Flight Commander Ian Diggle is a man who likes an understatement.

His squadron's first mission flying into the notorious Taliban stronghold of Sangin, will, he smiles, "be quite interesting". A massive crash involving one of his aircraft would be "not nice at all".

In his spare time you can imagine Ian, above, nipping out to the dry cleaners to get his upper lip restarched. Olly Lambert's revealing film follows 27 Squadron from RAF Odiham in Hampshire on their eight week deployment in Afghanistan.

Their job is flying Chinook helicopters in and out of the front line, to deliver troops, supplies and, as we see here, evacuate the injured.

The Chinooks look like giant fireflies buzzing over the landscape and, for the first time, cameras were allowed into the cockpit so we can better imagine what it must be like inside one of these big, noisy targets.

Nothing like Top Gun, as one of them explains, cleaning up after one of the American troops they are ferrying has been air-sick all over his helicopter.

If nothing else, when 27 Squadron return home this film should at least give them a satisfactory answer to the question "So, what did you get up to last weekend?"

By Jane Simon