Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  Vulcan 598 crossed the Runway One Four threshold much faster than normal. The higher the landing weight, the higher the speed of the approach. John Reeve tried to put the heavy bomber down on to the main-wheel bogies as gently as possible. But, as if this wretched sortie hadn’t gone badly enough, as he guided her down the runway, keeping the nose high to use the barn-door expanse of the Vulcan’s delta planform to slow them down, he scraped her tail down the Tarmac, kicking up a flash of orange sparks in her wake. It was insult to injury.

  Monty watched them taxi back to the dispersal area. Travelling fast, he noticed. He hadn’t returned to the Ops tent for over an hour after the formation flew out of Wideawake. And when he’d been told that John Reeve was flying the returning Vulcan he thought it must be a mistake. After running through the shutdown checks, Reeve reached forward and opened the DV window – the source of their failure. As it swung open, a perished seal fell limply out of the frame. All that bloody work, he thought, unable to adequately capture his bitter disappointment. Monty waited for the crew door to open, then fixed the ladder and ran up into the cockpit.

  ‘What the hell’s wrong?’ he asked as he looked round at the crew’s faces. He’d never seen Reeve look so angry. ‘Let’s calm down,’ he said, trying to sound soothing. ‘We’ll get everyone out and have a beer. You can tell me what happened.’

  Despite the best of intentions, Monty needed to be careful. Mick Cooper wanted to lash out. Barry Masefield found it hard even to look anyone in the eye, unable to shake a corrosive feeling that they were going to be accused of LMF – Lack of Moral Fibre. The AEO was walked away by his counterpart, John Hathaway, to sign all his codes back in. Cooper, holding a bag carrying all the safety pins for the bombs, found an armourer.

  ‘Do you need me to put them back?’ he asked. The airman wisely shook his head. Cooper handed over the bag and his mind turned enviously to Bob Wright on board 607. How good are you going to be?, he wondered. You’ve only got twenty-one; for Christ’s sake don’t waste them.

  ‘Seal on the DV window,’ Reeve explained tersely as they left the bomber behind on the pan.

  Monty drove them up to Two Boats where they all chatted miserably and haltingly over beer.

  ‘John,’ Monty began, in an effort to help him rationalize, ‘there’s nothing I can say that’ll make you feel any better. It’s happened…’ But he realized it was still too soon for that. Reeve was inconsolable and, Monty thought, looked close to tears.

  Along with the rest of Reeve’s crew, Monty eventually turned in, leaving 598’s forlorn Captain sitting alone out on the veranda, nursing a can of beer. AARI Pete Standing came outside briefly to say that he couldn’t sleep with the light on. Reeve switched it off, opened another beer, and continued to stare out into the night.

  Nav Plotter Jim Vinales was the only member of the crew who didn’t return to Two Boats. Instead, he stayed at Wideawake. He’d expected to be up all night anyway and thought he’d discreetly watch events unfold from inside the Ops tent. Jerry Price, he noticed, was chain-smoking.

  At the controls of Red Three, one of the four Victors returning to Ascension from the first refuelling bracket, Squadron Leader Barry Neal was starting to feel concerned about his fuel state. Things should have been fairly healthy after that first transfer, but he was well down. He was just about to break radio silence when a voice from one of the other three jets crackled through his headset.

  ‘This is White Three. Are you guys short of fuel?’

  Neal and the other two Victors said they were, but none of the four crews were sure what they could do about it. They all re-examined their fuel and compared notes, estimating where each would be at Top of Descent into Ascension. All would be well below minimum. The AEOs tried to raise Red Rag Control on the HF radio, but they knew that there was nothing Ascension could do. They were out of tankers. In any case, it would have taken longer to scramble one at short notice than any of the four inbound Victors now had. They considered their options and quickly realized that there wasn’t going to be time for each of them to land, roll to the turnaround pad, change direction, backtrack nearly two miles and vacate the strip before the next one had to come in. They were going to have to land one after another. They got a message through to Jerry Price asking him to approve the plan. It had to be their decision, he told them. Right, OK, Neal thought, knowing they were all committed to it, I’m happy with that. That’s the way we’re going to do it. Then they asked Price to make sure there was a Victor pilot in the Wideawake tower and agreed the sequence in which they were going to come in, based on their relative fuel states. Barry Neal was to come in last.

