and the pilot. I close the door, shutting out the Nevada desert. Another desert landscape will soon occupy our attention. In the meantime I am fascinated by the fact that the walls, floor and ceiling are all carpeted. Not high quality woollen Axminster carpet, more the kind of hardwearing industrial weave. I make a mental note to ask someone what the carpet is for. I make a second mental note that there are more important things going on.

      I am handed a set of headphones with a chord that looks long enough to reach right back to the MIC station. As I adjust them for comfort I can hear that the pilot and SO are already running through their pre-flight checklist. I look up to see a bank of around a dozen small television-size screens in front of them, with four smaller screens. In between them are two old-fashioned telephones.

      Then the pre-flight checks grind to a halt. There is a problem with one of the live information feeds. The Auth in the Operations Room next door will not approve the start of the mission until it is sorted out, which could take a couple of hours. There is so much information flowing into the GCS from different sources that I am intrigued that this one problem is a show-stopper. During a lull in the conversation the SO – who also happens to be the Squadron Commander or Boss – explains the situation in terms he thinks I will understand. ‘Basically, we have lost something like the equivalent of a car satnav. The alternative is to have a map plus verbal updates from elsewhere, as required.’ He has seen this problem before and is confident it will be resolved quickly.

      I also note how the personnel dynamics start to shift. When the Boss is in the GCS as an SO crew member, he is subject to the supervisory authority of the lower-ranked Auth in the Ops Room next door. In this instance, the Auth will not approve take-off as the lack of a ‘satnav’ could potentially reduce crew situational awareness. The Boss is confident that the problem will be sorted before the Reaper reaches its operating area in Iraq and that it is safe to send the aircraft there. However, it is the Station Commander back at RAF Waddington who legally ‘owns’ the risk involved and only he can allow the Boss’s plan to proceed. It will have to be the Boss who phones the Station Commander, wakes him up in the middle of the night in the UK and asks him to give permission to proceed with the flight. So, the Auth gives the Boss approval to leave the GCS to take charge of the situation temporarily; the Boss then phones the UK and gets agreement for the flight to transit with the limitation; the Auth then approves take off; and the Boss takes his seat again as the SO under the supervision of the Auth. Simple.

      It all seemed quite convoluted but the underlying principle is that the person with supervisory authority over the aircraft is responsible to the legal owner of the risk; in this case the Station Commander. If the Auth had simply decided to launch the Reaper without getting authorisation from above – and if anything then went wrong – it would have been his neck and career on the block.

      Flight preparations proceed an hour behind schedule. Everybody seems happy with the outcome except, perhaps, the Station Commander in the UK who is now probably trying to get back to sleep.

      ‘So, what happened to “kick the tyres and light the fires”?’ I ask. The old-school fighter pilot adage.

      A crisp, ‘Very funny!’ from somewhere tells me to shut up.

      The checks restart and they will mostly be familiar to anyone who has flown anything from a light aircraft to a jumbo jet: airframe checks; engine checks; area of operations and maps; comms (lots of different types in this case); clocks (important when working across several time zones); radio frequencies; and weather.

      There are also numerous system checks that differ from conventional aircraft and indicate that this Reaper is to be piloted remotely. The ‘command link’ is one example. It connects the pilot’s and SO’s controls in Nevada to the aircraft via fibre optic cable and satellite.

      Then there is the preparation to electronically take control of the aircraft. Somewhere at a runway within a reasonable transit time of the Reaper’s operating area in Iraq, a separate Launch and Recovery Element (LRE) will ensure that it takes off and lands safely. It looks like a vastly bigger version of a radio-controlled model aircraft take-off. Once the Reaper has safely climbed a few thousand feet into the air, the flick of a switch diverts the electronic control signals from the LRE crew in the Middle-East to the crew members in front of me, who are now actively controlling the Reaper.

      As the Reaper continues to climb I can work out most of what I see on the pilot’s screen. To the left of his main screen the aircraft’s indicated airspeed is around 110 knots. Ominously, the number 88 is highlighted in red. This is the stall speed at which there is not enough lift from the air under the wings and the forces of gravity take over. Bad things happen after that. There are also a couple of unfamiliar hieroglyphics, so I ask.

      ‘These markings indicate the weapons I have available. Four Hellfire laser-guided missiles – two on the left and two on the right – and one GBU-12 guided bomb.’ The former weigh 100lb each and the latter 500lb. Either can be immensely damaging or immensely helpful, depending on who you are and what is happening at the time.

      Meanwhile, the SO is checking the camera pod in its ‘normal’ and ‘infrared’ modes. Later he will check that the laser for guiding the weapons onto their targets is working. For now, however, he catches me out: ‘Do you want to jump in the seat and try the controls?’

      ‘Sure.’ As we swap seats I know that I am about to impress the hell out of him. I have flown light aircraft in the past and have also spent many hours on computer games.

      The left-hand control allows me to zoom the picture in and out. He gets me to zoom in quite close to watch a car driving on a road that cuts diagonally across the screen in front of me. The right-hand