Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  Squadron Leader John Reeve drove the mile or so to work on Tuesday morning and parked, as usual, outside the 50 Squadron buildings. He was unaware that he’d been the focus of such debate over the long Easter weekend, but didn’t stay in the dark for long. As he walked into the squadron, the faces were all familiar, but the atmosphere was anything but. It was buzzing. Then someone explained it.

  ‘Have you heard they’re putting crews together for the Falklands?’

  Reeve was immediately determined to be a part of it. Still regretting that he had missed out on the RED FLAG deployment earlier in the year, he was desperate for a slice of the action this time.

  ‘You cannot exclude me from this!’ he spluttered, hammering his fist on a desk to force his point home, unable to mask how much it mattered to him that he be involved.

  Brought up near Birkenhead on the Wirral peninsula, Reeve still carried a soft trace of Merseyside in his vowels. An aviation enthusiast from a young age, even now he collected Air Force memorabilia. He won an RAF scholarship after being part of the RAF cadet force at school; then, apart from a tour on Jet Provosts as an instructor, he had been on the V-force, flying Vulcans, since 1969. He had an eagerness that was sometimes mistaken for a gung-ho attitude. And his appetite for all aspects of Air Force life didn’t stop at the Mess door. At squadron dining-in nights, a box of chocolates was always handed out to mark the occasion when Reeve’s wife Pat had burst into the bar, fed up that Happy Hour had ruined another Friday night.

  ‘John Reeve, get your arse home,’ she shouted through the smoke and booze-fuelled chatter. ‘Your dinner’s been in the oven for four hours!’ Then she made to leave, before turning back a moment later with the clincher.

  ‘And, by the way, I’m having a 1lb box of Black Magic!’

  It wasn’t the kind of thing that was easily lived down.

  But when the 50 Squadron boss, Chris Lumb, was asked which of his crews should train for CORPORATE, it was Reeve’s can-do approach to whatever was asked of him that made a difference.

  ‘Relax, John, you’ve been selected,’ Reeve was told quickly, and put out of his misery.

  If John Reeve was desperate not to miss out, Bob Wright, Martin Withers’ young Nav Radar, greeted with disbelief the news that their crew too had been put forward from 101 Squadron. Given the faltering start to his career as a bomb-aiming Navigator, he realized that his crew’s performance during RED FLAG must have really turned his fortunes around.

  All the chosen crews were ordered to the Main Briefing Room, a large auditorium in the Ops block. The room also served as Waddington’s museum, the walls lined with black-and-white photos of long-retired aircraft like Blenheims, Hampdens, Lancasters and Washingtons. In an air of intrigued anticipation, the crews took their seats. Simon Baldwin and the other squadron bosses also sat down on the hard, straight-backed chairs.

  John Laycock got to his feet at the front to address them, choosing not to speak from the stage behind him. He looked at the officers picked to do the job. Reeve had joined Mick Cooper and the rest of his crew. Monty’s lot were there. And Bob Wright sat with his Captain, Martin Withers, and the other 101 Squadron men – Hugh Prior, Gordon Graham and Peter Taylor – reunited as a complete crew for the first time since RED FLAG, over two months earlier. Laycock told them all he knew: that 1 Group had asked them to prepare the Vulcan for a conventional bombing role and revive the aircraft’s air-to-air refuelling capability. Had anyone, he asked, ever had any experience of in-flight refuelling? Only one hand went up, and it went up reluctantly. Neil McDougall had tried it once. In 1962. He remembered well the incident that had led to it disappearing from the Vulcan’s training schedules. It had been a very close call.

  Closing on the tanker too fast, McDougall’s squadron boss hit the drogue hard. The refuelling probe broke off and flew back into the wing-root air intake of the number 3 engine. It was as if someone had thrown in a petrol bomb. The Olympus engine exploded. The Captain managed to bring the Vulcan home, but it was as close, McDougall thought, as you ever wanted to get to an accident.

  Air-to-air refuelling in the Vulcan had been shown to be inherently dangerous. As McDougall sat and listened, he found it a little difficult to believe that, twenty years later, they were going to give it another go. Only this time, they’d be doing it without days of ground school at Marham. Instructors would be arriving from Marham the next morning. And then the flying would start.