  In the tower, Bill Bryden and the PanAm controllers were joined by David Davenall from the Victor Ops team. Between them, they decided that the only way to recover the approaching tankers would be for the first three to land, hold on to their drag chutes, taxi to the turnaround pad at the end of the runway and position themselves right, left and straight-on like a fleur-de-lys. They would completely block the end of the runway. If the brakes or chute of the fourth jet failed – or if Barry Neal simply misjudged his one approach – the destruction at the end of the runway would be catastrophic. In the event of a brake failure, they suggested Neal pull off the Tarmac into the volcanic cinder field to the left of the strip. His jet would be wrecked but, they believed, the crew would survive and it might save the airfield and the other three Victors. From the tower, they asked the four Victor captains to try to allow as much of a gap between each landing as they felt they could. They alerted the fire crews and waited anxiously for the first of the big tankers to descend out of the darkness.

  Ten minutes separated White Three from White One; Red One followed five minutes after that; Red Three was coming in barely two minutes behind her. As Barry Neal intercepted the glidepath, he prepared the tanker for landing. Gear down and landing checks, please.

  Down, three greens, came confirmation. After setting the flap to ‘take-off’, he settled into long finals. With the four Conway engines set at 84–85 per cent rpm, he controlled his speed on the approach with the big clamshell airbrake underneath the Victor’s high dihedral tailplane. While he adjusted the airbrake with his left hand and flew with his right, his co-pilot controlled the throttles, tweaking the power a couple of percentage points as Neal called for it. He could see the runway lights ahead and, at the point where the line ended, the other three Victors, their anti-collision beacons blinking redundantly in the distance. He had one chance to get it right. And he knew that the Handley Page Victor K2 had notoriously bad brakes. He was dependent on the brake chute deploying. Descending towards the One Four threshold he passed through 200 feet. Decision height. He set full flap and committed to the landing. Then, as if offering a psychological helping hand at the vital moment, the long, high hump in the Wideawake runway obscured his view of the three waiting Victors. Neal flared over the threshold and his co-pilot cut the power. The moment the mainwheels squealed against the Tarmac he streamed the chute, brought the nosewheel down fast and applied the brakes. He had no qualms this time about hitting them early and hard. The Victor barrelled along the runway like a runaway train, but, as she crested the rise in the runway and the flashing red lights and camouflaged shapes of the other three Victors came into view again, Neal knew the speed was coming off. The brakes had held.

  As the big jet decelerated to taxi speed, Neal swung her round tightly through 180 degrees and dumped the chute – trying, as he gunned the throttles to roll back to the dispersal, to blow the discarded heap of fabric and rope off the runway with the jet wash.

  In the little red and white control tower, Bill Bryden took a few deep breaths and watched the ground crew’s pick-ups kick up dust as they sped away to recover the four drag chutes.

  Barry Neal’s crew was the only one of the four who’d just landed who were going up again that night. In less than two hours, they had to be ready to take off again in order to arrive at Rio RV in time to meet the returning Vulcan. B
etween briefing and planning, there would just be time to have a drink and grab a sandwich before crew-in.

  Chapter 33

  John Smith joked that he used religion like one of the emergency services. But the strength and frequency of his prayer now bore comparison with that of his wife Ileen, whose Catholic faith had always been strong. As April had passed, others of all faiths, looking for succour and the practical assistance Monsignor Spraggon could provide in dealing with their God-fearing occupiers, had joined them for mass at Stanley’s Catholic church, St Mary’s. Some of the Argentine officers, General Menendez included, had actually worshipped with them. But as he retired for bed on the night of the 30th, thoughts of loving thine enemy were far from Smith’s mind. Television was new to the Falklands and a gift of the invaders. Like many of his fellow residents, Smith had taken advantage of the Argentine subsidy to acquire a new set. Tonight he watched with rising anger scenes of General Galtieri in Stanley handing his rosary beads to young conscripts and telling them that the Blessed Virgin Mary was on their side.

