Joddie

John Oddie joined the RAAF in 1979, but unlike most who grow up to join the air force he hadn’t really longed to fly as a child. It wasn’t until he had a ride in an Army ‘Huey’ Iroquois from Ballarat to Mildura during his time as an Army reservist in 1976 did any thought of a career in the military occur to him, especially after learning from the Huey pilot that not only did the air force teach him how to fly, but they also paid him to do it as a job!
Any early ambitions Oddie may have had of joining the Air Force were offset by the need to help his family on their farm near Ballarat. But the idea wasn’t forgotten and the fire was rekindled after he was buzzed by a low-flying F-111 on the farm in 1979. Soon after he saw an advertisement for RAAF pilots and, while he didn’t think he would make it as a pilot, being a good map reader he thought he’d apply to be a navigator.

He was accepted for the RAAF entrance exam and made his way to Melbourne. Despite being late for the exam he finished it early and passed. Next up were the screening interviews where it was suggested he had done well enough to apply as a pilot after all. Even though Oddie didn’t know much about aviation at all – a fact that was pointed out by the interviewing board – they obviously saw something in him and he was selected for flight training at Point Cook.

Describing himself as “not a very good pilot” he scraped through initial flight training and went to 2FTS at Pearce in WA for further training and was surprised to pass his course there too with a “that’ll do” rating from the unit commanding officer. Next stop was 5SQN at Fairbairn in Canberra to learn to fly the Iroquois. By now his hard work started to pay off and he was dux of his conversion course in May 1980.

In 1982 Oddie deployed to the Middle East for the first time to support the multi-national UN peacekeeping operations between Israel and Egypt. Based at Etzion on the eastern side of the rugged Sinai Peninsula, Oddie described the flying environment as “tough but interesting.” There were few trees in the Sinai, and the airspace restrictions imposed due to the fragile peace often led to some “close calls” with fuel calculations.

Landmines were also a hazard to the helicopter pilots, with unstable minefields frequently unmarked landing zones needing to be cleared and marked, and many old mines often were washed down into wadis and streams by heavy winter rains. The mountainous terrain and extreme heat meant many of the landing zones were confined and frequently marginal at altitude and it was often necessary to conduct power checks prior to landing to validate the machine’s performance charts in case of compressor blade erosion in the dusty environment.

More than once Oddie put his faith in his and the Huey’s abilities by pushing beyond the published limits to land in high and tight landing pads, saying: “We often made judgement calls that may not be made in today’s environment.”

The RAAF Iroquois flew three types of missions in the Sinai including logistic support of multi-national (mainly Colombian and Fijian) ground forces, observer missions to validate Israeli and Egyptian force dispositions, and border surveillance emissions to check the location of border markings. Oddie said the 44-gallon drums positioned as the border markings sometimes had a habit of “wandering” during the night.

During his deployment to the Sinai, Oddie “met some really interesting people on both sides” while also gaining valuable experience flying with other forces including the US Army’s famous 101st Airborne ‘Screaming Eagles’ which flew Hueys , and the French Air Force with C-160 Transall transports. The RAAF Iroquois detachment was also fully integrated with a smaller RNZAF cadre and it was normal for Australians and Kiwis – as integrated crews – to share or use each other’s machines.

Following his Sinai deployment Oddie returned to Australia and was posted to 12SQN at Amberley to convert to the CH-47C Chinook. Australian Chinook operations were varied, but were mainly restricted to logistics and transport operations rather than the air mobility and air assault roles our current CH-47Ds conduct in Afghanistan. The Chinooks frequently operated in tropical far north Queensland and into PNG where the terrain and ‘hot & high’ climate was extremely challenging and VFR ‘gap flying’ between mountains shrouded in cloud was often the norm.

Not long after converting to the Chinook Oddie took part in support operations during and after the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983. The aircraft was at Richmond performing Air Mobility Transport Development Unit work when the call came in to proceed to Warrnambool on the Victorian coast to pick up then prime minister Malcolm Fraser and his wife to tour some of the fire ground. After this, the machine stayed in the area providing logistics support for fire crews, taking them in to and out of fire areas, and bringing in much-needed supplies. Naturally, the Chinook was vastly more capable in terms of uplift capacity and its pilots had the ability to get into tight landing zones along with the smaller civil helos, but it was not cleared for water bombing at that time.

