Under the Radar

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  This morning, when he had driven down to the flight line, Chief Technician Baldy Hodge had glanced towards the end of the runway and noticed a familiar vehicle parked on the road beyond the fence. It was much too far away for him to be certain with the naked eye, but he thought it was bound to be the bloody Russkies as usual. Good; let ’em watch: they might learn something. He had a brief fantasy of one day rolling up in his new E-Type Jaguar and parking beside them in the lay-by just for the pleasure of seeing their grey, apparatchik faces register envy at the goodies that capitalism could so easily supply.

  Lately, Baldy’s colleagues had remarked that he had become fractionally less grumpy since the formation of the special ‘P’ Flight. According to the new dispensation XM580 was no longer subject to the centralised system for servicing and repairs. Instead, in a reversion to the old way of doing things, it once again became exclusively his aircraft. What was more, it now felt almost brand new. It and XJ791 had recently arrived back from Woodford having had various electronic goodies installed. Gone were the entirely ghost-white Vulcans of a fortnight earlier. The entire upper surfaces of both aircraft had been resprayed in a grey and green camouflage scheme for their new low-level role. Less obtrusively, there was a new aperture beneath the bomb-aimer’s blister under the nose. Inside, filling the crawlway to this unused position, was a bulky box of tricks that now completely blocked the narrow sighting window. Some sort of experimental bombing sight, Hodge had gathered.

  The pear-drops scent of fresh cellulose had penetrated even into the cockpit. Baldy was now sniffing this with pleasure as he stood on the access ladder between the pilot’s seats watching the fuel control panel he had pulled out from beneath the main fuel gauges. He also kept a sharp eye on the centre of gravity indicator as the two bowsers below gradually filled the aircraft’s fourteen tanks with some thirty-two tons of Avtur. He was not about to make the mistake that idiot young Cowans had made some weeks back when he had carelessly stood XJ810 on its tail while refuelling it. The lazy sod had done it from outside on the ladder beneath the wing, dialling up eighty per cent on the selector panel and just trusting the automatic system to distribute the fuel evenly. It hadn’t. The rearmost tanks had filled first, the aircraft’s centre of gravity had shifted aft beyond recall and the tail hit the ground and stayed there. Well, Cowans had learned his lesson and it served him right too. He’d been demoted to a mere erk pending being sent back to St Athan for retraining. Frankly, Saints was too good for him. If Hodge had had his way he’d have been out on his ear pronto, end of story. There was no room in the RAF for twats like that.

  The fuel flow stopped at the ninety-eight per cent he had called for and, seeing from the display that it was correctly distributed, the chief technician closed the panel and backed down the steps from the flight deck before descending the main ladder to the ground. There he grimly surveyed the erks and tanker drivers as they rewound the hoses and earthing leads onto their respective reels in the two bowsers. Not that he was a mere overseer. Hodge was a big man, and those who had seen him taking a rare dip in a warm ocean in Aden or somewhere had realised that he could not possibly have acquired his upper-body musculature by standing around watching others work. Apprentices were depressed by the ease with which he could drag the thick fuel hoses to the aircraft with one continuous pull and, standing on the main wheels with his arms at full stretch, push the heavy couplings up onto the nozzles and seal them with a twist. ‘That’s all there is to it,’ he would say, jumping back down and banging his work gloves together. ‘Next time, you do it.’ Then he would strike one of his peculiar attitudes. He had a repertoire of these odd postures which he would hold for a long moment like a shop window mannequin in overalls: both hands cockily on hips, or only one; one hand grasping the back of his reddish neck; occasionally both hands pressed to the sides of his face as though in an access of horror at the incompetence he could see around him.

  Today Hodge was readying XM580 for a sortie up to the north of Scotland: the first since her return from Avro’s and as far as he knew a routine test flight. No doubt it was designed to uncover any problems with whatever new gadgets had just been fitted. Even more than most at Wearsby he was curious to know why his and Flight Lieutenant Meeres’s Vulcan had alone been earmarked for special treatment. Gossip abounded on the flight line as to the relevance of their new avionics fit, but maybe after all they weren’t so special and any significance lay merely in their being the first of many. It was common knowledge that all Bomber Command’s Vulcans and Victors were to be repainted in the new camouflage scheme, so it seemed likely these two aircraft were merely the first of the fleet to be dressed to meet their new low-level deterrent role. No doubt that had entailed some necessary adjustment to their navigation radars as well.

