Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  There was no toilet, and no kitchen, and there were no soft edges. It wasn’t a comfortable place for a five-man crew to spend any length of time, and with Dick Russell on board there would be six of them. Flying Officer Peter Taylor, Withers’ co-pilot, was condemned to the jump seat – an unwelcoming metal platform in the bottom of the cabin, just next to the crew hatch. His only cushion was his parachute.

  They strapped in, snapping shut the machined-aluminium Personal Equipment Connectors, or PECs, to tubes that carried oxygen and the intercom. The fabric of the Nav Radar’s PEC tube trailed down from the roof of the cockpit, like a two-inch-thick vine. Pre-flight checks complete, they taxied to the runway threshold while Withers explained to Russell how the Vulcan was steered on the ground. Sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, Russell was struck by the commanding view from the Vulcan. Perched much higher than in the Victor, he felt like he was sitting at the top of a double-decker bus. Withers turned to him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you might as well take off,’ confirming the impression of trust that the AARI had picked up earlier. Russell opened the throttles of the Vulcan for the first time in his life, held the brakes for a moment as the turbines spooled up, then let go, surging forward, propelled by over 80,000lb of thrust from four 301 series Rolls-Royce Olympus turbojets. The big delta leapt into the air behind Reeve and Monty. With that departure, the crews had begun the most intense, demanding training programme any of them would ever endure. Over the next two weeks, they would log flying time that normally would have taken six months to accrue. Peacetime regulations were swiftly abandoned. Of the three Vulcans climbing out over the North Sea, perhaps only Withers’ jet – he being the only current Vulcan QFI, or Qualified Flying Instructor – should legally have been in the air with the ‘student’ Victor tanker pilot in the right-hand seat. In an emergency, unfamiliar with the jet, there was little Russell, Standing or Clifford could have done to help.

  The first attempts at hooking up with the Victors were demoralizing. The AARIs, unfamiliar with the position of the Vulcan’s refuelling probe struggled initially. Officially, the technique was to look at neither the probe nor the drogue trailing from the tanker. Instead, the receiver had to line up on a series of black and fluorescent orange lines on the belly and wings of the tanker. Get that right and you’d make contact. Dick Russell had had twenty years to get used to the view from a Victor cockpit. Like riding a bike, refuelling in a Victor wasn’t something he thought too hard about. He could just do it. In the Vulcan, though, the picture was completely different. Instead of extending forward from above and behind the pilots’ heads, the Vulcan probe was mounted below them, right on the nose. It was virtually impossible to see both the probe and the tanker at the same time. Russell loosened his straps and leaned forward to look over the coaming a third time without success, then he handed over to Withers. Much to everyone’s surprise, the Vulcan captain made contact on his first attempt. But the 100 per cent success rate wasn’t to last long. Like the other two Vulcan captains, he was confident. Piece of piss, Monty had thought until his efforts to stick the probe in the basket attracted ridicule from the rest of his crew.

  ‘Would it help if we put hair around it?’ they laughed. The association was unavoidable.

  Nearly three hours after taking off, the three Vulcans were back on the ground at Waddington. After shutting down and disembarking, their captains were quick to compare notes.

  ‘He was working like a one-armed paper hanger!’ As he described his AARI’s early efforts to make contact with the tanker Monty reached instinctively for an imaginary stick and throttle, his hands playing out his instructor’s actions.

  ‘So how did you get on?’ Withers ventured, sounding out the others.

  ‘Yeah, fine.’ A stock answer from Monty.

  ‘And you, John?’

  ‘Oh, nothing to it!’ he replied, sounding like he’d rather talk about something else. There was a pause before Withers tried again.

  ‘Did you get it in the basket then?’

  ‘Erm… no,’ the other two pilots admitted reluctantly and all three laughed in solidarity.

  ‘It was bloody hard actually,’ confessed Monty, ‘probably need a bit more practice…’

  Sport of Kings?

  More like trying to stick wet spaghetti up a cat’s arse!

  Or taking a running fuck at a rolling doughnut!

