Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  Relight button, press and hold in.

  Throttle. After five seconds move very slowly towards the idling gate.

  Reeve nursed the 3 and 4 engines back into life and made sure they were stable. The alternators were switched back on and they tried to continue with the sortie, only for Masefield to report that a number of small electrical failures persisted. Reeve decided to call it a day and they turned for home.

  When flying, you can only ride your luck for so long.

  Only thirty-four Mk 2 Victors were ever built. Of them, twenty-four were subsequently converted into tankers. And one of these was destroyed in a take-off accident in 1976. On paper, the RAF had just twenty-three aircraft capable of flying to the Falklands and back. On paper. The reality was that on an average day there were rarely more than about four or five Victors available for normal training. Many would be undergoing servicing at Marham and couldn’t be generated at short notice. Others would always be in deep servicing at RAF St Athan, the RAF’s maintenance facility in South Wales. With advance notice, for a major exercise perhaps, the number of airframes flying could reach eleven or twelve. In April 1982, while the aircrews worked up, the Marham Engineering Wing laboured to bring as many Victors on line as possible. Ex-Victor personnel were drafted back to Marham to help this unprecedented effort. The chief technicians were organized into shifts so that work could go on round the clock. Such was the intensity of the work, there was little chance of getting home or even to the Sergeants’ Mess. The aircrew feeder in the Ops block, they reckoned, was the only thing saving them from starving.

  Servicing periods were extended. When two Victors were collected from their major overhaul at St Athan, the aircraft scheduled to replace them stayed on the flightline. Any Victor that was unserviceable was cannibalized to keep the others in the air. It was nearly a year before one of these unlucky, stripped jets was to fly again. In anticipation of the difficulties of maintaining the Victors once they’d deployed south, parts approaching the end of their life were replaced with new ones. Needing even closer attention were the airframes themselves – they were old, the first of Marham’s current fleet having been delivered to the Air Force in 1960. Every time an aircraft manoeuvres, the airframe is put under a degree of stress. Over the course of its lifetime, the effect of that stress is cumulative. Aerobatics or combat will see the total fatigue index jump sharply, but any kind of manual handling, such as tight formation flying or air-to-air refuelling, will also see it rise. Unchecked it can lead to catastrophic failure like the cracked wing spars that grounded the RAF’s Valiants. Research that followed the tragic losses of Comet airliners in the 1950s meant that the effect of metal fatigue was well understood. Every Victor had a finite life, measured by a fatigue counter in the bomb bay, and many were approaching the end of it. It was to be an area of critical concern for the Marham engineers.

  As well as maintenance work in preparation for the deployment south there were also modifications which needed to be made – a job which was again complicated by the age of the airframes. All the Victors were originally built in ‘Fred’s Shed’, Handley Page’s huge hangar at Radlett, near St Albans. It was a facility that was infamous for its ramshackle appearance – a visiting American VIP had been impressed by the Victor, but wondered aloud ‘why you had to build it in a barn’. Like the Vulcans, they were essentially hand-built. None were entirely identical, which meant that modifications couldn’t be applied in an entirely consistent way throughout the fleet.

  Cameras were already installed in the jets flown by Tux, Elliott and Todd. Further work was done on their radars. The RAF’s dedicated maritime radar reconnaissance squadron, 27 Squadron, had disbanded just two days before the Argentine invasion. Their Vulcans, with radars designed to operate over land, had their sets tuned to enhance their performance over water. Engineers from 27 were recalled from new postings so that the Victors’ radars could do the same job – hunting for surface contacts at sea.