  Three months before all the remaining Vulcan squadrons were due to disappear for good, they had been asked to train for a war none of them had expected. Drawing to a close, John Laycock tried to capture the occasion’s significance.

  ‘People would give their right arms to be in your position,’ he told them. For some of the men listening it struck the wrong note, but all of them knew what he meant. He finished by asking if there was anyone who didn’t want to be a part of it.

  There was just one. John Reeve’s Nav Plotter, Dave Harthill, had leave booked. He was due to fly to the States to be with his pregnant wife, but if this thing was really going to kick off he’d cancel. There was no way he was going to miss it, so he asked Laycock where he stood. The Station Commander felt that it was unlikely; that they were just going through the motions. After all, Air Vice-Marshal Knight had told them to enjoy themselves while it lasted. No one really believed that they’d actually be sending the Vulcans to bomb Argentina or anywhere else. It seemed a bit unnecessary to insist Harthill miss the birth of his son on account of something that might never happen. Laycock told him, ‘Go, Dave.’

  It left him and Baldwin with a problem though. The V-force was made up of constituted crews that operated together as units. It was always the crew’s collective performance that mattered rather than that of any individual member. Such was the importance attached to this that if a crew member went sick before a deployment, the likelihood was that an entirely new crew would be found instead. This time, though, they were prepared to make an exception and, fortunately, a new Nav Plotter soon presented himself, rather by accident.

  ‘Jim will volunteer, won’t you, Jim?’ suggested Neil McDougall when it became clear that the Reeve crew was short of a navigator. ‘You’ll fill in as Nav Plotter!’

  ‘Yeah, sure…’ Jim Vinales answered, without really thinking about it. But it was enough. There was every chance he’d have been chosen anyway. Like Mick Cooper, Reeve’s Nav Radar, Vinales was another veteran of the GIANT VOICE bombing competitions and had an impressive record against the Americans. In 1974, his crew flew to victory in the Navigation Trophy against American B-52s and FB-111s. As Nav Plotter, it was Vinales who really took the plaudits, winning a Queen’s Commendation for his performance.

  On paper, he and Mick Cooper now looked to be Baldwin’s outstanding Nav team. With his tall, Chelsea-supporting co-pilot, Flying Officer Don Dibbens, and his new AEO, Flight Lieutenant Barry Masefield with his years of experience on the maritime ‘Kipper Fleet’, Reeve’s outfit looked strong.

  With the crews in place, Simon Baldwin turned his thoughts to the skills and equipment they were going to need to do the job. He needed to put together a training programme for the crews, but in order to do so had to make certain assumptions. In his long, narrow office next to the Operations Room, he set to work with his Operations team. The ashtrays filled quickly and the conference table soon disappeared under a mound of maps and reference books as he drafted an outline plan for the attack. There were three priorities: reaching and finding the target; protecting the bomber from the air defences; and hitting and destroying the target. Any mission in the South Atlantic would have to be mounted from Ascension Island, and the entire route southbound would be over 4,000 miles of featureless ocean. The certainties offered by the South American coast were outside the range of the Vulcan’s radar. That meant that the only way for a crew to fix their position would be to go back to the old ways and use the stars. They would have to fly through the night. The crews would need to brush up on their astro naviga
tion, but that alone, Baldwin worried, would probably not provide the necessary navigational accuracy.

  At least there was no point worrying about the refuelling plan. That would have to come from the 1 Group Tanker Planning Cell. Nobody at Waddington had even basic knowledge of tanker planning. Ensuring that the crews were qualified to refuel in flight, though, would be a vital part of the training programme.

