Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  Decision, rotate.

  Rotating.

  As Tux’s jet hauled itself into the air, the next Victor was already turning on the runway. Ahead of them, White Two was climbing away.

  Gear up, please.

  Selected, three reds and travelling.

  Jerry Price was nervous. He’d already been forced to use the ground reserve aircraft when one of the Primary Victors couldn’t maintain engine revolutions. If any of the departing aircraft had to abort their take-off that was the end of the night’s work. He watched each one that safely took to the air with a sigh of relief.

  ‘OK, there’s another one away.’

  On board 598, the Primary Vulcan, John Reeve was counting them out too, making sure he slotted in at the right time. The rest of the crew could hear the thunderous crackle of the Victor’s engines through the fuselage. A sound to stir the blood. Number eleven in the stream, Reeve nudged 598 along, careful to control the speed. Even idling, the Olympus engines had the power to let the jet get ahead of you. As they taxied out behind the Victor leading the Blue section, the perspective from the copilot’s seat was still unfamiliar to AARI Pete Standing. Unlike the low cockpit of the Victor, the Vulcan flight deck seems to hang high in the air, projecting forward over ten feet ahead of the nosewheel. It provided a great vantage point. Reeve leaned forwards against his straps to close the little triangular direct-vision window.

  ‘There’s a problem here,’ he said over the intercom. ‘I can’t get this thing shut… I’ll give it another go.’ In the back, the rest of the crew could hear the banging from flight deck as Reeve struggled to close it. Come on, get the bloody thing closed, thought Mick Cooper as he heard the Captain hammering at the window, it can’t be that difficult.

  ‘Calm down, John,’ urged Don Dibbens from the sixth seat as Reeve got more agitated by it. ‘Just work at it.’

  ‘I think I’ve got it.’

  They were set. Dibbens sat back for take-off as Reeve swung round on to the runway centreline. Then he released the brakes and opened up the throttles and 598 produced an astonishing noise that cut through the night for the first time. The blistering, grating roar of the engines was flattened out by the intake resonance to create a ghostly howl. And the bomber quickly gathered speed along the Tarmac.

  A minute later, the eleventh Victor followed them. Then, barely twenty minutes after the first of the V-bomber fleet had begun her take-off roll, the last of them, 607 with Martin Withers at the controls, got airborne. Vulcan 607 hadn’t wanted to leave the ground. At rotation speed Withers had pulled back on the stick, expecting the familiar eagerness to fly, and she’d just continued barrelling along the runway. Filled with fuel and loaded with bombs, both Vulcans were well over their maximum take-off weight of 204,000lb. Add to that two new weapons pylons made of reinforced steel joists, the Dash 10 pod, a sixth crew member, even fresh layers of paint and it was probably over two tons. The excess alone was greater than the entire normal bomb load of an old American B-17 Flying Fortress four-engined heavy. But as the Olympus 301s powered her faster and faster down the runway, the big delta wings had eventually found purchase. Now airborne, she felt familiar again. As they climbed out of the rough cradle of mountains around the airfield, the undercarriage locked up with a comforting clunk and 607 accelerated away into the black sky.

  As the crew ran through their post-take-off checks, Withers climbed straight along the track of the runway centreline of 140 degrees for fifteen miles before turning south on to a heading of 230 degrees. Two minutes ahead of him on board 598, the scene was very different.

  At Wideawake, the rumble subsided to leave in its wake an eerie stillness. Those who’d witnessed the departure were still transfixed, moved even, by the overwhelming, visceral power of the armada going to work. The hot scent of jet engines lingered in the air a while longer, but after the intensity of the last few hours, Ascension seemed once again to have become a tiny isolated rock in the middle of the Atlantic.

  Jerry Price didn’t have long to savour the satisfaction of getting the formation into the air safely. A few minutes at most. Then things started to go wrong.