  As the fuel bowsers pulled away Hodge signalled to a handler to start the diesel generator that supplied electric current for powering-up the aircraft. The coach arrived and the crew piled out, bulky and purposeful in their layers of specialised clothing and carrying their helmets and flight bags full of manuals and sandwiches. Their blue flying suits were topped off with vests with built-in life jackets whose yellow rolls around the collar shone as bright flashes of colour against the prevailing dull grey of the Lincolnshire day. Handing up their kit to each other they climbed into the aircraft.

  ‘Wow,’ said Amos, stopping for a moment to admire the Vulcan’s new look. ‘Don’t you think she’s rather handsome, Chief? Green and grey suits her. Smells nice, too. I trust all the tits and knobs are working?’

  ‘All hot to trot,’ Hodge confirmed, thinking as he handed him Form 700 to check that the Vulcan captain really did look like an RAF recruitment poster boy. Those dark good looks: very like Denis Compton in the Brylcreem adverts. He’d bet the ladies went wild over Squadron Leader McKenna, although truth be told there didn’t seem to be many stories of Squadron Leader McKenna going wild over the ladies, even though he was known to enjoy a party like everyone else. No doubt he saved it all for that wife of his. Hodge rather approved of fidelity, which he habitually described as ‘one owner-driver’ in the manner of Exchange & Mart. Amos rapidly scanned the form, found nothing outstanding and climbed up the yellow ladder. Hodge followed. Standing behind the two pilots’ seats the chief technician helped the men with their safety harnesses and then removed the safety pins from the ejector seats as well as from the canopy. The pilots stowed these in the appropriate pouches below the coaming.

  Baldy gave a last look around the cockpit with a grunt of satisfaction before climbing back down the main ladder. He heard the hatch close above him as he pulled on his cloth helmet and took the long lead of its built-in headset and microphone from where it hung coiled on the nose-wheel steering jack, plugged it in and retreated some fifty yards behind the aircraft. From there he confirmed the movements of the Vulcan’s control surfaces as up in the cockpit the pilots went through the check sequence while watching the telltale on the panel in front of them. Meanwhile the rest of the crew had settled in their seats and were reeling off the tedious litanies of their own system checks as Hodge signalled to a handler to fire up the Palouste air starter on its trolley. The Vulcan had its own onboard supply of compressed air for starting the engines but this was limited and better conserved for emergencies. Many an aircraft had had to put down unexpectedly on a strange airfield only to find that the single starter trolley they had there was unserviceable. Without their on-board starter they would have been stuck lifeless on the ground, and all for want of some compressed air.

  In his headphones Hodge listened to the rapid patter of the crew over their intercom: ‘Temperature selector – normal. Temperature control switch – neutral. Pitot head heaters – test and off. External lights – test and off. Tanks pressurisation – off. Nitrogen purge – off. Flight refuelling master – off . . .’ So it went on. Baldy stood below on the concrete pan in the shadow of the giant wing with his head bowed, both lulled by it and attentive, like a bishop listening to a choir pl
ough through the Te Deum and awaiting his cue. Unheard by him Gavin Rickards called up Air Traffic Control on the R/T: ‘Five-eight-zero ready to start,’ and received the expected response, ‘Clear to start,’ with the helpful addition: ‘Wind is two-nine-zero at eight knots.’ Now Amos’s voice came over Baldy’s headphones saying, ‘OK, Chief, cleared to start. Ignition switch – on. Engine master switch – on. Clear four, Chief?’

  ‘Clear,’ said Baldy into his mike.

  ‘Light on.’ This was Amos confirming that no. 4 engine’s air valve was open. The compressor bellowed and the hose from it went suddenly rigid.