  Over a beer at the debrief in the Ops block, Russell, Standing and Clifford appeared unconcerned. In fact they seemed to be enjoying their students’ discomfort rather a lot.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ asked the bomber pilots. The AARIs tried to sound reassuring. They’d seen it all before.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ they told them, ‘it’s always like this. You’ll get it next time.’

  The scratched paint and bent pitot tubes suffered by the Vulcans didn’t seem to support this point of view. To Mick Cooper, John Reeve’s Nav Radar, who’d listened to the drogue clanging hard against the outside of the fuselage a couple of feet from his left ear, success felt a long way off. He drew heavily on a cigarette.

  In London, news reached Sir Michael Beetham in his office at the MoD that the Vulcan air-to-air refuelling training was under way. His plan appeared to be coming together. At the time of its conception, no one knew whether or not it was even still possible. Now, perhaps, it was time to let the Argentinians know what the RAF was up to. Let them worry about what might or might not be possible. But while it was true that the Vulcans had begun formating on the Victors and the AARIs at least had made some successful prods, not a single drop of fuel had yet been transferred. When they progressed from dry contacts any hope Beetham had that things were up and running would start to look a little premature.

  CFIT, Controlled Flight into Terrain, is how air crash investigators describe what happens when a completely serviceable aircraft simply flies into the ground. CFIT kills hundreds of people on commercial flights every year. It’s one of aviation’s biggest killers. It can happen for a variety of reasons and flying low over the sea, with atmospheric conditions conspiring to provide no visible horizon, is one of them.

  Training for the camera runs in goldfish bowl conditions like this, a few hundred feet above the North Sea, Tux had a scare. He felt uncomfortable. Disorientated. He knew something wasn’t right, before realizing with a shot of adrenalin that the Victor was a lot closer to the surface of the sea than he’d thought. The pilot lost situational awareness, they would have concluded in the accident report. At altitude, it’s easier to recover from. There’s time to check the instruments, to take stock of the situation and get your bearings. At altitude, loss of situational awareness rarely kills aircrew. But low and fast, spatial disorientation usually will. The aircraft will crash with its pilot knowing only that he’s lost it – the final, fatal view of the mountain or sea surface perhaps providing a snapshot confirming height and heading at the very moment of catastrophe. Tux caught it this time, but the danger was real. The main problem was the jet’s Radar Altimeter. Like the Victor itself, it was designed to operate at high level. Calibrated to be accurate at 50,000 feet, at 250 feet it didn’t perform well. The relative scale of the instrument meant that distinguishing 250 feet from 500 feet – or sea level – just couldn’t be done with any confidence.

  This wasn’t the only problem. The profiles of the flights Tux and the other two captains were flying meant a high-level transit before descending to take pictures. As they flew down into the relatively moist, warm air at low level, the two cameras in the nose misted up. After the first flight the engineers had to come up with a fix that prevented misting by ensuring there was air flowing over the lenses to prevent it.

  As an ad-hoc solution to the long-range reconnaissance problem, the Victor had no mechanism for accurately aiming the cameras. Unless some method could be worked out the whole exercise was pointless. Tux called colleagues at Wyton, home to the Canberra PR9s of 39 Squadron, the RAF’s reconnaissance specialists, and asked what they could suggest.
The next morning he was sitting in a Victor on the Marham ramp drawing lines on the cockpit glass with a chinagraph pencil. Outside, two airmen moved bits of tape around the Tarmac shouting, ‘Up a bit, down a bit.’ The tape represented the targets. The chinagraph marks were calibrated so that, when they appeared over the target at a given height, the correct image would be captured by the port-facing camera. It was hardly high tech, but it worked.

  The Victor crews honed their new skills with low-level camera runs over the airfields and coastlines of the Scottish Western Isles. The Air Force called it Area 14. In their logbooks, the pilots recorded the more evocative names of the places they photographed: Stornoway, Islay and Macrahanish. There was pride in developing this new capability in such a short space of time and, inevitably, competition developed between Elliott, Todd and Tux over the quality of the pictures they were taking. They were enjoying themselves. But while frightening the life out of the inhabitants of coastal caravan parks was fun, in the back of their minds there was a growing anxiety about the Victor’s terrible vulnerability as a low-level camera platform.

