THE Royal Navy’s “Top Gun” pilot and veteran of almost 200 missions in Afghanistan has relived the hair-raising aerial manoeuvres used against a Taliban stronghold.

Lieutenant Simon Rawlins, 30, described flipping his Harrier jet upside down while flying up the side of a mountain at more than 500mph to scare off enemy troops.

The “show of force” mission required the fighter pilot to fly just 100ft above ground, the minimum safe distance, leaving him vulnerable to rocket attack and rifle fire.

Rawlins has clocked up in excess of 400 flying hours - more than any other navy pilot - providing air support for British and Nato troops in Afghanistan over five years.

He has flown 193 separate missions, most recently from the main southern airbase at Kandahar.

Rawlins, from Camberley, Surrey, is a member of 801 Squadron, Naval Strike Wing, which flies Harrier GR9 aircraft, known as jump jets because they take off and land vertically.

He spoke about his most audacious mission last week, after returning from Afghanistan to the squadron’s base at RAF Cottesmore in Rutland.

Rawlins said Taliban fighters had hunkered down on a ridge halfway up a mountain 9,000ft above sea level from which they were able to watch British troops and direct attacks.

“The intent was to give the enemy as little time to see me coming as possible,” he said. “So I used a manoeuvre called the ridge-crossing technique. I took the aircraft out to a distance of several miles from target and flew up the valley at low level and around 480 knots [550mph].” Hidden in the valley, Rawlins remained out of sight of the Taliban until he was close enough to the mountain to be below their field of vision.

Meanwhile, a “wingman” in another Harrier aircraft was at 15,000ft - out of range of small-arms fire - watching his back.

“I flew the jet up the side of the mountain, keeping as close to 100ft as I could, and approached the Taliban from underneath their position on the ridge,” he said.

Remarkably, he then flipped the aircraft virtually upside down. “At the top, I rolled through 135 degrees to invert the aircraft directly above the Taliban heads.”

If he had simply tried to fly over the ridge the right way up the aerodynamics would have forced the aircraft to “balloon” up in a curve presenting its belly as an easy target.

“By inverting at the top of the ridge, the pilot is able to pull back to get the nose of the aircraft down and can do so much more aggressively,” he said.

His sudden appearance terrified the Taliban. “If I’d had time to look up through the top of the canopy, I would have been staring directly into the enemy position beneath me.

“Instead, I pulled back aggressively on the stick to disappear down the other side of the ridge as quickly as possible. The effect is that no sooner is the aircraft above the enemy, than it has disappeared down the other side of the mountain.”

Rawlins has narrowly escaped death at least twice. On one occasion, in the winter of 2004, his aircraft suffered electrical failure above the Hindu Kush mountain range.

“We were flying in torrential rain through black storm clouds above the mountains,” he said. His engine and hydraulics were working, but the flight instruments had malfunctioned. “I was sitting in a metal box in the dark above one of the most environmentally hostile mountain ranges in the world. All I could do was stick as close as possible to my wingman and follow him down to Bagram airbase at Kabul.”

In mid2006, shortly after British troops first entered Helmand, Rawlins and another pilot provided air cover for para-troopers in the town of Gereshk despite coming perilously close to running out of fuel.

“Our fuel state had reacheda point we call ‘Bingo’, at which you have only enough gas left to return to base and must leave the target,” said Rawlins.

“We could hear that the situation on the ground was deteriorating. We could see [Taliban] Afghans gathering at certain points and it was clear the paras might be in contact at any second.”

The two pilots remained until the battle was over and made it back to Kandahar airbase “on a wing and a prayer”.

This summer, the Harrier, which first proved its worth in the Falklands conflict 27 years ago, is to be replaced in Afghanistan by the Tornado GR4 ground attack aircraft.

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