  Up in the cockpit Amos waited as he watched the engine’s rev counter and oil pressure gauge climb, listening to the whine of the engine winding up before he moved the high-pressure fuel cock to slightly beyond the ‘idle’ position. He noted the jet pipe temperature was a satisfactory 350 degrees and throttled the engine back to idle. Everything was normal and he repeated the same sequence with the other three engines as his crew behind him continued with their own pre-flight checks, reading from the manuals. Nobody bothered to commit these lists to memory because nobody’s memory was trustworthy enough. It all had to be done by the book.

  As the three electronics crewmen sat shoulder-to-shoulder at their work stations Gavin Rickards fleetingly had an image of his treasured Austin-Healey Sprite and thought – by no means for the first time – how very different getting a V-bomber ready to fly was from simply leaping into a car and driving off. Or, come to that, from getting a Second World War aircraft into the air, a process that he’d once heard Muffin Mewell summarise as ‘kick a tyre and light the fire’. As the air electronics officer, the young flight lieutenant had control over all his aircraft’s myriad electrical circuits which had steadily been coming alive from the moment the Houchin generator had supplied external power. Now that the engines were burning and turning, the Vulcan’s own generators made the aircraft self-sufficient. Somewhere on the ground below Baldy Hodge was even now shutting down the portable generator and disconnecting the cable. Ground supply – off. Like his two companions Rickards intently watched dials and clicked switches. He would now be doing little else until well after they had completed the sortie and landed again. If there was any romance left in flying it was largely confined to the minds of ordinary folk on the ground who might watch the delta bomber soar into the sky. From inside, and from the viewpoint of the crew facing backwards in the darkened compartment behind the cockpit, flying was almost entirely a matter of watching dials and displays and pressing switches until, after however many hours of bumping and lurching, the motion stopped and the main hatch popped with a hiss of nitrogen, daylight flooded in and they were in Cyprus or Norway or maybe back at Wearsby. Hopefully this discovery ought not to be a complete surprise to Vic Ferrit, the nav radar who had guided them there.

  Out on the pan the compressor had also been shut down, disconnected, and everything cleared safely away behind the white line by the erks. Cocooned in the warm stench of burning kerosene beneath the roaring aircraft, Baldy Hodge still had a couple of checks to make. The first involved climbing up into the nose-wheel bay on an aluminium ladder to check the quivering hot-air trunking for leaks. There were none, which he confirmed to Amos in the cockpit overhead. Had this been an armed mission he would next have checked that the Vulcan’s bomb doors could open and close in less than eight seconds, showing that all three hydraulic pumps were working. As it was he merely signalled to a handler to remove the ladder and walked out in front of the aircraft for the final check. This was to watch the air brakes move to all three of their positions. From there the resonance from the intakes with the engines at idle was just about bearable when wearing a headset.

  ‘OK air brakes, Chief?’ came Amos’s voice faintly in his headphones. On each side of the aircraft there were two air brakes above the engine nacelles and one below. Amos and Hodge now checked them at ‘mid’, ‘full’ and ‘in’ and then repeated the procedure under emergency power. Finally, Baldy called up, ‘You’re good to go, Boss.’ He waved to the handlers poised to drag clear the chocks from the wheels, walked back under the Vulcan, unplugged his headset and, gathering up its cable, retreated to the far side of the aircraft’s nose where he could be seen from the cockpit in order to wave an all clear. Behind the cockpit’s circular side window Keith Coswood in the right-hand seat could be seen raising a gloved hand in acknowledgement. Simultaneously the roar of all four Olympus engines rose to a howl and XM580 began to move forward, her nose turning to follow the taxiway and engulfing Hodge and the handlers in choking clouds of jet exhaust from which they vainly ducked, eyes streaming, behind the compressor and the generator. Judging from the fuel load Amos had requested, this sortie would last several hours. So instead of hanging around in the dispersal hut Baldy drove off in the battered Standard pickup to the sergeants’ mess, reaching it just as his Vulcan went to full power at the end of the runway and began rolling.