  In Vietnam, the US Navy had found tactical photo-reconnaissance to be the most hazardous task it could give its aircraft. The North American RA-5C Vigilante was dedicated to the role. In the late 1960s, the Vigilante was deemed to be a hot ship, one of the fastest jets in the sky. Her awesome low-level performance provided a degree of security, but still the Vigilantes suffered the highest loss rate over Vietnam of any Navy aircraft.

  The Victor didn’t share the Vigilante’s speed advantage. In comparison she was large and lumbering. She was also defenceless. Since the Victors had been converted into tankers, all the radar-jamming equipment had been removed; so too had the chaff dispensers that might confuse radar-guided attacks and the flares that tackled heat-seeking missiles. All that was left was the RWR – Radar Warning Receiver – that could tell them when fire-control radars had locked on to them. But that was hardly a comfort. Flying down an enemy coastline or the centre-line of a heavily defended airfield the Victor would be an open target. And that was assuming she’d survived the danger inherent in using the radar altimeter to descend to low level over the pre-dawn South Atlantic.

  Tux relished the challenge of being singled out for such a demanding mission, but he had no desire to go out in a blaze of glory. He collared Wing Commander Ops, David Maurice-Jones, in the bar to try to find out more.

  ‘Where’s all this going?’ he asked. ‘What are we doing racing around at 200 feet?’

  Maurice-Jones couldn’t tell Tuxford much more than he already knew. High-level transit, low-level photo-reconnaissance run, high-level transit.

  It was a daunting task. While Maurice-Jones and his superiors knew that the Victors could be ordered to run the gauntlet of the Falklands air defences, what might be waiting for them during that low-level run was left only to Tux’s imagination.

  Chapter 14

  The Argentinians had quickly begun preparing their air defences. An American Westinghouse TPS-43 search radar was rolled out of the back of an Air Force C-130 Hercules at 4.00 p.m. on the day of the invasion. The next day, the first anti-aircraft guns were deployed in the form of twin-barrelled 20mm Rheinmetall batteries. Heavier weaponry began to follow a week later, when, on 8 April, elements of the Marine Anti-Aircraft Battalion armed with their 30mm Hispano-Suiza cannons and British-made Tiger Cat wire-guided surface-to-air missiles flew in. What had been planned to be as unmilitary an operation as possible was rapidly changing its complexion. Since the dispatch of the British task force, the nature of the Argentine occupation had been transformed. But it was after Roger Lane-Nott’s HMS Splendid and her sister-ship Spartan began their patrol that troops, equipment, fuel, supplies and armaments really started to flood into Stanley airfield. With the British declaration of the Maritime Exclusion Zone on 12 April, everything had to come in by air. Gerald Cheek, now redundant as the head of civil aviation on the islands, watched the constant stream of aircraft flying in: C-130s; Fokker F-27s and F-28s; BAC 1-11s and Boeing 737s, which, he thought, must have been tight on Stanley’s 4,100 foot runway. But while the runway was short, skilful Argentine pilots were demonstrating its utility daily. It may not have offered much margin for error, but it didn’t stop Aerolineas Argentinas, the state carrier, landing a fully laden four-engined Boeing 707 without a mishap.

  Planes were turned round and sent home as quickly as possible. C-130s would leave behind fuel not needed for the return trip to the mainland and aircraft were unloaded on the taxiways, but the volume of men and materiel threatened to overwhelm the limited facilities at the small airfield. During April, over 9,000 troops and 5,000 tons of cargo were flown in. The Commander of Base Aerea Militar Malvinas, Commodore Héctor Destri, called for help.

  Major Héctor Rusticinni of the Fuerza Aerea Argentina flew into Stanley on 15 April. He was boss of the training squadron at the Air Force school for non-commissioned officers in Ezeiza, south-west of Buenos Aires, and his organizational talents were what Destri needed. Rusticinni felt strong emotions as he stepped off the transport plane into the watery sunshine of BAM Malvinas. Responsibility for communications, food, clothes, shelter, armament, transport and maintenance on the base was now his. Argentina, he felt, had won back what was rightfully hers.