  Baldwin never considered the possibility of using anything but conventional 1,000lb bombs – the largest available in the RAF’s Cold War arsenal. But he had no information at all on what the target would be. He studied an old 1:250,000 map of the islands. It was all he could get his hands on. At the east of East Falkland was the capital, Stanley, and beyond that, clearly marked right next to the coast itself, was an airfield. The 4,000-foot runway ran almost east–west. In the absence of more concrete information, the paved strip appeared to be the only viable military target for the Vulcan’s bombs. To take it out, he thought, the bomber would have to fly at 300 feet down the runway to release a stick of twenty-one parachute-retarded 1,000lb bombs. That would rip it up from end to end. The Vulcan force hadn’t practised laydown attacks with conventional thousand-pounders for years. One more thing to be built into the training schedule.

  Beating an enemy’s air defences was dependent on three things: surprise, avoidance and suppression. But Baldwin and his team had only sketchy, published, information on Argentine air defences in general and none whatsoever on the equipment that had actually been deployed to the islands. The only assumption to make was that the air defences would be comprehensive. The Vulcan’s best chance of getting through would be at night, at low level – as they would expect to go in against the Soviets. This way the bomber would be detected only at the last possible moment – surprise. The dark would reduce the chances of visual detection, and degrade any Argentine optically aimed defence systems, but the air defence radars weren’t so easily side-stepped.

  They needed to come in under them. To approach from the west on an easterly heading, the crew would have a difficult overland penetration in rocky terrain in the dark, and the risk of visual detection would be increased. So the obvious approach was to come in over the sea on a westerly heading. Doing this meant there was no need for a long low-level overland penetration using the TFR – Terrain Following Radar. However, it would be very useful in descending and maintaining height over the sea, and during the immediate exit from the target area over land. And while it seemed reasonable to Baldwin to regard the airfield at Stanley as the target, it would be dangerous not to allow any possibility that it was not. If the crews were going to be asked to go in overland, he was going to make sure that they were equipped with the skills they needed to do so. The training, he decided, would include some TFR flying.

  The low-level approach over the sea from beyond the range of the radar cover should bring the bomber in under the radar lobes. This had implications for the navigation though. The Vulcan would have to descend before the Falkland Islands were within range of the aircraft’s map-painting radar. The first opportunity to fix their position using the radar would be on the run-in to the target itself. The navigation would need to be pinpoint accurate if the crew were going to be able to position themselves over the centreline of the runway on their first approach over the sea from the east. The astro-nav was unlikely to be able to guarantee that and a second run-in through now wakened, alert air defences was out of the question. So it was clear already that navigation was going to be a problem.

  But worse, even the most basic assessment of the potential Argentine air defences – modern, Western and effective – made it perfectly clear that the Vulcan’s elderly electronic warfare equipment, tailored to cope with Warsaw Pact systems, just wasn’t going to be up to the task of defending the aircraft. The third component of the defence penetration triangle, suppression, was almost entirely absent.

  Chapter 13

  14 April 1982

  Flight Lieutenant Dick Russell was flown to Waddington aboard a specially laid-on two-seat Canberra hack. That in itself was remarkable. It was normally just top brass who got ferried around like that. He was now a 49-year-old senior pilot, and there wasn’t a lot that surprised him any more, but this was unusual – an indication of the importance attached to getting him to the Lincolnshire bombing base.

  Since joining the RAF as a teenage national serviceman in the early 1950s, Russell had enjoyed a remarkable career. As a young Wireless Operator/Air Gunner, he’d flown aboard the Short Sunderland flying boats providing air cover for UN ships during the Korean War. When there was no further need for WAGs he found himself training as a pilot in Rhodesia. Over the next ten years the flying was varied and rich. He flew Canberras during the Suez Crisis then, as a Victor B1 pilot, endured life on the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis and was deployed to the Far East, on standby to attack Jakarta International Airport, during the Indonesian Confrontation.

  He reckoned he’d had a good time of it. Flying out over the North Sea on a cloud-free night, looking down at the fires from the oil rigs flaring below, it was difficult to see it any other way. Now an instructor on the Victor OCU, the small training unit at Marham, the avuncular, golf-addicted Russell didn’t expect to be involved in the Falklands crisis. Much to his surprise, though, he turned out to be exactly what the Vulcan crews needed.

