“He tended to concentrate on the smaller things, sometimes to the detriment of the bigger picture,” he adds. “He would try and be very picky and accurate. The whole world might be burning down behind him, but as long as he could get 35 knots [he would be happy]. It was about trying to get him out, start to relax, look at the periphery, see what’s going on and start to take in the wider picture. In an Apache you have to be three steps ahead. He was good at the finer detail but at times he was perhaps too narrow-minded and focused. But in the end he did really well.
“He was a joker, always up for a laugh. Sometimes he’d make a comment and you’d think ‘time and place, Harry’. He was just being a bit jovial. But there’s a right place and a wrong place.” The Prince was a “popular” student, Jones adds, especially with his course mates. With around 12 pilots per cohort, they are a “close knit” bunch.
Jones is more circumspect when it comes to the Duke of Sussex’s trajectory since he left the Army, abandoning his Royal duties, which included his military roles. “I do feel disappointed,” he says. “I feel gutted he’s not at the head of the military as he used to be. I’m grateful to have met him and flown with him. I think he has done his bit for his country. We can never take that away from him. He’s done an Apache course. He’ll always be one of us.”
Despite that, Jones says he was disappointed by Harry’s detailing in Spare that he had killed 25 Taliban fighters.
“Every kill was on video,” Harry wrote in the book, in reference to the nose cameras that the helicopters carry. “The Apache saw all. The camera in its nose recorded all. So, after every mission, there would be a careful review of that video.”
“I was part of six missions that ended in the taking of human life, and they were all deemed justified… I deemed them the same.”
“It’s not what we’re about,” says Jones, of the Duke’s putting a number on his kill count. “We’re not here to say, ‘I did this, I did that.’ It’s not a game. These are real people. They’ve got families. I wouldn’t have made any comment. I get a very uneasy feeling for anybody who says ‘I killed 10. It’s not what should be said, at all.
“But [Harry] did have a successful tour. It’s a shame he didn’t hang around to do more but I guess he ticked that box and scratched that itch and moved on. I would say he’s stepped backwards in a way, from the way he was to [how he is] now.”
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