  Vulcan crews were used to the red pressure-warning light coming on. Sometimes a depressurization horn too. They usually ignored them. The big delta could climb too fast for the cabin pressurization system to keep up with it. This time, though, they knew it was the DV window Reeve had been wrestling with before take-off. As soon as the bomber had started gathering speed the air had begun whistling around its edges. When they passed through 10,000 feet and the cabin began trying to pressurize, the air just bled out. While the noise of the wind rose alarmingly, Reeve was trying to work out a solution. Not a problem, he thought at first, it’s perfectly logical: seal it. In the back they pulled sandwiches out of the ration tin and Reeve tried to stuff their cellophane wrapping in the gap. No good. Cursing, he tried to plug the hole with his flying jacket without success. Vulcan 598 continued to climb and the spiteful sound of the rushing air was becoming overpowering. And it was getting cold too. Approaching 20,000 feet, keeping their place in the stream of jets flying south, the outside air temperature was dropping to minus 30 Celsius. Barry Masefield turned to Jim Vinales to his left. Despite the oxygen mask, Vinales could see the colour had drained from the AEO’s face.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Masefield said, speaking for all of them, ‘this is going horribly, horribly wrong.’

  It was really just a matter of time now. Masefield pointed out that by breathing 100 per cent oxygen through the masks, as they’d have to, their supply wouldn’t last. On top of that they needed to cruise above 30,000 feet, where the air was even colder than at their current altitude. Despite the layers of insulating, protective clothing they all wore, the six of them would freeze to death if they continued. There was no way they could go on.

  Just four minutes after taking off, Reeve reluctantly pressed the RT button to transmit.

  ‘Blue Two unserviceable. Returning to base. Blue Four, you’re on.’

  On board 607, the message was greeted with silence. Martin Withers had been looking forward to a beer with Monty in the Exiles Club. After the initial drumbeat of adrenalin subsided, he sat at the controls, rapidly adjusting to the new reality. A sixteen-hour operational mission now lay ahead. He gathered his thoughts for a moment then spoke to his crew: ‘Looks like we’ve got a job of work to do, fellas…’

  Dick Russell immediately started thinking about the tanker plan – what he was there for. It was one thing sitting off until the Primary had refuelled successfully, then returning home. But now they were the Primary. The success of the operation depended on flying formation in the dark for the next seven hours and, just two weeks earlier, Withers had never really done any night formation flying.

  Here we go again, thought Hugh Prior at the new development, practising the aircrew’s studied indifference to adverse circumstances. But this time his resignation was tinged with satisfaction. We’ve got it!, he thought smiling to himself as he picked up Reeve’s transmission.

  Minutes later, as his co-pilot, Pete Taylor, reorganized the Vulcan’s cramped cabin after take-off, he began to realize that something was up. Condemned to the jump seat, he had been disconnected from the intercom when the news came through. He reattached his PEC to speak.

  ‘Have I missed something?’ he asked brightly.

  Meanwhile, Bob Wright started to think about how he was going to squirm into his immersion suit.

  Twenty minutes later, Red Rag Control received another unscheduled RT message from the formation. As soon as the Victors were settled into the climb the Nav Radars tested the refuelling equipment. In the back of White Four, XL163, Alan Bowman, 57 Squadron’s boss and head of the Victor detachment on Ascension, watched with a sinking feeling. As the Nav Radar played with the HDU controls in an effort to trail the hose, it was clear that nothing he tried was working. White Four had been tasked with the ultimate long-slot position. After a final Victor–Victor transfer from Tux,
they would fly on with the Vulcan for the final refuelling before the bomb-run. That knowledge only made their disappointment more acute as they reported that they were unserviceable and turned back towards Wideawake estimating that they’d be on the ground again at 0006. With RT communication stripped to the bare essentials, no further direction was necessary. Steve ‘Biggles’ Biglands in Blue Three, one of the two Victor airborne reserves, smoothly took their place.

  Of fourteen Victors on Ascension, two had now failed. Two had replaced them. A minimum of ten Victors were needed to make the refuelling plan work. Jerry Price had run out of options. If there was another failure they’d have to abort the mission. But, for the time being, while it might be delicately balanced, they were still on top of it. Price sent a flash signal to Northwood HQ informing them that the formation was airborne.

  Once again, the flexibility of the Victor force – and the margins built into the mission plan – was keeping the thing on the rails. But only just.

