Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight had made up his mind that the AARIs had to fly any mission as part of the bomber crew. As he’d travelled to Waddington that evening, he considered the reaction his decision might provoke. With such store attached to V-bomber crews as cohesive units, he didn’t think it was going to be a popular move. Not only was there the possibly dented pride of the Vulcan crews to hurdle, but also the understandable surprise of the AARIs when they discovered that they’d be going in at the sharp end. Stealing himself to broach the subject, he was completely disarmed when, without prompting, John Reeve spoke up to make the suggestion himself. Knight paused, as if considering the idea, then he leaned over to Filbey and asked, ‘Is that a possibility do you think?’ Job done, Knight returned to Bawtry. He’d let John Laycock have the pleasure of telling the men from Marham.

  Chapter 22

  22 April 1982

  ‘You messy bastard, you’ve left your wiper running!’ It was all Ian Stanley could think of to lighten the situation. What do you say to a pilot who’s just scrambled clear of his crashed helicopter?

  The conditions endured by the SAS dropped on Fortuna Glacier had been horrific. The troopers were able to cover barely 500 yards over the treacherous crevasses and ice bridges, all the time assaulted by the biting, bruising wind. At nightfall, they tried to put up their tents only to have poles and fabric ripped from their hands. Instead, they chopped into the compacted ice to try to find some protection from the wind and snow. They made it through the night, but another one would surely bring hypothermia and frostbite. Wet, locked in a huddle and beaten by the weather, they were unable to perform any kind of military function.

  Antrim received the signal asking for an evacuation at ten o’clock that morning. Humphrey and the two HU5s were going to have to run the gauntlet again.

  The first attempt failed. While the two Wessex troop carriers remained in calmer conditions at low level, Ian Stanley spent half an hour searching for a route through the thick cloud to the waiting soldiers. With intermittent tail rotor control, ice building on the fuselage and a wildly fluctuating altimeter, he was forced to turn back.

  Two hours later, taking advantage of a break in the cloud over the glacier, they tried again. The sky was clear and Stanley led the loose formation up over the crawling river of ice towards orange smoke grenades triggered by the stranded SAS party. The wind, though, was still ferocious. Their engines straining against it, the helicopters put down and the troops bundled in.

  From the right-hand pilot’s seat of one of the HU5s, Lieutenant Mike Tidd watched anxiously as another squall of cloud and snow gusted towards him. In the back of the Wessex, his Aircrewman, Sergeant ‘Tug’ Wilson, was already pouring hot coffee for his grateful cargo. Tidd thumbed the RT, requesting immediate clearance from Stanley. Stanley let him go. The pilot increased the revs, pulled up on the cyclic and, nose down, scudded north. Then the squall overtook him. White-out. Tidd couldn’t see the rocks, but banked to avoid them. He couldn’t see anything. The altimeter spun down. Instinctively, Tidd applied full power a moment before the helicopter’s tail and main rotor clipped the ice, ripping the whole aircraft round on to its side. The Wessex scraped along the glacier before coming to a final rest eighty yards away in a bank of soft snow. Tidd went through the drills, shutting down the fuel and electrics before, along with his passengers, abandoning the wrecked helicopter. For some reason, a single wiper blade continued to sweep pathetically to and fro across the windscreen.

  * * *

  The unravelling of PARAQUAT provided the most acute cause of concern for the Defence Chiefs so far. After Tidd’s crash the second Wessex HU5 was also caught in a white-out and destroyed. Only Humphrey survived the appalling conditions. The operation to retake South Georgia – the much-hoped-for boost to the country’s morale – had got off to a truly disastrous start. Had it not been for some remarkable, brave flying by Stanley the situation might have been catastrophic. Wondering privately how long his luck was going to hold out, the Fleet Air Arm pilot had taken Humphrey up on to the glacier for a sixth time and had squeezed the remaining troops and marooned helicopter crews into the cramped hold. Dangerously overloaded, the old single-engined helicopter returned to Antrim. Too heavy to hover, she’d slammed into the deck in a one-chance-to-pull-it-off controlled crash landing.