  Most important of all was the upgrading of the navigation systems. For most of their long careers, Victors had flown along well-known routes supporting deployments to North America, to the Far East or, most frequently, up and down the towlines of the North Sea. Even in unfamiliar airspace there was always the option of fixing a position by using the radar to pick out ground features. The South Atlantic, though, was going to be a very different proposition. Thousands of miles from safety, over featureless water, the Victor’s ageing systems simply weren’t up to the job. There were two solutions. Most of the jets were fitted with a strap-down Inertial Navigation System, or INS, known as Carousel, a piece of kit already used successfully aboard commercial airliners. Later, others were fitted with Omega, a very low-frequency, very long-range radio device designed for the US Navy’s submarine fleet. Omega allowed the Americans to fix their boats’ positions without forcing them to surface. It could do the same for the Victors in the air, however far they might be from home. Positioning the Omega aerial was crucial, though. Get it wrong and it didn’t work. Electronic surveys of the Victor pointed to the back of the jet, underneath the tail cone. Right next to the airbrakes. These hydraulic barndoors would extend like huge 7 foot by 6 foot clamshells into the airstream to slow the aircraft. It was like dropping an anchor, but the vibration around the brakes caused by the disruption to the airflow could dislodge fillings. The Omega’s sensitive electrical connections weren’t robust enough to endure such savage treatment. The Marham engineers didn’t muck around: they just glued up the whole installation with massive amounts of Araldite. Nothing, but nothing, was going to shake those aerials loose. Ever again.

  Secrecy meant that rumour and intrigue surrounded much of what was happening at Marham. Sideways glances were cast at Tux and crews training for the reconnaissance missions. Similarly, the engineering work attracted speculation. Word went round that there were plans to fit the Victors with AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. Now that, thought excited aircrews, would be great sport.

  Hanging Sidewinders off the wing was about the only thing, however, that the toiling engineers hadn’t been asked to do. But they were working hard to turn the Victor into a missile carrier for the first time since it was retired from the bomber force in 1968. Developed in the 1960s, the AS37 Martel was a big 13-foot-long, 1,200lb anti-radar missile used primarily by the RAF’s Buccaneers. Marham, though, was home to the Martel servicing unit. Stress and design men from British Aerospace arrived at the Norfolk base at the beginning of April and set up drawing boards in the Engineering Wing. They began work from scratch on marrying the Martel to the Victor airframe. As designs for each component were finished they were dispatched to the station workshops for manufacture. In the hangar, Victor and Martel technicians laboured together to replace a test Victor’s wing refuelling pod with the new weapons pylon, then wire it to control panels in the cockpit.

  The effort going on at Marham was extraordinary, and visiting from 1 Group in the first week of April, Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight was accompanied into one of the hangars by Jerry Price to see it for himself. As they looked on, an exhausted Corporal wriggled out from inside a Victor and practically collapsed at the AOC’s feet. The airman had been cramped into the stifling confines of the jet’s maintenance spaces for nearly ten hours. Knight was struck hard by the dedication on display.

  Another anti-aircraft battery went up in Stanley behind the town hall on the waterfront on Wednesday the 14th. In the eastern part of town towards the rubbish dump, John Smith thought Argentine troops seemed well dug in. In addition to digging effective-looking covered trenches, they’d also mocked up dummy guns made of lorry wheels, gas bottles and 6-inch fuel pipes to confuse aerial reconnaissance. But interspersed amongst the fakes were the real guns. While the young Argentine conscripts couldn’t help but let their inexperience show, it was clear, Smith thought, that there were many in the professional army who knew exactly what they were doing. Smith would do what he could to get around Stanley collecting information about the military
build-up. Walking the dog provided the excuse. His youngest boy, eleven-year-old Tyssen, would walk with him – always making sure to put on shorts, even with temperatures down to zero. It made him look younger and seemed to disarm the soldiers, giving him and his father more time to look around and ask questions. Peter Biggs employed a similar subterfuge. Incensed by the continual house searches, he harboured plans to petrol bomb the Argentine helicopters that sat on the open ground between the government buildings and the Governor’s mansion. Frustrated in that ambition by the blanket of Argentine guards, he wandered around town discreetly taking photographs of Argentine defences. He found that if Fran joined him he was able to avoid the attentions of the soldiers. Her pregnancy seemed to provide cover. He marked their positions on a map, photographed the map, then sent the film back to the UK on one of the last planes to leave, smuggled out in the luggage of a departing Irish schoolteacher’s wife.

