On paper, he and Mick Cooper now looked to be Baldwin’s outstanding Nav team. With his tall, Chelsea-supporting co-pilot, Flying Officer Don Dibbens, and his new AEO, Flight Lieutenant Barry Masefield with his years of experience on the maritime ‘Kipper Fleet’, Reeve’s outfit looked strong.
With the crews in place, Simon Baldwin turned his thoughts to the skills and equipment they were going to need to do the job. He needed to put together a training programme for the crews, but in order to do so had to make certain assumptions. In his long, narrow office next to the Operations Room, he set to work with his Operations team. The ashtrays filled quickly and the conference table soon disappeared under a mound of maps and reference books as he drafted an outline plan for the attack. There were three priorities: reaching and finding the target; protecting the bomber from the air defences; and hitting and destroying the target. Any mission in the South Atlantic would have to be mounted from Ascension Island, and the entire route southbound would be over 4,000 miles of featureless ocean. The certainties offered by the South American coast were outside the range of the Vulcan’s radar. That meant that the only way for a crew to fix their position would be to go back to the old ways and use the stars. They would have to fly through the night. The crews would need to brush up on their astro navigation, but that alone, Baldwin worried, would probably not provide the necessary navigational accuracy.
At least there was no point worrying about the refuelling plan. That would have to come from the 1 Group Tanker Planning Cell. Nobody at Waddington had even basic knowledge of tanker planning. Ensuring that the crews were qualified to refuel in flight, though, would be a vital part of the training programme.
Baldwin never considered the possibility of using anything but conventional 1,000lb bombs – the largest available in the RAF’s Cold War arsenal. But he had no information at all on what the target would be. He studied an old 1:250,000 map of the islands. It was all he could get his hands on. At the east of East Falkland was the capital, Stanley, and beyond that, clearly marked right next to the coast itself, was an airfield. The 4,000-foot runway ran almost east–west. In the absence of more concrete information, the paved strip appeared to be the only viable military target for the Vulcan’s bombs. To take it out, he thought, the bomber would have to fly at 300 feet down the runway to release a stick of twenty-one parachute-retarded 1,000lb bombs. That would rip it up from end to end. The Vulcan force hadn’t practised laydown attacks with conventional thousand-pounders for years. One more thing to be built into the training schedule.
Beating an enemy’s air defences was dependent on three things: surprise, avoidance and suppression. But Baldwin and his team had only sketchy, published, information on Argentine air defences in general and none whatsoever on the equipment that had actually been deployed to the islands. The only assumption to make was that the air defences would be comprehensive. The Vulcan’s best chance of getting through would be at night, at low level – as they would expect to go in against the Soviets. This way the bomber would be detected only at the last possible moment – surprise. The dark would reduce the chances of visual detection, and degrade any Argentine optically aimed defence systems, but the air defence radars weren’t so easily side-stepped.
They needed to come in under them. To approach from the west on an easterly heading, the crew would have a difficult overland penetration in rocky terrain in the dark, and the risk of visual detection would be increased. So the obvious approach was to come in over the sea on a westerly heading. Doing this meant there was no need for a long low-level overland penetration using the TFR – Terrain Following Radar. However, it would be very useful in descending and maintaining height over the sea, and during the immediate exit from the target area over land. And while it seemed reasonable to Baldwin to regard the airfield at Stanley as the target, it would be dangerous not to allow any possibility that it was not. If the crews were going to be asked to go in overland, he was going to make sure that they were equipped with the skills they needed to do so. The training, he decided, would include some TFR flying.
The low-level approach over the sea from beyond the range of the radar cover should bring the bomber in under the radar lobes. This had implications for the navigation though. The Vulcan would have to descend before the Falkland Islands were within range of the aircraft’s map-painting radar. The first opportunity to fix their position using the radar would be on the run-in to the target itself. The navigation would need to be pinpoint accurate if the crew were going to be able to position themselves over the centreline of the runway on their first approach over the sea from the east. The astro-nav was unlikely to be able to guarantee that and a second run-in through now wakened, alert air defences was out of the question. So it was clear already that navigation was going to be a problem.
But worse, even the most basic assessment of the potential Argentine air defences – modern, Western and effective – made it perfectly clear that the Vulcan’s elderly electronic warfare equipment, tailored to cope with Warsaw Pact systems, just wasn’t going to be up to the task of defending the aircraft. The third component of the defence penetration triangle, suppression, was almost entirely absent.
Chapter 13
Flight Lieutenant Dick Russell was flown to Waddington aboard a specially laid-on two-seat Canberra hack. That in itself was remarkable. It was normally just top brass who got ferried around like that. He was now a 49-year-old senior pilot, and there wasn’t a lot that surprised him any more, but this was unusual – an indication of the importance attached to getting him to the Lincolnshire bombing base.
Since joining the RAF as a teenage national serviceman in the early 1950s, Russell had enjoyed a remarkable career. As a young Wireless Operator/Air Gunner, he’d flown aboard the Short Sunderland flying boats providing air cover for UN ships during the Korean War. When there was no further need for WAGs he found himself training as a pilot in Rhodesia. Over the next ten years the flying was varied and rich. He flew Canberras during the Suez Crisis then, as a Victor B1 pilot, endured life on the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis and was deployed to the Far East, on standby to attack Jakarta International Airport, during the Indonesian Confrontation.
He reckoned he’d had a good time of it. Flying out over the North Sea on a cloud-free night, looking down at the fires from the oil rigs flaring below, it was difficult to see it any other way. Now an instructor on the Victor OCU, the small training unit at Marham, the avuncular, golf-addicted Russell didn’t expect to be involved in the Falklands crisis. Much to his surprise, though, he turned out to be exactly what the Vulcan crews needed.
On Easter Monday, as he sat on the patio of his Norfolk home listening to the non-stop noise of the Victors training for CORPORATE, he took a phone call asking him to come in to the station. Jerry Price wanted to see him. Russell had been an air-to-air refuelling instructor, or AARI, for eight years until 1979. Now Price wanted him to requalify. The station commander had a surprise for him: Vulcans.
‘Right, Dick, you fly tomorrow a couple of times, by day and by night,’ Price told him, explaining that he’d be training Vulcan crews who were completely new to air-to-air refuelling. ‘I’ve got a Canberra for you at eight o’clock to take you to Waddington.’