  On Whitehall, at a table dominated by a high-backed wooden chair that had once belonged to Mountbatten, the First Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Michael Beetham, chaired a meeting of the current Chiefs. They chewed over the disaster on Fortuna Glacier and subsequent attempts by special forces to infiltrate by inflatable boat, which had also ended in failure. While they’d been exceptionally lucky that there’d been no loss of life so far, the bottom line was that British forces had made no progress towards retaking the island. And worse, there were now intelligence reports that an Argentine diesel-electric submarine was in the area. They were at an impasse. And there seemed to be no clear way of forcing the situation forward.

  * * *

  The long-range missions to South Georgia had helped orientate the Victor force to operating over the huge distances involved. What had been planned in theory was working in practice. The more the Victors were flown, the more reliable they seemed to become. In reality, though, this did little to lighten the load on the shoulders of Squadron Leader Bill Lloyd, the head of the engineering detachment. The most obvious difficulty on Wideawake’s exposed pan was the abrasive volcanic dust. It was kicked up every time the wind blew. So when four Rolls-Royce Conway engines spooled up, the effect was predictable. Every effort was made to protect the jets. They were parked as far back as possible, often the entire empennage hung over the dust beyond the hardstanding. This saved limited space, but it also meant that when dirt and debris was thrown up by the jet exhausts, it was blown off the hardstanding, away from engine intakes of the other aircraft. The Tarmac, too, caused unforeseen problems. It was softened by the heat and the degrading effects of spilt Avtur, so the heavy, fuelled-up Victors would sink into it. Freeing themselves from these ruts used extra power, which blew up extra dust. So before engine start, the ground crew would tow the Victors forward a few feet so that their wheels could roll unhindered.

  Despite all the precautions, the metal compressor blades of the Victors’ four turbojets soon acquired the polished appearance of mirrors.

  The main headache, though, remained the HDU, the hose-drum unit. Mounted in the belly of the Victor, the HDU, pronounced ‘hoodoo’, was an old piece of kit with a reputation for being temperamental. In contrast to the airframes themselves, the more it was used, the more worn out it seemed to become. And that was a big problem.

  The principle was simple: the fuel hose unfurled from the drum unit like a thread from a cotton reel. There were powerful forces at work on the mechanism, though, and these needed to be balanced. Gravity and drag would ensure that the hose trailed. Once it was in position, hydraulic motors were kept on, poised to wind in the slack caused by the impact of the receiving aircraft. Without them, when a receiver made contact with the drogue, a loop caused by even a gentle impact could travel up and down the hose like a wave, damaging either the receiver’s probe or the tanker itself. The condition of the HDU was monitored intently by the Victor’s Nav Radar. The strength of the electrical current drawn by the hydraulic motor was the main indicator of the HDU’s health. If it didn’t function, they couldn’t tank.

  The last part of the refuelling system was the fuel pump. Powered by a turbine driven with compressed air from the engines, it operated at enormously high speeds. If it broke up, it did so explosively. Unrestrained kinetic energy would throw out slices of broken metal in all directions. It was like a bomb going off inside the aircraft. At the very least, it could create a ring of jagged holes around the circumference of the fuselage, weakening it like the perforations on a sheet of stamps. If you were unlucky, it would take out fuel lines and hydraulics too. A catastrophic failure of the fuel pump meant that losing the abil
ity to refuel would be the least of the unfortunate crew’s problems.

  Underneath the khaki canvas of the Ascension Ops centre, some of the Victor captains considered the possibility of the HDU failing. Could they, in extremis, use either of the Mk 20 wingpods? Tux talked it through with the two 57 Squadron Flight Commanders, Martin Todd and Barry Neal. Even if it was the only chance of saving the jet it seemed unlikely. When they placed plan drawings of the Victors next to each other it became clear just how difficult it would be. It was one thing for a small jet fighter like a Lightning to hold station behind the wing of a Victor, but to try it in another Victor was a recipe for disaster. The eighty-foot hose on the centreline was nearly twice the length of those that trailed out of the wingpods. Making contact with the baskets trailing from the pods would bring the receiving Victor’s wing dangerously close to the tail of the tanker. On top of this, the receiver’s own high tail would sit right in the turbulent vortices spinning off the tanker’s wingtip. When it was needed most, control would be near impossible.