  Access to the heavily fortified room in the Ops block was strictly controlled. ‘The Vault’ contained RAF Waddington’s target information and was where the Vulcan crews would spend hours mission-planning. Each was allocated both NATO and national targets. Such were the levels of secrecy that one crew wouldn’t know the target of the next. The NATO targets tended to be more popular. The more capable American strategic bomber force tended to be allocated the more heavily defended targets. In the unlikely event that Britain found herself waging war against the Soviets alone, the national list might find crews tasked with delivering a nuclear weapon to downtown Moscow – through the most comprehensive integrated air defence network in history. The short straw. Banks of documents pertaining to particular sorties were stored in vast sliding floor-to-ceiling cabinets. The files were designed to cover any possible contingency during a flight, from engine failure to civil aviation procedures. The volume was overwhelming. With way too much to learn, the information in ‘The Vault’ acted as a kind of corporate memory. What was conspicuously absent was any information at all on the Falkland Islands.

  Accurate intelligence was a huge problem – as the priority given to preparing the Victors to fly reconnaissance missions underlined. The South Atlantic was way beyond the range of 39 Squadron’s high-altitude Canberra spy planes – unless a closer friendly operating base could somehow be negotiated. There was no satellite imagery from the Americans. Neither Professor Ronald Mason, the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, nor the Defence Secretary, John Nott, were able to persuade them to divert a KH11 satellite away from NATO duties – much to both men’s frustration. Instead, there were rudimentary 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 maps and the detailed notes made by an ex-commander of the Falklands Marine garrison as he sailed around the islands’ coast. HUMINT, or human intelligence, was also in desperately short supply. In April 1982, MI6 had one officer based in Buenos Aires. He had been responsible not just for intelligence on Argentina, but for the whole of South America. Those planning the campaign would take whatever they could get, although what information there was was played close to the chest. Even Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight, as Air Officer Commanding 1 Group, the officer with ultimate responsibility for delivering jets and crews capable of doing whatever they were ordered to do, felt outside the loop. He did whatever he could to try to anticipate what would be demanded of him and his assets. Working within such a compressed time frame, anything he could do to help those working on the coalface at Marham and Waddington, before an official signal arrived from Northwood, he would do.

  Chapter 15

  Simon Baldwin started early and finished late as he concentrated on trying to bring Sir Michael Beetham’s vision to life. As he worked, he lived off a diet of bacon sandwiches, coffee and Gold Block pipe tobacco. Many of the challenges he faced were entirely new to him. The Vulcan community knew all about what they would face attacking the Warsaw Pact – fighters and missiles given names by NATO like Fishbed, Flogger, Foxbat, Guideline and Grail. The AEOs probably mumbled the frequency bands of the Soviet fire-control radars as they drifted off to sleep. But Argentina, Baldwin learnt from Jane’s or material published by the Institute of Strategic Studies, had none of the Russian kit they were trained to counter. Most of it came from much closer to home, produced by factories in France, Germany, Switzerland, America and Britain. He was going to have to hit the books.

  Within Air Vice-Marshal Knight’s 1 Group planning cell at Bawtry, no possible use of the Vulcans was left unconsidered. New weapons were studied, including cluster bombs and laser-guided bombs. Suddenly, a bomber a quarter of a century old, which had been neglected for years, was the centre of attention. What about a four-ship firepower demonstration to demonstrate Britain’s resolve and capability?, they asked themselves. Or minelaying sorties to keep the Argentine Navy at bay? Maybe leaflet-dropping, to demoralize her conscript troops. Even, in whispered tones, the possibility of hitting the Argentine mainland. All relied on an assumption that the Vulcan’s flight refuelling system would be successfully revived and that the Victors could provide the fuel to support whatever was planned. As it happened, it wasn’t to be as simple as that.

