Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  First of all, Red Two refuelled Red Four. Ten minutes later, the transfer complete, Red Two banked gently across the sky to the right and took up a position ahead of 607, ready to refuel the Vulcan. Martin Withers watched to his left as Tux in White Two drifted across the sky to the left and dropped in behind Red Four to take on fuel. Twenty minutes later, tanks full to 123,000lb again, Tux fell back and the coupling was broken. Then, as planned by Red Rag Control, he moved across to the right as Steve Biglands in White Four slotted in behind the tanker to take on the 14 tons of fuel that would carry him south. Framed by the ironwork of the Vulcan canopy Withers saw the floodlit undersides of the three Victors rise and fall and move forward and back together against the tar black sky; a careful three-dimensional ballet. Despite the appearance of grace and calm, 33,000 feet below the sea was speeding past at over 500 miles an hour.

  Four hours into the mission and nearly 2,000 miles south of Ascension, Withers nosed the Vulcan towards Red Two. As 607 approached from dead astern, the bright-white shape of the Victor’s planform grew until it filled the cockpit windows. Withers focused on it, barely blinking. Gloved in soft, pale-grey pig-skin, one hand kept a light grip on the pistol-grip stick while the other spread across the four central throttle levers. Using the heel of his hand he carefully nudged them forward and pulled them back, maintaining settings between 80 and 90 per cent, where the Rolls-Royce engines were at their most responsive. Next to him, Dick Russell kept a watchful eye on Withers’ approach, ready to react to any developments before they became dangerous. The tip of the probe felt for the drogue as 607 closed at around 2 or 3 knots – slow enough to be safe, fast enough to push the hose back into the HDU with enough force to trigger the fuel flow. Through their headsets, the rest of Withers’ crew heard the sound of their captain breathing in and out. Aboard the Victor, the Nav Radar watched 607 through his periscope and relayed the bomber’s progress to the rest of the tanker crew over the intercom.

  As the red lights on either side of the Victor’s HDU winked out, Withers flew forward through the mild buffeting that always accompanied the last few feet before contact. The drogue seemed to hover ahead of him, almost still, but gently responding to the imperfections of the fluid air in which it was being trailed. When the tip of the probe hit target, rollers inside the basket rode over it and gripped it to create a secure, watertight coupling. The Victor’s Nav Radar continued his commentary.

  Aboard 607, Withers and Russell watched the two green lights come on, and, through the probe, non-return valves and four-inch-thick bifurcated pipes that ran underneath their feet, Avtur began to flush into the number 1 and 2 tanks behind them at over a ton a minute. Contact made, Withers passed control to Russell in the right-hand seat, and for the next fifteen minutes the experienced AARI comfortably held the big delta in close formation behind the Victor – less than twenty yards from her tailcone.

  At the end of the second refuelling bracket, two more Victors peeled away from the formation to head home to Ascension. As they settled on to a north-westerly heading they would begin to enjoy the assistance of a 60-knot tailwind. Flying into the same wind, the attack formation pressed on towards the Falklands. There were now just three of them: Bob Tuxford, Steve Biglands flying the long-slot, and the Vulcan. The V-bomber three-ship formation cruised on south at 33,000 feet, still unaware of the biting fuel problems that jeopardized the success of their mission. Neither did they know that one of the two Victors that had just rolled away from them was now in serious trouble. Aboard Red Four, the AEO was trying to raise Wideawake on the HF radio: Three Tango Foxtrot Niner, this is Quebec Five Charlie, over… Three Tango Foxtrot Niner, this is Quebec Five Charlie, over…

  Chapter 34

  At 0520, an hour and a half before sunrise and six and a half hours after the first thirteen aircraft had departed, the first of four Victors accelerated with a buzzsaw roar down Ascension’s long runway and climbed away over the sea. As they left the Wideawake circuit they set course for the Rio RV, an agreed lat/long point above the South Atlantic over three hours’ flying time to the south-west. Barry Neal and his crew had been on the ground for less than two hours. Two of the other crews had also already flown that night. For one of them, Frank Milligan’s crew, which included the Victor detachment boss, Alan Bowman, as its Nav Plotter, it was a chance to make up for their disappointment earlier on. They’d been forced to return within an hour of BLACK BUCK’s launch with a faulty HDU. They were flying the same Victor now. XL163 had her chance to make amends. The departing formation had just one task: to bring the Vulcan home.