  Chapter 32

  Airborne for less than half an hour, John Reeve’s Vulcan had used little of the 74,000lb of fuel in her tanks. Unlike the Victor, the Vulcan can’t jettison fuel. Still above the big jet’s maximum weight for even an emergency landing, Reeve had no choice but to stay in the air to burn it. The technique was straightforward. They could climb at maximum power in a tight spiral, or descend in corkscrew with the airbrakes out and even the landing gear down to increase the rate of fuel burn. Distressed, angry and strapped into a cold, noisy cabin, the crew of the lame bomber faced a bleak prospect. As they coiled upwards Reeve started having trouble with his communication equipment.

  ‘I’m just going off intercom,’ he told the crew before disconnecting his PEC.

  AARI Pete Standing pulled back on the stick, holding the delta in a steeply banked ascending turn, while Reeve concentrated on trying to sort out the problem with his comms. Unnoticed by Standing, though, the bomber’s nose was creeping up and vital speed bleeding off. Tucked away in the jump seat, Don Dibbens sensed something wasn’t quite right. Feels mushy, he thought for a moment before the full force of what that meant hit him. Oh shit! This bloody aircraft’s going to stall! Close to losing lift from the wings, 598 was on the verge of tumbling out of the sky. Dibbens leapt up from his seat and vaulted up the ladder to the flight deck.

  ‘Get the fucking power up,’ he shouted as he threw himself forward over the fuel tray to grab the four throttles. ‘Lower the nose!’

  Pete Standing reacted immediately to bring the Vulcan back from the brink. The airspeed rose again. Caught by surprise at first, Reeve took control from the startled AARI.

  ‘OK, we’re all OK…’ calmed Reeve. Drama over. Dibbens returned, sweating, to his seat and the six of them settled again. After the scare, Reeve decided to bring her in, overweight or not. It was time to call it a day.

  Around a hundred miles separated 607 from the first Victor of the BLACK BUCK formation. That was the distance Red One had flown at the point when Withers’ Vulcan was leaving Runway One Four. As the stream turned on to the southerly heading, the neat line-astern formation became muddled. With each jet covering around half a mile every ten seconds, even small variations in the point at which they initiated their turns had a major effect on their relationship to each other in the night sky. As 607 closed on the fleet of Victors, Dick Russell gave Martin Withers directions.

  ‘Right, at the first bracket we refuel off Blue One.’

  The Captain looked out ahead at the long front of blinking navigation lights stretching across the sky in front of them.

  ‘And which one of all those aircraft out there is that?’ he asked.

  While the organization of the three sections, Red, White and Blue, was clear on paper, in radio silence, darkness and three dimensions it was less straightforward. They weren’t hard to see. Each Victor’s white underside was illuminated by its own floodlights and red anti-collision lights pulsed. Each of the V-bombers had three anti-collision beacons above and below the fuselage that revolved like mini-lighthouses, flashing red and out of sequence with their neighbours. But scattered around the sky at different heights and distances, they all looked exactly the same. Rather than continue on his heading, Withers banked towards what, ahead and to the side, he assumed was the section they needed to join. But even the experienced Dick Russell was struggling to figure out which of the three sections they needed to refuel from, let alone which of the tankers within that section was theirs. On board 607 they had reams of paper with radio and TACAN frequencies, aircraft positions, Captains’ names and call signs. But trying to operate in radio silence meant that, right now, much of this was academic. Unhappily, Russell realized they were going to have to get on the RT and ask their tanker to identify itself. Over a discrete channel, Hugh Prior asked the section leader for a flare. Mounted in the roof of each Victor above the AEO’s station was a signal pistol. Aboard Blue One, the AEO loaded a cartridge and pulled the trigger, firing a green Verey flare into the night.

  Withers and Russell craned their necks scanning the skies around them for the signal, expecting to see the glowing flare out ahead. Nothing.

  ‘Ask him for another one.’

  Prior again pressed the transmit button, all the time scanning from side to side through his rear-facing periscope. Then he caught it at eight o’clock, behind and below them. Withers pulled back on the power and dropped down into the formation in anticipation of the first refuelling bracket, still over an hour away, over 800 miles south of Ascension.

