{"id":86,"date":"2012-03-02T16:14:57","date_gmt":"2012-03-02T16:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/user39678.vs.easily.co.uk\/?p=86"},"modified":"2024-01-10T09:17:37","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T09:17:37","slug":"stefan-karwowski-sharpshooter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/?p=86","title":{"rendered":"STEFAN KARWOWSKI: SHARPSHOOTER"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Pitts Special he was flying had just fourteen hours on the clock.\u00a0 Only recently completed, Stefan Karwowski had been unable to resist the temptation to take her flying.\u00a0 Despite more recent experience as a display pilot flying Hunters, Gnats and, perhaps, most famously of all, the Duxford Fighter Collection\u2019s awesome, dark blue, radial engined Grumman Bearcat F8F-2P, Karwowski was at home in the Pitts biplane.\u00a0 He\u2019d spent a season in North American flying them as a member of a top flight aerobatic team.\u00a0\u00a0 So when, in 1985, after returning home to New Zealand on holiday and to see his widowed mother, the opportunity to practice aerobatics in the Pitts had come up, he had taken it.\u00a0\u00a0 As he looped and rolled around the skies five miles north of Wanaka airfield, New Zealand\u2019s green mountain peaks and smooth lakes provided the perfect backdrop.\u00a0 he was in his element.<\/p>\n

\u2018Stefan Karwowski was a virtuoso in his field\u2019 claimed the BBC\u2019s veteran Air Display Commentator,\u00a0 Raymond Baxter, \u2018 he was to aerobatic flying what Yehudi Menuhin was to music.\u2019\u00a0 Baxter was not alone in holding this opinion.\u00a0 Karwowski was often described as the best pilot they\u2019d ever seen by his peers.<\/p>\n

It was in the blood.\u00a0 Both his grandfathers had been fighter pilots during WWI.\u00a0 His father, Wlodzimierz, after escaping to Britain ahead of the Nazi invasion of Poland, was a decorated Spitfire pilot in WWII before, after the war, emigrating to New Zealand with his wife Pamela where, in 1945, Stefan was born.\u00a0 Eighteen years later, obsessed with flying for as long as he could remember, he joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force.\u00a0 His talent was immediately obvious and, during his initial flying training, won a scholarship to the RAF to fly jets.\u00a0 As a student<\/em>, Karwowski won an Air Force Aerobatic Trophy flying the little Folland Gnat T1 trainer, then being adopted by the RAF\u2019s new aerobatic team, the Red Arrows.\u00a0 Before he was posted to 208, his first operational Squadron flying Hunters in Bahrain, Karwowski was classified by the RAF as an \u2018exceptional pilot\u2019, an official recognition that was meted out with vanishing infrequency.<\/p>\n

He was certainly the best stick and rudder pilot Nigel Charles had ever flown with.\u00a0 And Charles himself was regarded by his contemporaries as a cut above.\u00a0 The two men met for the first time in the blistering heat of an Omani summer in June of 1975; the first recruits to the Sultan of Oman\u2019s Air Force\u2019s new Hawker Hunter squadron.\u00a0 Charles had retired from the Royal Navy a month earlier.\u00a0 Karwowski, had just realised that he hadn\u2019t got the patience to train as an airline pilot.\u00a0 6 Squadron had provided them with a mixed bag of jets donated by the King of Jordan and it fell to Charles and Karwowski, before the next five pilots arrived at SOAF\u2019s recently built airbase at Thumrait in Dhofar province in the south of the country, to start preparing them for war.\u00a0 After six years of reliance on the little BAC Strikemaster, it was hoped that the new swept wing jets would bring a decisive new edge to SOAF\u2019s capability.<\/p>\n

A ex-Fleet Air Arm Air Warfare Instructor, Charles had long experience using all kinds of weapons and tactics.\u00a0 Karwowski, for all his skill in the cockpit, had little bombing experience, but the Hunter FGA9 didn\u2019t need to carry bombs or rockets under the wing to do devastating amounts of damage.\u00a0 In the nose were four 30mm ADEN cannons that fired high-exposive rounds the size of a toddler\u2019s forearm.\u00a0 And if there was one thing Karwowski had a knack for apart from flying, it was shooting.\u00a0 Aged 14, in his first year at Whangarei Boys\u2019 High School in New Zealand, he won the class shooting trophy.\u00a0 A year later in 1959, he was Junior Shooting Champion.\u00a0 He left school four years after that without ever having been beaten on the rifle ranges.<\/p>\n