  Three minutes after the departure of the recovery wave, Red Rag Control began picking up transmissions through the static on the HF. Somebody was trying to make contact.

  High-frequency – or shortwave – radio had long been used as a method of long-range communication by the RAF. It works through radio transmissions being reflected by the ionosphere and bounced back towards the earth’s surface, hundreds of miles below. But while communication over great distances is possible, HF is vulnerable to the effects of changing atmospheric conditions. Night or day, summer or winter, even the eleven-year solar cycle and sunspots affect the ionosphere’s ability to reflect radio waves and, as a result, the performance of HF radio communications. As listeners to the BBC’s World Service know only too well, frequencies can strengthen and fade away through the course of a single night.

  The variable quality of HF reception in the Ops tent at Wideawake meant that following the mission’s progress involved guesswork, intuition and anticipation. Little could be entirely relied on and much of what was picked up made no sense at all. This confusion was compounded by the changes that had necessarily taken place within the formation. But as Jeremy Price and the rest of the Red Rag team tried to piece together the mission’s progress from talking to returning crews and the fragments of clear radio traffic, they tried to be prepared. So when, at 0523, Quebec Five Charlie crackled through the HF reporting a fuel leak, Price was able to scramble a jet to meet him. With John Elliott’s crew ready to go, the Victor was airborne just eight minutes after the request came in. Elliott had been on one of the four jets that had returned on vapours from the first refuelling bracket. So as he took to the air, he and the rest of his crew understood all too well the tension they were feeling aboard Quebec Five Charlie.

  As the rumble of Elliott’s engines receded into the distance, Price allowed himself the briefest of moments to reflect. His foresight in having a TAT on standby might just have saved the lives of one of his crews. If the jet hadn’t been made ready to go it would never have been airborne quickly enough to meet the damaged inbound Victor in time. Nice one, Cyril, he thought, and lit another cigarette.

  They’d already flown as far as London is from Timbuktu. And on board 607, Gordon Graham was becoming concerned about the flight plan. There was a discrepancy emerging between what the Carousels were telling him and where his flight plan and slide rule told him they should be. As far as he could tell, six hours from Ascension, they were nearly half an hour out. On top of this he’d noticed that they seemed to be burning fuel at a far higher rate than had been expected. What that might mean, he didn’t know, but it was unlikely to be good news. Potentially more alarming was the slight but definite difference in what the two Carousels were telling him, a discrepancy that seemed to be increasing.

  There was normally a healthy trade in chicken legs as the crew bartered with the contents of the ration tin. This time, though, the food on board remained untouched. Only the orange juice doled out by Pete Taylor was accepted gratefully, but they gulped it down at a price. It was running straight through them. With the third fuel bracket looming and beyond that the run-in to the target, Martin Withers knew he couldn’t put it off any longer. He had to take a leak. If he went now, at least he could take advantage of the relative quiet to overcome the rigmarole of immersion suits and pee-tubes. He handed control of the bomber to Dick Russell and got to work. After loosening the straps on h
is seat harness, he’d just managed to unzip the heavy rubber suit when patches of cloud obscured Russell’s view of the formation to the left. Withers though still had visual contact with the Victors so, with perfect comic timing, Russell handed the jet back to her captain.

  ‘You have control,’ he said with a grin, and Withers, with his one free hand, was forced to take over from his smiling AARI.

  Martin Withers throttled back a little as they began their descent from the 33,000-foot cruising height to the refuelling height 4,000 feet below. During contact, with two large aircraft flying in close formation, the extra power and control that came in the lower, thicker air was welcome. Tonight it would be crucial. At night, with their radars switched off, they had no way of seeing what lay ahead. But, on what had been a gin-clear night lit only by bright stars, those first smudges of cloud warned of heavy weather ahead.

  The numbers in the Ops tent had thinned out a little. Monty had gone to bed in the early hours, leaving his AEO, John Hathaway, to hold the fort. They’d agreed to swap shifts in the morning. Air Vice-Marshal Chesworth had also turned in. It made sense: there was nothing either of them could add to the work being done by Price and his Ops team.

