A senior RAF commander has told his airmen to consider flying their aircraft at terrorist targets.

Air Vice-Marshal David Walker said pilots should think about “kamikaze” missions as a last resort if their aircraft ran out of ammunition or the weapons failed.

Speaking at a conference, he said: “Would you think it unreasonable if I ordered you to fly your aircraft into the ground in order to destroy a vehicle carrying a Taleban or al-Qaeda commander?”

Last night pilots reacted with bewilderment to the suggestion. One unnamed RAF pilot speaking to The Sun said: “I’m prepared to give it a go but only if the Air Vice-Marshal shows me how to do it first.” Another said: “His idea of leadership is to suggest that it is within his power to authorise the first example of an ordered kamikaze attack in the RAF’s 89-year history.

“He is subtly suggesting that, if he wished, he could order anyone in his command to die”.

Air Vice-Marshal Walker is in operational charge of the RAF’s fighter jets including the £43 million Typhoon Euro-fighter, Tornado, Jaguar and Harrier aircraft.

Among the conference audience were recently qualified Typhoon pilots whose training costs more than £5 million.

Air Vice-Marshal Walker, who is based in the Air Command bunker at High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, cited a Second World War scenario in which a Spitfire pilot’s guns had jammed and Adolf Hitler was in a car below. He suggested that could be an example where a pilot may be expected to make a sacrifice.

The former Harrier pilot, who had his canopy shot out in action over Iraq, said that RAF airmen knew they may have to risk their lives when they enlisted.

But one audience member asked: “Imagine, as you are floating skyward towards the pearly gates having parked your jet in the desert at 500 knots, that intelligence had it wrong and that the bloke driving the car was actually a plumber taking his children to school?” He told The Sun: “Imagine trying to fly your fast pointy thing at an evading car. The bloke driving only has to swerve at the last minute and it’s goodnight Vienna, mission failed.”

But other unnamed sources played down the comments, saying that Air Vice-Marshal Walker was posing a question and not ordering crews to their deaths.

In a statement, the Ministry of Defence said: “Air Vice-Marshal Walker did not say he would order his crews on suicide missions. As part of a training exercise he wanted them to think about how they and their commanders would react faced with a life-and-death decision of the most extreme sort — for example terrorists trying to fly an aircraft into a British city, being followed by an RAF fighter which suffers weapons failure.

“These are decisions which, however unlikely and dreadful, service people may have to make and it is one of many reasons why the British people hold them in such high esteem.”

In September 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, Sergeant Ray Holmes flew his Hurricane fighter into a German Dornier bomber heading for Buckingham Palace.

Sergeant Holmes, 26, who was out of ammunition, hit the aircraft’s tail, causing it to crash. He baled out at 350ft and survived.

‘Divine wind’

— Kamikaze (divine wind) refers to a typhoon that, according to tradition, saved Japan from Kublai Khan’s invasion in 1281

— 2,500 suicide attacks were flown by the Japanese in the Second World War, killing or wounding more than 10,000 American and British sailors

Source: Times database

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