No flying today. The Flight team were giving ARFA the once over after his strenuous efforts of the previous days, not the least because as Bob and I were on our own, we had ad to do our own servicing. Meanwhile Bob and I debriefed the ships staff on the jammer and we had various discussions on how to use it in a tactical environment. One problem was going to be our reactivity. An Exocet raid would tend to happen at very short notice and so getting airborne very quickly would be a priority. I worked out a way of presetting all the aircraft switches and leaving it in a configuration that would allow a very fast start up. The flight standards guys back at home would have had an apoplectic fit if they had known - but tough they weren't there and weren't the ones with the problem. It worked only a few weeks later. One of several records I can claim to have broken during the war is the time to get airborne from the action station alarm going off.
We were all taking things quite seriously now, what with the loss of Sheffield and the bombing of Port Stanley. The Argies declared the entire South Atlantic a war zone today. So much for diplomacy.
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