  At 0600, another message made it through to Red Rag Control on the HF. Red Rag Control, this is Quebec Five Charlie. Request RV at 13°30′ south, 17°48′ west at 0622, over. Red Rag read the message back to them to confirm it, then tried to raise Elliott in the outbound TAT to tell him of the inbound Victor’s suspected fuel leak. They passed him a bearing and distance and confirmed the RV on channel 15. And, they stressed, he should make his best possible speed to the struggling jet.

  Only soldiers were out on the streets of Stanley at night. As the civilian population slept behind blacked-out windows, the occasional Argentine military vehicle moved around with masked headlights. A light wind blew from the south-west. Once again, residents of the wooden houses on the hill at the back of town had sought comfort and safety in the centre. Hilda Perry and her husband had their chairs and sofas full with sleeping guests. In Sparrowhawk House, John and Ileen Smith were putting up their friends Duffy and Jeannie with the kids Eli and Maxwell as well as their own four children. Joe King had been forced into a pair of pyjamas. The seven people staying with him and his wife may have been friends, but that didn’t mean they deserved to see him wandering around in a vest and Jockey Y-fronts. Leona Vidal and her brother Glen slept soundly. On the night of the invasion, their mother had made them sleep fully clothed with their shoes next to the bed. Things had settled down, but to Leona, too young to fully appreciate the anger and anguish caused by the occupation, much of what was going on still seemed exciting and different. Elsewhere, Liz Goss and her young family were staying with her in-laws and Peter Biggs and his wife Fran, despite advice, were defiantly sleeping on the first floor of the two-storey house. If they were going to die, they decided, they’d rather die in the comfort of their own bed.

  On Sapper Hill, to the south-west of Stanley, the powerful Argentine AN/TPS 43 search radar of the FAA Vigilancia y Control Aereo scanned the skies. Since 13 April, when the crews and their equipment had moved during the night from near the airfield to this new location, they’d trained hard. They followed the comings and goings of the streams of aircraft supplying the islands from Argentina. They marked fixed echoes from ground features and they tried to determine the possible lines of approach by jets from the British aircraft carriers. And as FAA Mirages, Daggers and Skyhawks staged practice attacks from mainland bases, they honed their skills by tracking the low-flying strike fighters.

  Fourteen anti-aircraft batteries manned by crews from the Air Force, Army and Marines ringed BAM Malvinas. Similarly dispersed around the airfield were the Four Superfledermaus and Skyguard fire-control radars that directed the barrels of the 30mm Hispano-Suiza and 35mm Oerlikon cannons. And on the outskirts of Stanley, looking east across the harbour, over the three-masted silhouette of the rusting wreck of an old cargo ship, Lady Elizabeth, was the twin Aerospatiale/MBB Roland surface-to-air missile launcher: deployed, ready and lethal way above the 10,000 feet at which the crew of Vulcan 607 planned to fly their bomb-run. The Roland fire unit was the pride of Grupo de Artillería de Defensa Aerea 601. Despite his confidence in the system, the men who operated it and their training, their commander, Hector Lubin Arias, regretted not being able to field more of them. Very sad, he thought. Along with the radar-laid Oerlikons, it was a weapon that he knew had the potential to influence the course of a war.

  * * *

  Green on, fuel flows, reported Ernie Wallis as he saw the flashing navigation lights of the Vulcan through his rear-view periscope for the first time. Bob Tuxford and his crew were nearly done. Finish topping up 607’s tanks then do the same for Steve Biglands in the long-slot Victor and they’d be on their way home. Job done. With its tanks full, the Vulcan dropped back, pulling the drogue with it until the tip of the probe tugged free of its grip. As the Vulcan slowly lost ground on the big tanker, the two red lights on either side of the HDU blinked on and 607 rolled gently away to the right. Withers and Russell soon checked their drift to the right to take up station a couple of hundred feet behind in a loose starboard echelon formation. Then they watched as the two Victors drew together.

  As Biglands closed on the trailing basket, Tux started to lose sight of the stars for the first time that night. Withers and Russell watched as the two floodlit tankers began to flick in and out of the cloud tops. At 31,000 feet, the three-ship attack formation was flying directly into the path of a raging electrical storm, at 40 degrees south, just as the Met officer had warned.