  None of the creative thinking in evidence affected the simplicity of the orders given to Waddington in that first week: restore the Vulcan’s ability to refuel in the air and drop conventional bombs. So Baldwin’s CORPORATE flight pressed ahead. Despite the fuel leaks there had been nothing lacking in the Vulcan pilots’ ability to make contact. Someone needed to find out why the machinery was failing, but by Friday the 16th all three Captains completed their day receiver training. The bombing, though, also posed a challenge – it had been a long time since the Vulcans had dropped 1,000lb iron bombs.

  Once again it fell to the engineers to get to grips with the problem first.

  As a conventional bomber the Vulcan had been capable of carrying twenty-one 1,000lb bombs on three septuple bomb carriers attached to hardpoints in the bomb bay. The release of the bombs was controlled from a panel in the Nav Radar’s station in the cockpit known as the ‘90-Way’ that monitored electrical connections to each bomb. It was said that it provided ninety different ways of sequencing the drop, from one bomb to twenty-one and every combination in between, in quick succession or one at a time. It provided options and flexibility, meaning that differently fused weapons could be used separately as the mission demanded – air burst bombs in the front, delayed fuses in the back.

  None of Waddington’s Vulcans was still fitted with either the bomb carriers or the 90-Way. But they didn’t just have to be reinstalled; they had to be found first. It was a good thing that the engineers seemed to have an aversion to actually getting rid of anything for good. All RAF stations had engineering dumps where the Engineering Wing stored anything that they felt might one day come in handy – anything they couldn’t bear to part with. Dumps at Waddington and Scampton, the nearby base that had just drawn the curtain on twenty-one years of Vulcan operations, were scoured for the missing kit: 90-Way panels were found, refitted and tested but the septuple bomb carriers – and they needed at least nine of them – proved harder to find. The required number was eventually made up when someone recalled that some had been disposed of at a Newark scrapyard. Incredibly, they were still there.

  Much that was once known about the Vulcan had been lost. RAF training no longer offered the kind of deep foundation that had once been deemed necessary. There was someone to turn to, though: 50 Squadron’s John Williams. Williams had been through the very first Vulcan conversion course and, during a year of ground school, had practically learnt how to dismantle and rebuild the jet. If he said, ‘You need to tweak the third nut on the left one quarter-turn to the right,’ you did it. And it usually did the trick. Baldwin brought him into the CORPORATE flight’s planning team.

  If the Vulcans were going to practise bombing, they were going to need bombs too. When Simon Baldwin first enquired, he discovered that Waddington’s armoury had just forty-one 1,000lb high-explosive ‘iron’ bombs. With three crews to train, they could be used up in one day on the ranges.
He widened his search, but was alarmed to track down just 167 in the whole country – all that was left from thirty years of trying to dispose of the stockpile left at the end of the Second World War. Hundreds had simply been dropped into the sea. This was much appreciated by fishermen off Cyprus – where two Vulcan squadrons were stationed throughout the 1960s – who eagerly scooped up the dead fish as they floated to the surface. Many of the bomb cases that were left were cast rather than machined and that too was potentially problematic. Cast-iron cases shattered on impact like glass on a tile floor, dissipating the force of the blast. What were needed now were the tough machined cases that would penetrate deep into the ground before exploding. But the bombs had been disposed of indiscriminately and Baldwin had no choice but to take whatever he could get his hands on.

  The Chief of the Air Staff knew Marham well. Visiting his old station on Friday the 16th to meet the Victor crews as they prepared to deploy to Ascension, Sir Michael Beetham felt pleased to be back. It had changed a bit since his day, but it was still recognizably the same place, still known to some of the old-timers ambivalently as ‘El Adem with grass’, after the RAF’s now long-vacated remote, windswept desert airbase in Libya. Beetham was a man held in high regard by the ‘tanker trash’ – he was one of them. As Marham’s Station Commander, Jerry Price, ushered Beetham around, he was struck again by the CAS’s gentle manner and encouraged by his interest in what was going on. Beetham, it was clear, properly understood the value of what they were doing. After all, Price reflected, he knew as much about in-flight refuelling as anyone. Responding to this, the Marham crews appeared bullish. And Beetham returned to Whitehall, both proud and confident in his men, impressed by their mood – Get up and go, we’re going to do this.