  Like a mother duck watching her chick take to water for the first time he eyed it as it gathered speed several hundred yards away, imagining he could hear the co-pilot calling out the knots: ‘Ninety . . . hundred . . . hundred and ten . . .’ With satisfaction he correctly predicted the exact rotation spot when at a hundred and thirty-five the nose lifted and she unstuck and went smoking into the sky amid almighty tumult, a racket that could set windows rattling for miles around. It was a sight and sound repeated a dozen times daily and he never tired of it. Yet this time it looked slightly different. Instead of a tilting white triangle diminishing into the cloud base, the new stripy paint job on the climbing aircraft made its outline less clear, maybe more stealthy, the disruptive patterning designed to make it harder for a fighter pilot to spot the bomber from above as it flew low over the ground. As XM580 tilted, her still-white underside gleamed for a moment like a gull against the grey before she vanished into the overcast. The crew chief turned away and went into the mess for a mug of tea and – if nobody had nicked it yet – a shufti at the Daily Sketch. It was more sensibly Conservative than the Mirror, and Baldy Hodge was a conservative man. Still, he did concede the Andy Capp strip made the Mirror worth the occasional glance despite it being a socialist rag.

  *

  Aboard XM580 the clipped transmissions between it and the control tower (‘Understand transition three thousand feet’) began to thin but the litany over the intercom continued until Gavin Rickards clicked the microphone switch on his oxygen mask, said ‘Take-off checks completed’ and removed his white bone-dome. This revealed it as being nothing but a protective shell designed to fit over the cloth helmet which held the headphones. Bob Mutton, the nav plotter, did likewise before giving Amos a new course to steer over the intercom, adding ‘Climb to thirty-eight thousand feet for our first turning-point.’

  Now that the secret Oilcan radar system had been fitted to the two Vulcans their crews were mildly interested to see whether it worked. However, it was too important to risk being overheard by either the Russians or the Americans until the aircraft was definitely combat ready, so this sortie was more a way of testing everything else first. The same went for the new laser bombing system which had resulted in a mysterious box of tricks shoehorned into Vic Ferrit’s already crowded workstation. First things first: no aircraft ever returned from having new equipment installed without immediately being taken up and tested. Even slight alterations made to its complex circuitry had a habit of causing seemingly unrelated problems. The briefing Wing Commander Ops. had given them earlier was to fly to the north of Scotland by a route that included Sunderland where, using the old system, they were to radar-bomb the museum from high altitude for old times’ sake, and then on over Scotland to a stretch of the Atlantic west of the Orkneys where they could test the Vulcan’s normal ECM radars and jammers with the help of an RAF Coastal Command Shackleton.

  In due course the mobile ground radar in Sunderland ‘fixed’ the Vulcan far overhead in three dimensions. From this and the known trajectory of a WE
.177 nuclear bomb it was immediately possible to calculate the accuracy of a theoretical drop. Almost at once Rickards received a radioed message that their radar pulse had scored a direct hit on the museum, theoretically obliterating County Durham. ‘A good job jobbed there, Vic,’ Amos congratulated his nav radar before leaning the Vulcan onto a new bearing supplied by Baa Mutton. Some twenty minutes later the northern coast of Scotland would have been visible between broken clouds had anyone aboard the aircraft been able to see it. But the view from the cockpit was, as usual, of nothing but sky until the aircraft banked slightly to starboard, which afforded the co-pilot, Keith Coswood, a brief glimpse of some dull green islands set in a steel-grey ocean.

  The Shackleton with which Rickards had already made contact was one of several that over the last five years had helped keep up a twenty-four-hour surveillance of the Communist Bloc’s intrusive ‘fishing’ fleets. These vessels tended to hang around the areas through which the Royal Navy’s submarines most frequently passed on their way to and from their bases. Since they were in international waters there was little to be done about it. These so-called fishing vessels bristled with aerials and sizzled with coded messages and were also equipped with sophisticated gear to listen out for any submarine’s distinctive sonar signature. The Shackletons periodically dropped passive sonobuoys to eavesdrop on the eavesdroppers and radio back what they heard. It was yet another small daily part of the great Cold War standoff in which both sides were on permanent twenty-four hour alert for the tiniest snippet of information that might fortuitously lead to a discovery or an advantage. It was this constant fluidity that eternally saved the game from the impasse of true stalemate.