After a stint flying and instructing on Macchis at East Sale and Pearce, Oddie was offered a three-year exchange posting to the RAF in 1988 flying the Chinook HCMk1, which was equivalent to our CH-47C but with higher-power engines, broader chord composite blades, three cargo hooks, and an early automatic flight control system. Oddie was based at Gütersloh in Germany and, being the height of the Cold War with forward deployed NATO forces facing off against the Soviets and eastern bloc, the training was different and far more intense than he had experienced in Australia.

The main roles of the RAF’s Chinooks in Germany were artillery ammunition resupply and the rapid counter penetration/ambush mission against soviet ground forces, with crews required to know their area of responsibility intimately. Low-level ‘nap of the earth’ formation flying under powerlines and between trees was frequent along with a lot of night flying into remote locations without the aid of night vision goggles (NVG). The 14 Chinooks of Oddie’s squadron trained to lift and move a brigade-sized force of about 1,400 troops and underslung loads more than 160km at night in under two hours.

This was also Oddie’s first exposure to electronic warfare with radar warning receivers from retired RAF Buccaneer strike aircraft transplanted into the Chinooks to provide a degree of electronic situational awareness and discrimination between ground and airborne threats. To this end, the Chinooks often practised fighter evasion tactics mainly against forward deployed RAF Harriers. The HCMk1s also carried flare dispensers which were manually fired and offered little in the way of protection apart from the “feel-good that you were at least doing something.” The RAF Chinook crews had a real “warrior mindset” says Oddie – they constantly trained for war and many of them had already seen service in the Falklands in 1982 and in Northern Ireland.

During his exchange Oddie completed the RAF tactics instructor’s course – the rotary winged equivalent of the fast jet fighter combat or weapons instructor courses – and was in demand as an instructor by the squadron.

Oddie’s value to the RAF was highlighted when he deployed to Saudi Arabia in early January 1991, just before his son’s third birthday, as part of the lead-up to the UK’s Operation Granby to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. In a rather ironic coincidence, his unit’s Chinooks were shipped from northern Germany to Saudi Arabia on the MV Atlantic Conveyor II, named after the ship which was carrying four Chinooks to the Falkland Islands in 1982 and was sunk by an Argentine Exocet anti-ship missile with the loss of dozens of hands and all but one aircraft. That aircraft – known as ‘Bravo November’ – had since been upgraded and was part of Oddie’s unit and earned its crews four DFCs since entering service in 1978, and is still in RAF service as an upgraded HC4 today.

The Gulf War campaign was a busy one for the RAF’s Chinooks with logistics missions, Special Forces support, and POW transport just some of the missions performed. The transport of POWs by helo was new to the UK and no procedures had been written for the process nor on how to handle an attempted breakout while in flight. But Oddie takes comfort in the way he and the RAF adapted to the situation and the way they valued getting thousands of POWs – many of them malnourished conscripts – back to safety and shelter in rear areas away from the fighting.

When his exchange ended in May 1991, the Australian Army was in the process of assuming responsibility for the RAAF’s rotary winged elements. Because of his useful experience operating the Chinook in tactical roles with more up-to-date equipment than the RAAF, Oddie offered his insight but received a less than enthusiastic response, an experience he recalls as being “very disappointing.”

Luckily for the RAAF, that service recognised his experience and skills and he was posted to 37SQN as XO to fly the C-130E Hercules in 1994. Although he says his heart was in the tactical environment, he enjoyed flying the E model Herc, and valued the unit picking up parachuting and tactical airdrop – previously the domain of the Caribou and the newer C-130H – during his tour. Oddie also brought back a warrior commitment from his time in Germany and Iraq, and started what would be a more than decade-long process to bringing a structured and disciplined approach to building a ‘battleworthy’ air mobility team.

In one anecdote he recalls walking around 37SQN’s crew room and seeing a group of aircrew studying different control surface designs. When he asked what they were doing they responded that they needed to know about these things for when they ‘went to the airlines.’ Oddie says he was disappointed, and reminded them unambiguously that they were in the military. He then directed that they should instead go and study surface-to-air missile systems and brief him in 15 minutes!

