We are back!! @TheAngry53586 @hopfifi @IntercityFC @DMBrookfield We are ‘The State One Podcast’. We hope you will join us for dits, shits & giggles and all things maritime history, leadership, whisky and more. Pull up a bollard.

It's been a while since I wrote a little 'What a Route Controller gets up to' thread. Given I've spent tonight engaged in some unit-shuffling, now is as good a time as any! So, what have I been up to whilst you've all been asleep? Join me in the sunny South, and read on... 🧵

It’s not being a tiger though is it, it’s in captivity as the property of the zoo and is on public display. Therefore the mitigation measures to prevent death of members of the public should be in place, including shooting the animal as a last resort to protect human life.

A man has jumped into a tiger enclosure at The Yorkshire Wildlife park! No reports yet, as to whether he survived or not, apart from gun shots were fired & the park has been closed with heavy police & ambulance presence 🤦🏾‍♀️ I don’t even want to ask, how or why? #YWLP

Commander Nigel David "Sharkey" Ward, DSC, AFC Royal Navy, Fleet Air Arm On the morning of 21 May 1982, as British troops stormed ashore at San Carlos Water in the Falkland Islands, Commander Sharkey Ward led three Sea Harriers of 801 Naval Air Squadron on a combat air patrol over Falkland Sound. An air defence controller aboard HMS Brilliant called out two Argentine Pucara ground attack aircraft skimming in at low level. Ward took his flight down after them. He found the second Pucara over the hills near Goose Green and hit it with his cannon from behind, setting its engine on fire. It refused to die. He came in twice more, and on his final pass, flying barely ten feet above the ground, he ripped the cockpit canopy and upper fuselage apart with cannon fire. The Argentine pilot ejected at low altitude and lived. It was the first of three air to air kills Ward would score in the war, and one of the lowest level fighter attacks ever recorded by a British pilot. Later that same day, the killing continued. Patrolling west of San Carlos, Ward flew head on between two Argentine Mirage Daggers racing toward the landing force, then turned hard to engage them. The Daggers broke away and ran, putting themselves right in front of Ward's wingman, Lieutenant Stephen Thomas, who shot both down with Sidewinder missiles. A third Dagger, unseen, came up behind Ward and opened fire with its cannon. It missed. Ward turned on the attacker and destroyed him with a Sidewinder of his own. In one day Ward had accounted for two enemy aircraft personally and helped deny the Argentine Air Force its run at the landing beaches. He had done it as commanding officer of 801 Squadron, embarked on HMS Invincible, and as the senior Sea Harrier adviser to the task force command. Before the war he had driven the squadron's preparation: he made his pilots take the Ferranti Blue Fox radar seriously when others dismissed it, and made them the leading night flyers in the fleet. On 1 June, Ward scored his third kill in one of the war's most argued over engagements. Guided by HMS Minerva's radar, he intercepted an Argentine C-130 Hercules transport at low level. Short on fuel, he engaged at once: his first Sidewinder missed, the second struck between the starboard engines and set it burning, and he followed up with around 240 rounds of cannon fire until the aircraft fell into the sea. All seven Argentine crewmen were killed. Decades later, living in retirement in Grenada, Ward agreed to a radio interview with Ezequiel Martel, the son of the C-130's pilot. It was an extraordinary act of closure for both men, and it tells you something about the man behind the nickname. The nickname Sharkey is given by tradition to any Royal Navy man named Ward, after the Barbary corsair Jack Ward. Nigel Ward earned a heavier meaning for his own. Born in Medicine Hat, Canada, in September 1943 to an RAF squadron leader, he joined the Royal Navy as a cadet in 1962 and flew Hunters, Sea Vixens and Phantoms from HMS Ark Royal. By 1976 he was the naval staff officer overseeing the Sea Harrier's development, and by 1979 he commanded the Intensive Flying Trials Unit, the team that brought the jump jet into service on budget and on schedule. In the South Atlantic he flew more than sixty combat missions, took part in or witnessed ten aerial engagements, and brought every one of his pilots home. His Distinguished Service Cross, gazetted in October 1982 for gallant and distinguished service in the South Atlantic, came alongside an Air Force Cross given that June for his services to VSTOL aviation. He retired in 1985 and wrote the definitive firsthand account of the air war, Sea Harrier Over the Falklands, still the sharpest portrait of naval aviation at war. He died in Grenada in May 2024, aged eighty. What does it take for a squadron commander to stake his whole air war on radar his pilots mistrusted and night flying nobody had tried, and then be proved right within days?