  Even if the wingpods had been able to transfer enough fuel to make the effort worthwhile – which was, at best, marginal – it was a non-starter. If the Mk 20s were all that could save you, you were shafted either way.

  Simon Baldwin sat alone at his desk with a cup of coffee and his pipe. He shared Mick Cooper’s doubts about how they were training to go in. As a clearer picture of the Argentine air defences had emerged his own concerns had grown. The previous night the 44 Squadron boss hadn’t been able to sleep. As he’d lain in bed, different ideas and possibilities raced through his mind. Assuming the Victors could get the Vulcan to the right place, he had to take care of two things: he had to try to ensure his crew survived and he had to maximize their chances of destroying the target, which, although yet to be confirmed, seemed certain to be a runway. An enthusiast like Cooper could talk for Britain about the different bombing options available. He’d hoarded official Air Ministry publications on bombs dating back to 1948. From practice bombs to the 22,000lb Grand Slam, he could tell you what sort of impact to expect. Of course, he’d tell you, it also depended on whether you used cast or machined cases; what fusing and detonator combination you chose. You could have instantaneous explosions or anything else up to a 144-hour delay (should you decide to ignore the Geneva Convention). And you could mix it all up within one bombload if you liked.

  Baldwin knew that with more definitive information on the Argentine defences he had to reconsider the attack options. The Argentine low-level defences now looked extremely strong, and if the troops were on the ball, the Vulcan making a low-level attack could be exposed to an appalling barrage of anti-aircraft fire as it flew all the way down the runway at 300 feet. On top of this, the laydown attack was also by no means guaranteed to hit the target. The normal procedure was for the Nav Radar to issue directions until the pilot could make a positive identification of the target, and take over to make the final corrections visually. This approach was hard to fault in good visibility, and the Night Navigation Goggles meant that it remained an option in darkness. However, with the imminent onset of the Falklands winter, there was every possibility that the weather would be diabolical. In snow or fog the pilots would be all but blind, meaning that the attack would have to be carried out using the NBS and its antique computers. The runway was only about forty yards wide and radar bomb attacks were not always that accurate. There would be a strong probability that the Vulcan would end up decorating the airfield with a neat line of craters running parallel to the runway. Miss with one and you’d miss with them all.

  And yet this wasn’t the clincher. Baldwin knew that from 300 feet, even if they got the bombs on target, there was a danger that they just wouldn’t do the necessary damage. On a laydown attack the 1,000lb bombs slowed down by their small parachutes wouldn’t hit the runway at sufficient velocity, or at a steep enough angle, to do the job. There would be insufficient penetration for them to do more than pockmark the hard surface of the strip.

  Baldwin’s mind began to turn to the possibility of using a bombing technique he’d practised as a young Navigator during his first tour in the Air Force on Canberras in Singapore in the mid 1960s. The bombers would run in towards the target at low level, and shortly before the target, pop up to a height of 7,000 feet, and level off for a short run-in to the release point. Back then, the reason for using the tactic had been self-preservation. The potential targets at that time were Indonesian airfields and a pop-up to 7,000 feet put the Canberra out of range of the Indonesian anti-aircraft batteries. But the pop-up brought with it another crucial advantage: they could use ballistic bombs instead of retarded thousand-pounders.

  To properly break up a Tarmac runway, these needed to be falling nearly vertically – at an aerodynamic terminal velocity of over 1,000 feet per second. They would then penetrate deep underneath the Tarmac into the substrata and destroy the strip from below, exploding upwards to rip out its foundations and leave a huge crater. Baldwin wasn’t sure of the exact dimensions but he knew it would be big – big enough for any aircraft trying to take off to fall into. The effect wouldn’t simply be more spectacular; it would also be more permanent. Like a test match wicket, a runway, once damaged, is unlikely to be quite the same again. Even if it was patched up efficiently, a deep hole would always be liable to subside, ensuring that it was out of action as far as fast jets were concerned. A very comprehensive repair was possible, but it would take days rather than hours, and that was assuming the Argentinians had the equipment, material and expertise on the islands to even contemplate it.

