And in April 1948 a party of senior USAF officers arrived in Dorset to see if Cobham’s system could improve the prospects for their vast new nuclear bomber, Convair’s B-36 Peacemaker, then losing a fierce battle with the US Navy for Congressional funding. A contract with Cobham was signed soon after – the USAF were planning a surprise.
Before dawn on 7 December 1948 – the seventh anniversary of Pearl Harbor’s Day of Infamy – a heavily laden Boeing B-50 bomber clawed its way into the air from Carswell Air Force Base, Fort Worth, Texas, and, using the refuelling equipment Cobham had saved from the scrapyard, flew non-stop to Hawaii to carry out an undetected mock nuclear attack on that same US Navy Pacific base before returning to Texas.
Two and a half months later, another B-50 – Lucky Lady II – flew non-stop around the world. She was airborne for nearly four days.
As a result, Congress cancelled the US Navy’s ambitious 70,000-ton super-carrier and the ‘Magnesium Overcast’, the name given to the USAF’s vast B-36 bomber, became the spearhead of Strategic Air Command until the arrival of the B-52 in the middle of the next decade. But in Britain, the Air Ministry and RAF remained unmoved by the Americans’ success and by Cobham’s ‘slow bombardment of letters’. Instead, it was the winning combination of one impetuous remark and the inspiration of a Sunday morning lie-in that finally led the RAF to begin embracing the new technology.
While enjoying lunch with senior USAF officers at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in 1948, Cobham heard not only of Boeing’s development of its own refuelling system for Strategic Air Command’s heavy bombers, but of the Tactical Air Command’s interest in any new air-to-air refuelling technique it might use for its single-seat fighters. The Englishman brazenly claimed that work on a suitable system for the latter was well advanced at Tarrant Rushton. The remark was utterly without foundation, but the American generals, sensing they may have found what they were looking for, arranged to visit the small Dorset factory in the spring of 1949 – just four months later.
Until now, the ‘looped hose’ system, on which all Flight Refuelling Ltd’s operations had been based, was literally hit or miss. The receiving aircraft had to extend a weighted hauling line behind it as it flew. A grappling hook-like projectile was then fired from a tanker aircraft at the trailing line. If the harpoon made contact, the receiver’s hauling line was then wound in towards the tanker. Inside the tanker, it was attached to the end of the tanker’s fuel hose before being used to wind the whole coupling back to the tail of the receiver. Only once the tanker’s fuel hose was connected to the fuel coupling at the back of the receiver could fuel flow. While it may have been easier to perform than it at first sounds, it could in no way be considered a routine or straightforward manoeuvre.
The Americans, while they’d appreciated the potential of in-flight refuelling, knew that something entirely more practical than the ‘looped hose’ system had to be devised for it to see regular squadron service. And that is exactly what Cobham had promised them he had up his sleeve.
He now had to conceive, design and test a completely new system before they arrived in Dorset, hoping to be impressed. His designers eliminated unfeasible options until they settled on a method that looked good: a receiver aircraft would fly a probe-mounted nozzle into a funnel-shaped drogue trailed behind the tanker. It nearly never got off the drawing board, however. The problem that could have killed it was finally solved when an engineer, Peter Macgregor, lying in bed on a Sunday morning, considered the way his spring-loaded roller blinds retracted. If, he thought, a similar spring was mounted in the drum unit trailing the hose and drogue, it could keep the hose taut when contact was made, eliminating the whipping and looping that had so far made the system unworkable and dangerous. Just two days before the Generals arrived, the new system was tested for the first time using a Lancaster and Gloster Meteor 3, blagged from the RAF by the ever-resourceful Cobham. His brilliantly simple method had been produced with a typically British lack of governmental support. And with no sign whatsoever of that situation changing, a little over a year later Cobham was forced to sell the manufacturing rights to the Americans to keep his company solvent.
Not until 1954 did the Air Staff, perhaps persuaded by the USAF’s operational success with Cobham’s probe-and-drogue system in the Korean War, finally come to the conclusion that there was merit in giving their new V-force an air-to-air refuelling capability.
While sixty miles from Marham, on the other side of the Wash, RAF Waddington prepared for a mission that had long before ceased to be part of the Vulcan’s repertoire, at the Norfolk tanker base the story was rather different. Unlike most parts of the RAF, Marham’s Victor K2s of 55 and 57 Squadrons did in peacetime exactly what they would have to do in war – refuel the RAF’s fighters and other fast jets, keeping them in the air, giving them the range to reach their targets. In fact, throughout the Cold War, the tankers had fought a war that felt as real as the one waged by Roger Lane-Nott’s beloved submarine service.
At fighter stations like RAF Leuchars, Wattisham and Binbrook, McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms and English Electric Lightnings sat fuelled and armed in their hangars on Quick Reaction Alert. Their crews maintained a twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year vigil, ready to scramble at a moment’s notice to intercept intruders into UK airspace. These were invariably the Bear and Bison bombers of the Soviet Long Range and Naval Air Forces. On average there were five incursions into UK airspace a week, each testing the reaction of Britain’s stretched air defences. The Soviet bombers would come in from the north, probing through the Faeroes–Iceland gap. All had to be intercepted, identified and turned back by the RAF. Without the support of the Victor K2s the fighters, particularly the notoriously short-ranged Lightning, simply couldn’t have kept the Soviets at bay.
The ‘tanker trash’, as the Marham crews referred to themselves with pride, were doing their job for real. There was no question of them using training rounds, or checking bombing scores with cameras and computers. If they failed to deliver, in peacetime or in war, there was always potential for disaster.
As a result, Marham was a close-knit family. Many of the crews had been on the Victor K2s from day one. A number of them helped devise and refine the operating procedures that made the RAF tanker force one of the most flexible, effective and safe in the world. Safety during in-flight refuelling was always the responsibility of the ‘tanker trash’. It was a mindset that was ingrained – the life or death of the receiver was paramount.
Group Captain Jeremy Price liked things to be neat – done just so. The thoughtful, well-groomed tanker man had spent much of his professional life making sure that this was as true of air-to-air refuelling as it was of the vintage Aston Martin Ulster that he’d lovingly restored. He’d devised refuelling procedures that took decisions on safety out of the hands of stubborn fighter pilots with an aversion to admitting defeat. Another opportunity to put his skills to the test was as much a reminder of a bygone age as the old Aston: the 1969 Daily Mail Transatlantic Air Race. Price was part of the planning cell that steered an RAF Harrier to victory and enabled a Navy F-4 Phantom to set a new New York to London speed record – only beaten five years later by the astonishing SR-71 Blackbird.
Price had done it all at Marham: Flight Lieutenant, Squadron Leader, Wing Commander and Group Captain; Flight Commander (on Michael Beetham’s old squadron, 214), Squadron Commander of 57 Squadron and now, since June 1981, head of the tanker family, the Norfolk airbase’s well-liked and respected Station Commander.