James Blatch
THE FINAL FLIGHT
FOREWORD
It begins with nothing.
A space in the sky, silence on a radio channel.
A turn of the head in a control tower; a first inkling that something, somewhere, is not right.
There could be a range of benign explanations.
But old squadron hands sense death quickly.
Events unfold with their own momentum and a predictable narrative.
Somewhere in the countryside, a puzzled farmer stares at a plume of rising black smoke.
Within an hour of the missed radio call, a man in uniform knocks on the door of a married quarter.
He stands in silence, hoping his presence alone will convey the gravity of his message.
It always does.
Families mourn, but the men in flying coveralls must go back into the air.
They bury their friend, then bury their grief.
Away from public view, serious men with clipboards pore over the debris and piece together the sequence of events.
Arguments and compromise precede the publication of an official document on flimsy government paper.
It invariably contains two words. A final insult to young men who had so much of their lives to live but who died in the blink of an eye on a weekday afternoon.
Pilot error.
1966
1
TUESDAY 7TH JUNE
The peace of Blethwyn Valley was shattered for thirteen seconds.
The rabbits sensed the man-made thunder first and bolted for their burrows. The sheep, slow to react, scattered only as it arrived overhead, briefly blotting out the June sun. Invisible vortexes sent a buzzard tumbling in the air.
The four engines left a trail of black smoke in the disturbed wake and a deep rumble that quickly faded.
There were no witnesses.
The RAF Avro Vulcan bomber had come and gone on a sleepy weekday in a remote part of Wales.
The Welsh were at work.
And that’s how the men of the Royal Air Force Test Flying Unit liked it.
To be unobserved.
Had there been a witness—maybe a farmer turning his head at the sudden and loud intrusion to his otherwise tranquil surroundings—it’s doubtful he would have noticed anything unusual about this particular flight.
He may have been able to identify the Vulcan, perhaps because of its distinctive delta wing, but it’s less likely he would have spotted the bulge of white casing with a glass-panelled front, nestled under the nose of the bomber.
Although unremarkable in appearance, it was the most secret and significant item of military equipment on the planet.
Inside the white casing, behind the small glass panel, was a laser.
As far as the outside world was concerned, laser was a rudimentary and far from mobile technology.
But then the world doesn’t know what the world doesn’t know, and the men of the TFU were under threat of arrest to keep it that way.
As the Vulcan exited the far end of the valley, the wings rolled left, and the throttles edged up to eighty-five per cent of maximum to sustain the target speed through the turn. The stick eased back, the rudder deflected left—just a smidge—as the nose heaved thirty degrees and the jet rolled out on a new heading.
On board, not a single member of the crew had touched a flying control.
In fact, they were discussing the football.
Chris Milford tried to ignore the navigator’s drone regarding the England squad for the forthcoming World Cup. He didn’t share Steve Bright’s concern that there were too many West Ham players in the side. He understood the point about the Hammers being a pedestrian, unglamorous side that didn’t produce the type of flair players needed to win a World Cup, but Millie had work to do.
He concentrated on inserting a reel of magnetic tape into a brown cardboard sleeve. A simple enough task on the ground, but difficult when your seat is being hauled through the bumpy, low-level air at three hundred and fifty knots.
After a successful struggle, he scribbled a serial number on the cardboard and dipped into a pocket on his flying coveralls to pull out a small notepad. Millie adjusted the light that hung down on a pipe from the panel in front of him and added the tape serial number to a list. He had to pause as the jet rose and fell, weaving its way through the Welsh hills.
Alongside the serial number, he noted the date, flight number and time. He paused, casting his eye up the list of previous entries, noting the accumulation of flying hours.
So far, so good for project Guiding Light.
Millie tucked the notebook back into his pocket and turned his attention to the switches, dials and readouts in front of him.
Sitting in a well below the cockpit, facing backwards, he studied the converted navigator radar station.
The Guiding Light panel sparkled orange, electronically generated numbers pulsing as they changed in a rhythm directly linked to the aircraft’s proximity to the ground in feet.
Millie scrutinised the numbers.
The digits 307 flicked over to 312 and a moment later 305.
They had asked Guiding Light to fly the jet as close to, but not below, three hundred feet. It was doing a good job of the task.
Millie relaxed into his chair, but kept his eyes on the numbers.
He was still getting used to the marvel of it all. Somewhere behind the panel, electronics connected the laser’s range-finding data to the Vulcan autopilot.
Two pieces of technology in direct communication. Millie hoped they didn’t fall out with each other.
To Millie’s relief, the pilot Brian Hill interrupted Steve Bright’s football monologue with a clipped question over the intercom.
“How many more tapes?”
Millie pulled his oxygen mask over his face.
“That was the last one. I’m out now.”
“OK, we’ll stay at low-level until we get to the estuary as planned,” Hill replied.
With the recorder no longer capturing data from the laser, Millie wondered why they would continue at low-level. But he remained silent on the matter. It would only be a few minutes and he would continue to keep his human eyes on the orange digits.
Millie’s hand went up to a small black rotary dial beneath the main height readout. He rotated it, checking the distance to the ground at eleven pre-defined positions around the nose of the Vulcan.
In fact the system scanned twenty-seven separate positions sweeping from thirty degrees left and eighty degrees down all the way across to the same position on the right, taking in the view up to forty degrees above the nose.
The design engineer at DF Blackton once told him they began by mimicking how much a pilot’s eyes absorbed from the picture in front of him, and then worked to improve on that.
Millie noted the twelve hundred feet or so of space to their left and imagined the rocky side of a Welsh hill. He turned the dial back to the number one position, more or less straight down.
Two hundred and sixty-one feet to the unforgiving ground beneath them.
“Do you ever take your eyes off those numbers?”
Millie glanced across to Steve Bright and shrugged.
“Our lives in the hands of a stream of digits fed to a computer with this aircraft’s flaky electrical system? Yes, I like to keep an eye on them.”
Millie tried to be an amiable crewmate, but it was no secret he no longer enjoyed these trips. Squashed into a flying dungeon with the ever present threat of a sudden end to everything.
He looked back at Brighty; the nav looked bored. A consequence of his job being replaced by a flying computer.
“Hungry?”
Brighty perked up as Millie passed over a sandwich from his flight case.
He unlatched his seat, swivelled it around to face the empty middle position and stretched his legs. They ached from being squeezed under the workstation.