In 1996 Oddie was promoted to wing commander and posted to senior operations staff officer (SOPSO) in Air Lift Group (ALG). Oddie was part of the team which oversaw the ALG’s reorganisation which resulted in the formation of 84 and 86 Wings as the supervising entities of the operational squadrons. He had moved to SOPSO (later designated XO) of 86Wing when the situation in Cambodia deteriorated and it became necessary to evacuate Australians in that country. This was the first real operational use of a RAAF C-130 in a tactical situation and, because there was a real threat from man-portable surface-to-air missiles and small arms fire around Phnom Penh airport, C-130Hs of 36SQN equipped with the first generation ‘Apollo’ electronic warfare kit and cockpit armour plating were deployed.

Oddie flew on the first mission in to Phnom Penh to assess the situation and to liaise with Australian headquarters on the ground. In that first mission “a whole bunch” of Australians were evacuated to Penang in Malaysia and subsequent missions were flown on that and following days by other crews. The final flight was the most risky as the situation had deteriorated and security at the airport was in danger of being lost, so it was flown at night with no landing aids during a thunderstorm using NVGs. The crew was later honoured for their substantial achievements.

The Cambodian crisis and subsequent missions in PNG, Bougainville, the Solomon Islands and other places just reinforced Oddie’s views that ALG needed to continue its culture change to reinforce the skills of tactical flying and training. In 2000 Oddie assumed command of 36SQN and continued what he had started at 86WG. His stated goal was to make the squadron “combat ready” despite there being no wars on the horizon at the time and he involved the unit’s executives in defining and implementing the process. It turns out this process was quite a prescient one, as just after he finished as commanding officer in late 2001 the C-130Hs were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq as the lead elements of Operation Slipper.

After a tour at Northern Command in Darwin, Oddie came back to ALG in 2004 as a group captain and as officer commanding 86WG and he continued his goals of making air lift “battleworthy” by applying better approaches to defining and managing battlefield risk and by learning the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. During this tour it became clear the newer C-130Js would soon need to be deployed to take the load off the C-130H fleet and its personnel which was by then wearing thin. Tactics and concepts of operation derived from recent experiences, and modified to account for less crew and different systems, were developed for the newer aircraft to operate in the tactical environment, electronic warfare and armour kits were acquired and fitted, sustainment models were produced, and all were validated through systematic training and an intense pre-deployment exercise and operational certification program called Precision Red.

After a tour in Canberra as Director General Aerospace Development (DGAD) within Capability Development Group (CDG), Oddie returned to ALG as an air commodore to take command of the Force Element Group, and the next phase of his plan was put into effect. As part of the Air Force Improvement Program, Oddie recalls how he got some of his best people together – from junior airmen, warrant officer loadmasters to executive aircrew – and tasked them to brainstorm and come up with ideas to better serve ALG’s customers. The end result was the FEG’s unofficial motto – ‘We move important people and stuff to tough places on time’, an accompanying customer education program and concepts which revolutionised insight into efficient, adaptive and productive air mobility services.

Enabled also by the arrival of the C-17, instead of the traditional way of defence force units requiring air lift support asking for a C-130 or a Caribou etc to take a load on a certain date and time, they were instead encouraged to outline what their load was and when they required it to be delivered, and ALG’s Air Mobility Control Centre would take care of the tasking. This method has seen substantial savings and efficiencies realised in the employment of air lift resources with Oddie describing it as being “a profound change to the way air lift is delivered”.

After another brief Canberra tour Oddie was appointed Deputy Commander of Joint Task Force (JTF)633 which oversees all of Australia’s forces in the Middle East Area of Operations (MEAO). During his eight-month tour in the MEAO, Oddie travelled to Afghanistan and Iraq to visit Army units there, flew with RAAF C-130Js, C-17s and AP-3C Orions on transport and surveillance missions, visited the Army Chinooks, and sailed on the RAN ship patrolling the Arabian Gulf and Indian Ocean.

Oddie was acting commander when an Australian CH-47D Chinook (A15-102 Centurion) crashed in Afghanistan on May 30 2011 killing LT Marcus Case. Friendly ground forces were quickly on the scene and the crew and passengers were evacuated, while salvage crews attempted to recover elements of the valuable machine but were increasingly coming under threat from Taliban forces. So the decision was taken by Oddie to destroy the aircraft in-situ rather than risk the lives of the recovery crews. Interestingly, before being upgraded to a CH-47D and delivered to the Army in 1995, that same machine had previously been a RAAF CH-47C, serial A15-002 which Oddie had flown in the mid to late 1980s.

John Oddie retired from the RAAF in June 2012, with his final job being another brief tour as director general aerospace development.