Before live-firing them in the air, the Omani Hunters\u2019 ADEN cannons tested on the ground.\u00a0 \u2018Warlock\u2019, the 6 Squadron armourer, acquired a ground firing rig which, with the help of the station works team he installed on a new hardstanding facing out into the desert.\u00a0 But while it was possible \u2013 and great fun \u2013 to select the the best of the guns using the test-firing rig, choosing the ammunition was more of a lottery.\u00a0 Also from Jordan, its age was uncertain and it came from various sources.\u00a0 The tracer shells that fired every fifth round had a habit of exploding on leaving the barrel of the gun, on one occasion peppering the nosecone of Charles\u2019s Hunter with shrapnel and missing his feet on the jet\u2019s rudder pedals by no more than eighteen inches.\u00a0\u00a0 A couple of BAC 1-11\u2019s full of new ammunition bought from France (SOAF was told that 30mm ammunition from the UK would take months to supply) improved the situation, but it was still in short supply.\u00a0 That\u2019s why, when it called for accuracy, Nigel Charles turned to Karwowski.<\/p>\n

Tall and dark-haired, with sharp, aquiline features, Karwowski was constantly driven to be the best.\u00a0 He was.\u00a0 But it was never enough for him.\u00a0 As brilliant as he was he was also competitive.\u00a0 But he could always eke a little more out of an airframe on the edge of a stall.\u00a0 Always just turn inside his opponent.\u00a0 As the rest of the 6 Squadron pilots had joined he\u2019d shown them all a clean pair of heels.\u00a0 More than once Charles told his new comrade in arms \u2018Look, you\u2019ve got no competition here.\u2019\u00a0 But that was never enough for Karwowski.\u00a0 He had to keep pushing.\u00a0 And the destruction of a small building with a\u00a0 single accurate burst of fire from the ADEN cannons was just the sort of challenge, Charles knew, that Karwowski, was made for.<\/p>\n

From October 1st<\/sup> 1975, 6 Squadron\u2019s seven Hunters began flying cross-border raids against targets in neighbouring Yemen.\u00a0 For a decade or more, the border town of Hawf had provided safe haven for insurgents waging war against the rule of the Sultan in Oman.\u00a0 Artillery emplacements, Anti-aircraft batteries and stores depots were all on the Hunters\u2019 target lists.\u00a0 So too was PFLO\u2019s Political Office, a small stone building near the seafront, identified as a target by the Governor of Dhofar province.<\/p>\n

\u2018You go first\u2019 Charles told Karwowski as the two pilots planned the strike against the enemy building, \u2018I\u2019ll only waste my ammunition.\u2019<\/p>\n

Rolling in from 12,500 feet into a sixty degree dive, Karwowski flew the Hunter with the same touch and precision that he brought to his display flying.\u00a0 It was stunning.\u00a0 Using nothing more than a WWII technology fixed reflector gunsight on the coaming above the instrument panel, to bring the four ADEN cannons to bare, Karwowski flattened the target.\u00a0 A building ten yards to the north was completely untouched.\u00a0 Charles , his wingman, never had to fire a round.<\/p>\n

For their skill and courage while flying 6 Squadron\u2019s Hunters on operations against Yemeni targets, in the teeth of fierce opposition from anti-aircraft fire and Russian-made SAM-7 \u2018Grail\u2019 heat-seeking surface-air-missiles, both Stefan Karwowski and Nigel Charles were awarded the Sultan\u2019s Bravery Medal.\u00a0 And, greatly strengthened by the arrival of the powerful new attack jets, SOAF Commanders were able to declare the decade long war against the rebels won within three months of the Hunters entering the fight.<\/p>\n

Observers on the ground reported that the Karwowski\u2019s Pitts Special stalled at around 3000 feet.\u00a0 At the moment the little biplane departed, it probably never occurred to Karwowski that he was in such serious trouble.\u00a0 He was too good to simply lose control of an aeroplane he had hundreds of hours flying at the very highest level with the Carling Red Caps Aerobatic Team in Canada. .\u00a0 And, just a month short of his fortieth birthday, he nearly made it.\u00a0 But, after entering the spin, Karwowski recovered too late.\u00a0 And while, he managed to wrestle back control of the Pitts it was too little, too late.\u00a0\u00a0 There was nowhere to go.\u00a0 His effort to save himself managed only to ensure that he somehow survived the initial impact with the ground.\u00a0 But barely.\u00a0 Two days later,\u00a0 Stefan Karwowski died of his injuries in Christchurch hospital.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pitts Special he was flying had just fourteen hours on the clock.\u00a0 Only recently completed, Stefan Karwowski had been unable to resist the temptation to take her flying.\u00a0 Despite more recent experience as a display pilot flying Hunters, Gnats and, perhaps, most famously of all, the Duxford Fighter Collection\u2019s awesome, dark blue, radial engined Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":351,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","cat-5-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":704,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rowlandwhite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}