  Two hundred miles away to the north-west, Admiral Woodward’s Royal Navy Battle Group plunged through the swell across an imaginary line in the sea and into the Total Exclusion Zone.

  Wing Commander Colin Seymour’s return to Wideawake provided Jerry Price and Red Rag Control with a nasty shock – hard evidence of how much fuel the Vulcan was burning. Half an hour after the four first-wave Victors had shown how little margin for error there was, the 55 Squadron boss’s figures underlined it. In the thirty-four minutes between the first and second fuel transfers, 607 had burnt 9,200lb of fuel. During that time, the overloaded bomber’s weight had never even dropped to its theoretical maximum, let alone below it. They were flying outside the aircraft’s notional limits and the fuel burn reflected it: 16,250lb an hour. The BLACK BUCK fuel plan was going to the dogs. But while he could see big trouble ahead, there was little Price could actually do other than try to be ready for it when it happened.

  Subsisting on tea and cigarettes, wearing the khaki short-sleeved shirts of the RAF’s tropical kit, the Ops team hunched over trestle tables and tried to prepare contingency plans. They worked through different scenarios, factored in potential ifs and buts. As soon as the returning Victors were back at dispersal, the ground crew turned them round, checking the engines and refuelling them before reserve aircrew combat-readied them again. Barry Neal’s aircraft needed to be ready to go by 0520 along with the three others flying west to the Rio RV. That was less than two hours away. With such an urgent demand on the ground crew’s resources, preparing the rest of the waiting Victor fleet for as yet unknown, but virtually certain, emergencies had to take a back seat. Extra Victors would take three hours to turn round. The engineering teams were doing what they could, but it still seemed to Price a frustratingly long time. He was going to need those jets. The crews could stand down briefly, but after that he wanted them camped out by their jets, ready when he needed them. They could sleep under the wings, if they had to.

  While the planners at Ascension crunched the numbers, the ‘Balbo’ continued south, unaware of the developing problem. Aboard the three remaining Victors, all seemed well – according to the Nav Plotters and their flight plans they were on time and on target. But the effects of the physical exertion of flying each fuel transfer and the intense concentration of nearly three hours’ night flying in formation were beginning to show. Unnoticed by Bob Tuxford or his co-pilot Glyn Rees, his Victor, XL189, was developing a slow, potentially dangerous roll to port.

  Disaster doesn’t give much warning when flight refuelling goes wrong. Seven years earlier, Flight Lieutenant Keith Handscomb, one of Tux’s fellow 55 Squadron Captains, was flying a routine daylight air-to-air refuelling exercise with two Buccaneer S2 strike bombers over the North Sea, 170 miles north-east of Newcastle. Through the rear-view periscope, Handscomb’s Nav Radar saw that the second Buccaneer was approaching too fast. His probe clipped the edge of the trailing drogue, sending it snaking in towards the Victor’s fuselage. The Nav Radar lost sight of the Bucc as it settled again, above and a little behind the tanker’s wing. The bomber pilot throttled back a touch and started to drop down again to tuck in behind the Victor for another approach. Then he flew into the powerful jetwash from the Victor’s Sapphire engines. The Buccaneer was rolled quickly, his starboard wing smashing into the port side of the Victor’s high T-tail and ripping it off.

  ‘I think this is going to be a Mayday,’ observed the pilot of the other Buccaneer over the RT as he watched the catastrophe unfold.

  At the same time as his tail was struck, Handscomb felt a slight change in pitch before the control yoke went completely slack. Behind him, structurally unsound and unable to withstand the huge stresses imposed on it, the starboard side of the tailplane also sheered off. His Victor, bunting forward into an outside loop that guaranteed it would break up, was finished. Handscomb immediately lost all control. He ordered his crew to abandon the aircraft but he knew that without ejection seats his backseaters had little hope. As the dying tanker accelerated into a terminal negative ‘g’ loop, the conditions could not have been more unfavourable for them to try to make their escape. Even if they had managed to unstrap from their seats they would only have been thrown and pinned to the roof of the cabin; forced against the outside wall of a fatal centrifuge. Less than 2,000 feet above the sea, with the jet already inverted, Handscomb’s ejection seat fired. Straps around his shins and shoulders tightened immediately as his Martin-Baker Mk 3 seat began its launch sequence. He was dimly aware that the cockpit was collapsing around him as five explosive cartridges fired in quick succession, catapulting the heavy seat through the roof at a speed of 80 feet per second. Within a second of the seat being triggered he was free, while behind him the doomed Victor was consumed by a fireball from the ruptured fuel tanks. Two hours later, through the combined efforts of a German freighter, SS Hoheburgh, and a bright-yellow RAF Whirlwind search and rescue helicopter, he was finally pulled from the North Sea, freezing cold and unable to recall the moment of his escape. It was six months before he’d recovered sufficiently from severe back injuries to strap himself back in to the ejection seat of another Victor. The rest of his five-man crew all lost their lives.