  The crews felt their stomachs lurch as they dropped through the first pockets of turbulent air. Wrapped in dense arms of cumulonimbus, the jets began to buck violently, smacked around by rising, twisting air that jolted and juddered the airframes like heavy seas pummelling the hull of a ship.

  While a receiver manoeuvred behind to make contact, the Victor tanker would normally engage the autopilot. It was less tiring for both crews. Any mild turbulence would affect both jets in the same way and they would ride it together, rising and falling as one. But this time the sky was too violent. Tux flicked off the autopilot to try to keep his jet stable manually. As he gripped the throttles and stick, his gloved hands working hard, he was thrown against the straps of his harness. His seat bucketed out on the bottom of its rails whenever the nose of the Victor was thrown upwards. The thuds and bangs of the aircraft’s sharp movements were more visceral than audible. Instead, heard through thickly padded Bone Domes, the winding up and slowing down of the jet engines’ spinning turbines provided the urgent soundtrack to Tux’s struggle to keep the Victor where he wanted it.

  In the Vulcan, the physical discomfort was, if anything, even worse. The Victor’s long, slender wings flexed up and down like shock absorbers to disperse some of the storm’s ferocity, but the Vulcan’s more rigid construction transmitted it to the men flying her with the same bone-jarring directness of a cartwheel on a cobbled street. Always sensitive to sudden changes in pitch, the autopilot quickly tripped out under the onslaught. Instead, Withers flew the jet manually – always confident that the power and the responsiveness of the Olympus engines would keep him out of trouble.

  The dazzling white flashes of lightning destroyed Tux’s night vision. For a split second he could see everything with blinding intensity before being left blinking, straining even to see the instrument panel two feet ahead of him. Lightning didn’t just pose a threat to his view forward though. Great efforts were made by aircraft manufacturers to ensure that any strike was conducted directly from the extremity, like a wingtip, where it was likely to hit, to another extremity, like the tail, where it would exit. Particular attention was given to protecting an aircraft’s fuel system. Thick skin around the tanks was designed to prevent burn through and structural joins were tight to prevent sparks. Every critical component had to be capable of withstanding a direct strike. But while lightning damage was rare, i
t could be catastrophic. In 1963, eighty-one people were killed when lightning brought down a Boeing 707 airliner. And Tux himself had already once had a close call. While he was crossing the Atlantic, a lightning bolt had punched a hole through the metal of his Victor’s wing, taking out the whole of his compass system. Only a skilful talk-down through a 200-foot cloud-base by Goose Bay’s air traffic controllers saved the jet on that occasion.

  The best defence against lightning was simply to avoid it. So flying through a powerful electrical storm while trying to pass fuel from one aircraft to another had little to recommend it. As they flew, St Elmo’s fire crackled blue, white and purple in the hot, ionized air outside the flight deck windows to give a constant, insidious reminder of the electrical threat. They all knew that the plasma only appeared when there were very high voltages in the air.

  It was Steve Biglands, though, who was suffering most. While trying to make contact with the trailing hose, his view ahead was strobing like a drug-fuelled rock video. The sky burnt white for an instant, then Tux’s Victor would be almost completely obscured by cloud before emerging briefly into clear skies. The unpredictable sequence was relentless. But whatever the visual challenges, it remained the punishing turbulence that made it nearly impossible for Biglands to make contact. The basket, which normally appeared to sit nearly still in the air, was jerking up and down by ten feet and more. Any attempt to connect by formating on the fluorescent lines on the tanker’s belly was doomed to failure. Somehow Biglands was going to have to try to anticipate the drogue’s movements and intercept it. On board the tanker, Ernie Wallis watched astern as Biglands tried in vain to stab the elusive basket. Red out, maintaining astern, he reported over the intercom. But however dispassionate his commentary, the old Nav Radar – Mr Flight Refuelling – didn’t think ‘Biggles’ was going to be able to do it. In a twenty-five-year career he’d been witness to every kind of attempt to make contact, good, bad, hopeless and dangerous, but he’d never seen anything like what he was watching now.