  On Easter Monday, as he sat on the patio of his Norfolk home listening to the non-stop noise of the Victors training for CORPORATE, he took a phone call asking him to come in to the station. Jerry Price wanted to see him. Russell had been an air-to-air refuelling instructor, or AARI, for eight years until 1979. Now Price wanted him to requalify. The station commander had a surprise for him: Vulcans.

  ‘Right, Dick, you fly tomorrow a couple of times, by day and by night,’ Price told him, explaining that he’d be training Vulcan crews who were completely new to air-to-air refuelling. ‘I’ve got a Canberra for you at eight o’clock to take you to Waddington.’

  There wasn’t time for the night flights. He’d have to somehow squeeze in his own night qualification before taking the Vulcan crew through it.

  The aircrew feeder at Waddington was in the Ops block, separated from the locker room by double doors. On one side it smelt of athletics, on the other fried food. Russell arrived late, already wearing his flying kit, to find the three Vulcan crews finishing off a breakfast of steak and eggs. Two other AARIs from Marham, Flight Lieutenants Pete Standing and Ian Clifford, had already joined their crews. They were the only familiar faces in the room. They’d been assigned to the Reeve and Montgomery crews respectively, which meant Russell was going to be joining Martin Withers. The two men got on immediately, each recognizing the even temper of the other. Russell quickly got the impression that Withers trusted him. It was a good start and breakfast was soon wrapped up.

  ‘We’d better get off to the simulator so you can see what the cockpit looks like,’ Withers suggested.

  Russell was struck by how small the cockpit felt in comparison to the Victor’s. The basic layout was similar but he felt hemmed in. Avro had originally planned for the bomber to be flown by a single pilot. At the Air Force’s insistence, though, a co-pilot was shoe-horned in. The result was that without lowering the ejection seat, a tall man like Russell couldn’t actually hold his head up straight because of the curve of the roof. Ten minutes in the simulator was enough. Air refuelling was regarded as the ‘Sport of Kings’ by the fighter pilots, who practised it regularly. Withers and Russell were looking forward to flying. They signed for their Mae West life jackets and half an hour later they were walking out with the crew to Alpha Dispersal where XM597, their Vulcan B2, was waiting for them. A comparable size to a Boeing 737 airliner, the delta-winged bomber appeared to be much larger – an impression created by her height and dramatic shape.

  Although she first flew just seven years after the end of the Second World War, standing on the apron, taut and purposeful on a stork-like undercarriage, the old ‘tin t
riangle’ still looked startlingly modern in 1982. Up close, however, her camouflage looked conspicuously hand-painted. The brush strokes that smoothed over banks of rivets suggested her real age. It was her cockpit, though, that really betrayed her.

  Inside was a cramped, claustrophobic, matt-black confusion of wires and pipes crafted from steel, canvas and bakelite in the days before ergonomics. It now looked and felt defiantly old-fashioned. It smelt of sweat, leather and old metal. Stencilled panels warned of ‘200 volts’, or hand-painted notes annotating the mess of dials competed for space – everything competed for space – with company names like Dunlop and Electrical and Musical Industries Ltd. Dotted on the roof towards the rear was a small blue enamel badge that read Marconi, just another of the smörgåsbord of old British engineering firms that contributed to the Vulcan’s creation.

  The five-man crew sat on two different levels; the captain and co-pilot were cocooned up front inside a small blister with barely room to squeeze in between the two ejection seats. Once in, the view was deceptive. Glazing to the front and sides gave little hint of the huge aeroplane spread out behind them.

  Four or five feet below the pilots, behind a zip-up, light-proof curtain facing backwards, were three seats for the Nav Radar, Nav Plotter and AEO. Responsible for bomb-aiming, navigation and the bomber’s electrical systems (including jamming the enemy’s radar) respectively, their troglodyte space was brightened only by two small, high portholes that required the AEO or Nav Radar to stand in their stirrups to see through them. Three dented reading lamps snaked out of their control panel on flexible stalks to give their workspace the studious feel of an old library. Despite the dials, switches and screens it all looked engagingly low-tech – an impression cemented by grab handles that hung from the cardboard-lined flight deck ceiling. They were identical to the swinging balls used in the carriages of the London Underground District Line.