  ‘White Two, you’re rolling left.’

  The warning from Steve Biglands, terse and crackling over a discrete radio channel, punctured Tuxford’s inattention. If he and Rees had momentarily taken their eye off the ball, at least Biglands, flying to their right in starboard echelon, hadn’t. As Tux checked the controls, he felt himself flush, a mixture of adrenalin and embarrassment. He shook off his drowsiness and gently rolled the Victor’s crescent wings back straight and level. As he stretched and rolled his shoulders, he chastised himself, determined not to lose concentration again. And he thought of the hours ahead.

  Still nearly five hours away from the moment he could strap himself into the co-pilot’s seat, Pete Taylor tried to make himself useful. After the first refuelling he stepped up on to the ladder to the flightdeck to help check the Vulcan’s fuel tray, but mostly he was simply doing a good job keeping his colleagues supplied with cups of orange juice from the ration tin. They, in turn, maintained their vigil on the walls of dials, magnetic doll’s-eyes and flickering needles that surrounded them. Each man went through well-rehearsed routines that had, over many hours of training, become second nature.

  On the flight deck, Withers and Russell held the bomber’s place in the formation with an eye on the lights from the four Victors and small instinctive corrections to the stick. Every half-hour Hugh Prior ran through checks on the Vulcan’s crucial electrical systems and asked for a fuel check from the pilots. Bob Wright was under-employed. His H2S radar scanner would stay switched off until the bomb-run. During the long transit over the sea it was no good to them, but as they approached the islands, if switched on prematurely, its emissions would give them away. Instead he rehearsed the bomb-run in his mind’s eye, playing it through, step-by-ste
p, making sure that he was comfortable with it. But there was too much time to dwell on what lay ahead if he allowed himself to. He tried to keep his mind occupied. He unstrapped and stood on the ladder between the two pilots to look out ahead. He even tried reading, but despite being stuck into John Ralston Saul’s appropriately named political thriller Birds of Prey, Wright found it difficult to concentrate on it. He couldn’t help it, his thoughts kept turning to that bomb-run. Sitting next to him, Gordon Graham was monitoring the aircraft’s position. In front of him, the GPI6 provided continuous read-outs of latitude and longitude. A small discrepancy between the Vulcan’s automatic dead-reckoning equipment and what the INS was telling him was developing. And he didn’t yet entirely trust the twin Carousels. While there was no reason to doubt them, he felt uncomfortable putting all his eggs in one basket. Furthermore, if there was a problem with either, having two was not much better than having one. Like clocks telling different times, if one of the Carousels went awry, it was impossible to know which was right. As they reached the top of a cruise climb to 33,000 feet after the first refuelling bracket, Graham asked Bob Wright to take a star shot with the sextant so he could check their position against the night sky. Wright only managed to take one reading before they reached the next refuelling bracket. Flying in formation and frequently interrupted by the need to refuel, Graham and Wright realized they’d have to abandon their efforts at astro-navigation. It took too long. It needed relatively long periods of undisturbed, straight and level flying. In formation, leap-frogging from one refuelling bracket to the next, it just wasn’t going to work. Graham had no choice but to accept what the Carousels were telling him. On the flight deck, the two pilots prepared to refuel for the third time, initiating the checks for what, Dick Russell knew, was a complicated bracket. Withers initiated the pre-refuelling checks, keeping 607 back to the rear and starboard of the formation as the Victors began their intricate aerial dance.