7000 Feet Over Nowhere: Why the Tristan Mission Should Make Every Briton Proud |
There is a golf course on Tristan da Cunha. It has nine holes, no clubhouse worth the name, and sits on a volcanic plateau lashed by South Atlantic winds that regularly exceed twenty-five miles per hour. Last fortnight, six Pathfinders from the British Army’s 16 Air Assault Brigade used it as a landing zone — jumping from seven thousand feet, three miles out over open ocean, to save the life of a single British citizen.
If that sentence does not stir something in you, check your pulse.
The facts of the mission read like fiction. In early May, a resident of Tristan da Cunha — population 221, no airstrip, accessible only by sea — returned home from the cruise ship MV Hondius and fell ill with suspected hantavirus, the Andes variant that had already killed passengers aboard the vessel. The island’s hospital, staffed by just two medics, began to run critically low on oxygen. There was no ship close enough, no runway to land on, and no time to wait. Within hours of being alerted, 16 Air Assault Brigade had formulated a plan with the Royal Air Force. An A400M Atlas transport aircraft launched from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, flew 6,788 kilometres to Ascension Island, refuelled mid-air from an RAF Voyager tanker, then pressed another 3,000 kilometres south into the deep Atlantic. The round trip covered approximately 19,500 kilometres.
Strapped to the Pathfinders in tandem harnesses were an intensive care doctor — for whom it was a first-ever parachute jump — and an ICU military nurse. They leapt from the aircraft’s rear ramp, drifted backwards through gusting wind, and touched down on that rock-strewn golf course. Within minutes, the medics were........