  At RAF Waddington, John Laycock finally managed to slip away from the IX Squadron dinner near midnight. He drove straight from the Officers’ Mess to the Ops block and walked briskly through to the Ops Room. A handful of staff sat at desks, surrounded by communication equipment.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, hungry for news.

  ‘Absolutely nothing, boss.’

  All they could tell him was that BLACK BUCK had got under way on schedule. Starved of information by radio silence and a chain of command that, now the bombers had deployed south, excluded him, he knew they faced a long, anxious night. There was absolutely nothing to be done but wait until a message filtered back indicating success or otherwise. The room was silent and tense. He decided to leave them for the night and try to get some sleep.

  ‘Right, I’m heading home,’ he told the Ops staff. ‘If there is anything at all, call me.’

  About an hour and three-quarters into the mission, the tip of Vulcan 607’s refuelling probe locked into the drogue trailed by Blue One, and fuel flushed into her tanks.

  Ahead of the first refuelling bracket, the three sections had descended 6,000 feet from their cruising altitude while the pilots carefully maintained the vertical separation between the jets. Ahead of the Vulcan, White section was refuelling at 28,000 feet and Red section at 30,000 feet. At 26,000 feet, Dick Russell gently held station below the brightly lit underside of his Blue section Victor. They were flying at around 15,000 feet below the delta-winged bomber’s optimum cruising altitude. Over the next twenty minutes, 37,000lb of fuel flowed from Blue One through her heavy eighty-foot hose to the Vulcan – 4,500lb more than expected.

  At the first refuelling bracket, Bob Tuxford was going to take on 48,000lb of fuel – over 24 tons. This meant tailgating John Elliott’s Victor, White One, at over 250 knots for nearly half an hour. Over the course of transfer, while the co-pilot Glyn Rees worked hard to distribute the fuel evenly throughout the Victor’s tanks, the big jet’s centre of gravity inevitably crept forward. Unchecked, this could have a powerful effect on its handling, forcing the nose down. As the effort of keeping the Victor in formation increased, Tux tried to relieve the pressure on the controls using the thumb-mounted trim switch. The longer the transfer continued the more strength was needed to overcome growing heaviness of the controls. Hands and feet made continual adjustments as Tux maintained a finely honed balance between stick, pedals and throttles. The darkness made its own demands. By day, peripheral
vision helped an experienced pilot keep station almost subconsciously. At night, without a horizon, that touchstone was gone. The intensity with which it was necessary to focus on those visual cues that remained further sapped a pilot’s energy. It was easy to become tired and disorientated. It was gruelling physical work for all concerned.

  With his tanks filled to their maximum capacity of 123,000lb, Bob Tuxford notched back the throttles and allowed the Victor to lose ground slowly on White One. At the limit of its travel, the drogue pulled apart from the probe with a soft jerk. Ahead of him Tux saw the fluorescent studs that ringed the basket recede into the night above him. Three other Victors refuelled at this first bracket. All now carried more fuel than they’d taken off with, more than the weight of the aircraft itself. With the Vulcan now safely in formation things appeared to be going without a hitch. But operating in radio silence, Tux and the other three Captains were unaware that just a couple of hours into the mission, things were starting to come badly unstuck. The first four Victors to turn back for Ascension had cut deep into their own reserves to supply the combat formation with the fuel it needed to continue south. They barely had what they needed to get home safely.

  As they embarked on their uncertain return journey, Blue One, the Vulcan’s tanker, continued with the attack formation a little while longer. At the furthest extent of the first refuelling bracket she would give the Vulcan an additional top-up then turn for home herself. After 607 had taken an extra 4,500lb to fill her tanks at the first transfer, the Victor Captain, Wing Commander Colin Seymour, could see that she was thirstier than expected. The next transfer, taking place after half an hour of flying straight and level, would show him exactly how much more fuel she was burning than they’d bargained on. At 23°00′ south and 24°08′ west, Seymour spoke to his Nav Radar. Clear to trail.