MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands fighters hitch a ride.

The Royal Air Force has introduced a novel way of flying its front-line Tornado fighters to the Falkland Islands. They go as passengers inside the giant C17 Globemaster transport aircraft on lease from the United States.

Four RAF Tornado F3 aircraft, based permanently in the Falkland Islands to provide front-line defence, have to be rotated from Britain, two at a time, every six months.

For 20 years until recently, they were each flown there separately in complex and costly flight operations involving several other aircraft, including two or three Tri-star re-fuelling tankers, a Nimrod search and rescue aircraft, and a Hercules transporter carrying spares.

The eight-thousand mile (nearly 13-thousand kilometre) journey required the Tornados to re-fuel on the ground and in flight several times, at enormous cost. It took four days, used hundreds of tons of fuel, and required detailed planning and diplomatic clearance from countries where they stopped to re-fuel.

Now the Tornados are carried as freight inside the belly of a Globemaster, with their wings removed so they can fit inside its huge fuselage. The Globemaster, with its strategic long range, can fly non-stop to Ascension Island in mid-Atlantic, then non-stop to the Falkland Islands. It takes less than half the time and without any accompanying aircraft.

Huge savings in fuel and costs

The Ministry of Defence told Mercopress it is difficult to assess the precise reduction in cost, but the technique is producing huge savings never contemplated when the government decided lease four American Globemasters for seven years from the Boeing Aircraft Corporation.

The officer commanding the Globemasters in 99 Squadron, based at Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire, Wing Commander Malcolm Brecht, said: "We are used to carrying helicopters inside the C 17 such as Chinooks, Pumas, Sea Kings and Lynxes. Now we are carrying Tornados , which even the Americans have not done with their Globemasters".

Ever since the defeat of the Argentine invasion in 1982, the RAF has regularly had to fly fighter aircraft to the Falklands as part of their defence against potential aggressors.

The first of these land-based aircraft were Phantoms which took over from the carrier-based Harriers returning to the United Kingdom after the conflict in 1982. It was even more difficult then as the Phantoms had to land on the comparatively short Stanley airport runway, using arreste