  Baldwin now turned his attention to how he was going to keep the bomber safe. Soviet long-range ground-to-air missiles, supplemented by fighters with air-to-air missiles, had forced the V-force to low level. The Argentine fighters on the mainland were too far away to interfere. Word from Intelligence was that there were no fighters based at Port Stanley. Even if there were, though, at low level the Vulcan would retain a large measure of surprise. In the short time it would be exposed to the Argentine search radars – from early in the pop-up climb to bomb release – the Argentinians would struggle to get a fighter airborne.

  Baldwin checked against his graph of the Argentine air defences. At 2,000 feet – the minimum from which the bombs could be dropped and reach terminal velocity – the bomber’s chances of survival were slim…Roland: kill zone – 12,800 feet. He asked the Station Intelligence Officer to check again with his Intelligence community whether or not Roland was deployed on the islands. The answer he got was the same. Roland, Baldwin was told, had not been deployed. He moved on. Tiger Cat burns out at 8,500 feet, but it’s visually aimed… so barely threat at all at medium level at night. Oerlikon – that was what he was really worried about – 6,400 feet. Give it a bit for the wife and kids…8,000 feet. That should put them above the kill zone.

  Keeping out of the kill zone was the critical step, but it didn’t completely remove the aircraft from danger. The Argentine high-explosive cannon shells would continue to heights well above the kill zone and explode automatically at the end of their upward flight. That they were travelling relatively aimlessly at this stage would be no consolation to the crew if they happened to fly into one. He could raise the height of the bomb-run to, say, 20,000 feet, which would put the aircraft well above everything the Argentinians had, deployed or otherwise, but this was likely to have a hopelessly detrimental effect on bombing accuracy. And Baldwin knew from his Canberra days that there were no data or formulae to give him a clue to the rate at which accuracy degraded with height. He sought opinions from some of the Nav Radars, but none felt confident of hitting the small runway from 20,000 feet. This came as no surprise; he knew that to hit the runway, the lower the better.

  To reassure himself, he again turned to kill-zone graphs. The kill zones and burn-out zones are roughly hemispherical. He imagined half a grapefruit placed flat side down over a map of the target. Providing the attacking Vulcan stayed outside the grapefruit it was reasonably
safe. At 8,000 feet plus it would always be above the apex of the hemisphere – above the vertical limit of the Oerlikon kill zone. On a flatter trajectory, though, the cannon’s range was greater – perhaps two and a quarter miles. But the guns weren’t going to find the Vulcan down low. She’d be running in at 8,000 feet, releasing the bombs two miles from the target and relying on their forward throw to carry them the rest of the way to the target as they fell. At worst, the Vulcan wouldn’t do much more than pierce the skin of the grapefruit.

  So above the kill zone, with the added insurance of the Dash 10 jamming pod, 8,000 feet plus looked a realistic, acceptably safe attack height. But it meant that the crews would have to aim the bombs using the H2S radar alone. And with the inherent inaccuracies of the old NBS computer, they didn’t have a hope in hell of sticking a line of bombs along the centreline of a runway that was only forty yards wide.

  During the Second World War, it had been calculated that the optimum angle at which to attack a runway was not at 90 degrees to the centreline but at about 35 degrees. The experience and calculations had stood the test of time. The Nav Radar’s bomb control unit, the 90-Way, allowed him to adjust the stick spacing – the distance between the bombs as they hit the ground – by setting different time intervals between bomb releases. He would need to calculate the stick spacing necessary to ensure that even if successive bombs straddled the runway, they were close enough for the resulting craters still to bite deep into both edges of the runway. Nothing could ever be for certain with NBS, but they did have a good chance of getting a bomb on the runway.

  So Baldwin had a plan: low-level approach under the search radars; pop up to 8,000 feet or a little above; jam the gun radars – if necessary – with the Dash 10 pod; drop free-fall thousand-pounders, with an appropriate stick spacing, in a classic 35 degree runway cut. The bombs should hit the target and do the necessary damage. The element of surprise would count in their favour by giving the Argentinians very little time to react, and the Vulcan should be safe from the anti-aircraft defences. It was obviously not without risk, but as he sat back and considered the plan, Baldwin thought: Nobody has ever designed a war without risk. And, in any case, he felt he had another trump card. He knew his crews were very good.