Royal Australian Navy

Guest column by Peter (‘Purps’) Greenfield — The McDonnell Douglas A4 Skyhawk was the only aircraft I flew where I felt that I was in it, rather than occupying it. The cockpit was tight, to the point that your helmet ‘bonked’ the canopy in your struggles to see behind. You had to know where the switches were…

Guest column by Peter (‘Purps’) Greenfield — We were young, full of testosterone and living the dream. The year was 1976 and I was selected to fly the McDonnell Douglas A4-G Skyhawk fighter off the RMAS Melbourne, Australia’s only aircraft carrier. All of us had flown the CAC Aermacchi MB-326H jet trainer, known affectionately as the ‘Macchi’…

Another day another failure of naval procurement — The Australian Hunter Class “frigate” project was always eyebrow raising to anyone with a passing capacity to compare the size of numbers in four figures, or a basic understanding of warships since the second world war. Now the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, normally a sock-puppet for the navy when it…

World War II and my father — a Surgeon Lieutenant Commander, was posted somewhere in the Pacific Ocean quite possibly aboard the HMAS Canberra. …