  The change in the tone of the Argentine occupation was also showing itself to the residents of Stanley. Some were being singled out for thorough house searches. Peter Biggs and his pregnant wife Fran were visited every couple of days – perhaps because the Argentinians found plenty to interest them. A keen diver, Biggs found his scuba gear was quickly confiscated. So too was the Morse key he kept in his workshop – left over from his time working in radio. Often there’d be a thump on the door in the middle of the night. Biggs would open it up to eight armed troops who’d go through the house, even taking up the carpet. While the soldiers conducted themselves with a veneer of respectability Biggs found it hard to contain his anger, but tried to debate what was going on with any English-speaking officers.

  Like Biggs, John Fowler, the islands’ Superintendent of Education, had more than just his own safety to worry about. His wife Veronica had given birth to their son, Daniel, on 13 April, just two days earlier. Now as mother and child recovered from the labour back at home, the BBC World Service reported that the US Secretary of State Al Haig’s shuttle diplomacy was faltering. And Fowler, who’d already lost half a stone in weight since the invasion, could only see war ahead.

  On high ground at the back of the town, anti-aircraft guns were now in place.

  A full flying programme for the Vulcan training culminating in day and night bombing runs on the ranges had been written up and distributed. The crews flew twice on the 15th, persevering with the air-to-air refuelling qualification. Monty was getting it right about 50 per cent of the time. Martin Withers and Dick Russell were having a little more luck. Between them they were working out a technique that played to the strengths of each of them. Withers, unencumbered by the muscle memory accrued over years flying Victors that hampered Russell’s efforts, would make the contact. From the second sortie on, that was something he was achieving with increasing and reassuring regularity. The AARIs had been right about that. Once a contact had been made Russell would take over, flying the ten, fifteen or twenty minutes of smooth formation flying that a successful fuel transfer required. He was pleased to note that the Vulcan, lacking the distinctive high T-tail of the Victor, was actually the easier of the two V-bombers to fly in the tanker’s slipstream. A problem was beginning to emerge, however, and that afternoon John Reeve and his AARI, Pete Standing, were to get an indication that it could actually scupper the whole project before a single bomb was dropped. In the morning, Reeve had flown his first wet contact, transferring 2,000lb of fuel into the Vulcan’s tanks. As he broke contact, fuel spilled back over the bomber’s windscreen. Mick Cooper was standing on the ladder between the pilots and watched as the glass immediately turned opaque. Like trying to look thr
ough a toilet window, he thought. Not ideal when you’re flying so close to a 70-ton tanker that you can hear the roar from its jet pipes in your own cockpit. They tried a further five contacts during the afternoon sortie, each time suffering fuel spills on disengaging. On the sixth attempt, Reeve misjudged the power and overshot. But it wasn’t contact between the two big jets that was the biggest danger. As the nose of the Vulcan reached for the underside of the Victor, the trailing cone-shaped drogue scraped down the side of the bomber’s fuselage and into the starboard engine intakes. Inside the cockpit there was a loud physical thump as the numbers 3 and 4 Olympus engines, starved of air, coughed and flamed out. The rpm spooled down immediately and, without power, the two engines’ alternators tripped off-line, causing a red warning light to come on ahead of the pilots: electrical failure. Reeve yanked the handle to release the RAT to restore emergency power to the jet.

  Captain to crew, we have a failure on 3 and 4 engines, he called and applied full power to the two remaining engines on the port side, stamping on the rudder to keep her straight.

  Losing two engines on a Vulcan should be manageable. She’s blessed with deep reserves of power and because of the layout of the engines, built into the wing root with all four tucked in close to the fuselage, even losing both on one side doesn’t cause overwhelming asymmetry. But as Reeve gunned the throttles on the two good engines, one of them faltered. If we’re down to one, thought Mick Cooper, it’s time to sit by the door with my parachute. But it stayed with them. And as Barry Masefield tripped all the non-essential electrics and hit the AAPP – Auxiliary Airborne Power Pack – with his right hand, Reeve held the lame bomber in a gentle descent to begin the relight drills. In the thicker air below 30,000 feet Masefield began reading from flight reference card 25: Altitude. Airspeed. Windmilling speed. LP cock. From the front, Reeve provided the required responses: HP cock shut, throttle back adjacent engine as required.