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In April 1968, it was coming up the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Air Force (RAF). Much to Hawker Hunter pilot Alan Pollock's chagrin, no plans were being made to celebrate it. There were no balloons, no streamers, and no planes were to be given cake. More importantly, no aerial displays were to be conducted to mark the occasion.
Pollock, who is clearly a man whose birthday you should never miss, decided that this simply wasn't good enough, and took matters into his own hands.
"Apart from the parade as elsewhere, there indeed had been no special celebration for the airmen, that vital body of skills, service sacrifice which had made the Air Force great," he explained years later. "No Anniversary dance, no party, no half-day off. The head seemed to have forgotten the importance of the heart!"
He convinced his commanding officer that he and his squadron should be allowed to load up the planes with "a celebration warload of Anniversary leaflets" instead of bombs, which would then be used to bomb the civilians below. Sort of like if everyone missed your birthday, and you went around with a megaphone yelling "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME" at random strangers in the streets.
This, however, was merely a cover story for his real plans. On the day of the drop, he decided he was going to "lose contact" with his squadron, and head at low altitude for central London. Shortly after takeoff, he put his plan into action.
"I eased my throttle back, reverse rolled and slipped gently away from the others towards the north, descending rapidly to low level."
"After an intentional one-and-a-half minute delay, I then told the formation leader, with speechless code on my R/T button, that I had 'lost' visual contact and pretended my radio had failed, using speechless transmissions to avoid any further embarrassing conversations on the R/T."
After flying near Heathrow, Pollock headed to Richmond Park, and then followed the Thames, figuring this would cause the least disruption. This courtesy was not extended to Parliament when he passed it.
"I put the power on then. I thought: 'Stuff it, let them hear some noise!'," he later told the Daily Mail. "The funny thing was that at the time, they were discussing noise abatement."
He continued on his route, when he came across a landmark that had simply slipped his mind: the Tower of London.
"Until this very instant I'd had absolutely no idea that, of course, Tower Bridge would be there. It was easy enough to fly over it, but the idea of flying through the spans suddenly struck me," he said of the incident.
"I had just ten seconds to grapple with the seductive proposition which few ground attack pilots of any nationality could have resisted. My brain started racing to reach a decision. Years of fast low-level strike flying made the decision simple."
Pollock was a good pilot, one of the founding members of what would go on to be the Red Arrows display team. He went through the tower, above the road and beneath the spans, likely scaring the bejesus out of anybody on the bridge or in the near vicinity.
Figuring that he had now planted himself in too much trouble to avoid court-martial, he then headed to a number of other bases and made low and loud flyovers, before heading back to his base (a lot of the time upside-down) to be arrested.
As you'd imagine, the public were largely on board with his stunt, especially after he made it clear that he had performed it as a stunt to draw attention to what he saw as the government underfunding of the RAF. In parliament, MPs even spoke on his behalf.
The move was causing so much embarrassment, that in the end, he wasn't court-marshaled, though he was removed from the RAF on medical grounds, a decision that was reversed 13 years later. He had become the first person to fly a jet aircraft through the Tower Bridge, with no permission whatsoever, and gotten away with it.
