HE spent 40 days in hell -- lying in a small, dark cell in the middle of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.

David Waddington was aged just 24 and for him war against Saddam had taken a new, terrifying twist.

Squadron Leader Waddington, a former St Cuthbert's School and Bolton College student, had been sent over to Iraq to join a team of Tornado pilots assembled from crews at RAF Marham and Germany.

He was one of the Royal Air Force's youngest GR1 low-level pilots and was champing at the bit for a piece of the action.

But it was on one of his missions that disaster struck -- an anti-aircraft missile shot down his plane on January 19, 1991.

David had been flying over airfields at just 200 feet, dropping bombs which smashed craters into the ground, effectively making the runways useless for the Iraqis.

The unlucky pilot had been flying at 600 mph when the anti-aircraft missile tore through his plane's hydraulic system, causing fire to break out in the cockpit.

His navigator, Robbie Stewart, pulled the ejection handle and the pair parachuted down into the Iraqi desert, landing miles from each other.

It was 10pm local time and he was stranded, alone and 100 miles on the wrong side of the Iraqi border.

The next morning a couple of Iraqi soldiers spotted him.

He said: "I knew I would probably get caught. My plan was to hide until dark and then try and escape, but it was always going to be a long shot."

He was thrown into a punishment cell where he spent up to 20 hours a day in the pitch black.

His family -- including his fiancee Claire, who is now his wife -- sat at home in Bolton, glued to the television in the hope of catching a glimmer of news. They knew he had been shot down and they were anxious to find out if he was alive.

He was alive -- but during hours of interrogation, Iraqi soldiers beat him around the head, back and legs with truncheons .

All David could tell them was his name, rank, number and date of birth, standard practice for all servicemen. So they would knock him from his stool and beat him unconscious again.

His trauma did not end in the interrogation room. He was transferred to the Ba'ath Party intelligence headquarters and held in a small cell measuring three metres square.

He was given a bowl of soup each day and his weight plummeted from 10 stones to eight.

The cell was dark and cold. He asked for a second blanket and the guards reluctantly handed one over.

They urinated on it first.

On February 23, his prison was unknowingly bombed by the US Air Force.

It smashed half of the building to pieces -- luckily the half Waddington was not being held in.

Saddam's army moved the prisoners to another jail on the outskirts of Baghdad.

But days later, Saddam's forces were defeated, the war was over and Waddington was free to return home.

He was back flying Tornados just four months later and remains in the RAF.

He said: "The thing which annoyed me more than the beatings was the basic abuse of power by some of the guards.

"They really wanted to hurt me.

"They treated everyone like animals, not just the allied prisoners of war, but their own Iraqi prisoners as well."

David is on an RAF course until later in the year, which means he is not currently flying a Tornado.

But he said: "Although it's not planned for me to go back to Iraq in the near future, if I'm asked to climb back into a Tornado and complete a similar mission to last time, then I would have no problems with that."