There wasn’t time for the night flights. He’d have to somehow squeeze in his own night qualification before taking the Vulcan crew through it.
The aircrew feeder at Waddington was in the Ops block, separated from the locker room by double doors. On one side it smelt of athletics, on the other fried food. Russell arrived late, already wearing his flying kit, to find the three Vulcan crews finishing off a breakfast of steak and eggs. Two other AARIs from Marham, Flight Lieutenants Pete Standing and Ian Clifford, had already joined their crews. They were the only familiar faces in the room. They’d been assigned to the Reeve and Montgomery crews respectively, which meant Russell was going to be joining Martin Withers. The two men got on immediately, each recognizing the even temper of the other. Russell quickly got the impression that Withers trusted him. It was a good start and breakfast was soon wrapped up.
‘We’d better get off to the simulator so you can see what the cockpit looks like,’ Withers suggested.
Russell was struck by how small the cockpit felt in comparison to the Victor’s. The basic layout was similar but he felt hemmed in. Avro had originally planned for the bomber to be flown by a single pilot. At the Air Force’s insistence, though, a co-pilot was shoe-horned in. The result was that without lowering the ejection seat, a tall man like Russell couldn’t actually hold his head up straight because of the curve of the roof. Ten minutes in the simulator was enough. Air refuelling was regarded as the ‘Sport of Kings’ by the fighter pilots, who practised it regularly. Withers and Russell were looking forward to flying. They signed for their Mae West life jackets and half an hour later they were walking out with the crew to Alpha Dispersal where XM597, their Vulcan B2, was waiting for them. A comparable size to a Boeing 737 airliner, the delta-winged bomber appeared to be much larger – an impression created by her height and dramatic shape.
Although she first flew just seven years after the end of the Second World War, standing on the apron, taut and purposeful on a stork-like undercarriage, the old ‘tin triangle’ still looked startlingly modern in 1982. Up close, however, her camouflage looked conspicuously hand-painted. The brush strokes that smoothed over banks of rivets suggested her real age. It was her cockpit, though, that really betrayed her.
Inside was a cramped, claustrophobic, matt-black confusion of wires and pipes crafted from steel, canvas and bakelite in the days before ergonomics. It now looked and felt defiantly old-fashioned. It smelt of sweat, leather and old metal. Stencilled panels warned of ‘200 volts’, or hand-painted notes annotating the mess of dials competed for space – everything competed for space – with company names like Dunlop and Electrical and Musical Industries Ltd. Dotted on the roof towards the rear was a small blue enamel badge that read Marconi, just another of the smörgåsbord of old British engineering firms that contributed to the Vulcan’s creation.
The five-man crew sat on two different levels; the captain and co-pilot were cocooned up front inside a small blister with barely room to squeeze in between the two ejection seats. Once in, the view was deceptive. Glazing to the front and sides gave little hint of the huge aeroplane spread out behind them.
Four or five feet below the pilots, behind a zip-up, light-proof curtain facing backwards, were three seats for the Nav Radar, Nav Plotter and AEO. Responsible for bomb-aiming, navigation and the bomber’s electrical systems (including jamming the enemy’s radar) respectively, their troglodyte space was brightened only by two small, high portholes that required the AEO or Nav Radar to stand in their stirrups to see through them. Three dented reading lamps snaked out of their control panel on flexible stalks to give their workspace the studious feel of an old library. Despite the dials, switches and screens it all looked engagingly low-tech – an impression cemented by grab handles that hung from the cardboard-lined flight deck ceiling. They were identical to the swinging balls used in the carriages of the London Underground District Line.
There was no toilet, and no kitchen, and there were no soft edges. It wasn’t a comfortable place for a five-man crew to spend any length of time, and with Dick Russell on board there would be six of them. Flying Officer Peter Taylor, Withers’ co-pilot, was condemned to the jump seat – an unwelcoming metal platform in the bottom of the cabin, just next to the crew hatch. His only cushion was his parachute.
They strapped in, snapping shut the machined-aluminium Personal Equipment Connectors, or PECs, to tubes that carried oxygen and the intercom. The fabric of the Nav Radar’s PEC tube trailed down from the roof of the cockpit, like a two-inch-thick vine. Pre-flight checks complete, they taxied to the runway threshold while Withers explained to Russell how the Vulcan was steered on the ground. Sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, Russell was struck by the commanding view from the Vulcan. Perched much higher than in the Victor, he felt like he was sitting at the top of a double-decker bus. Withers turned to him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you might as well take off,’ confirming the impression of trust that the AARI had picked up earlier. Russell opened the throttles of the Vulcan for the first time in his life, held the brakes for a moment as the turbines spooled up, then let go, surging forward, propelled by over 80,000lb of thrust from four 301 series Rolls-Royce Olympus turbojets. The big delta leapt into the air behind Reeve and Monty. With that departure, the crews had begun the most intense, demanding training programme any of them would ever endure. Over the next two weeks, they would log flying time that normally would have taken six months to accrue. Peacetime regulations were swiftly abandoned. Of the three Vulcans climbing out over the North Sea, perhaps only Withers’ jet – he being the only current Vulcan QFI, or Qualified Flying Instructor – should legally have been in the air with the ‘student’ Victor tanker pilot in the right-hand seat. In an emergency, unfamiliar with the jet, there was little Russell, Standing or Clifford could have done to help.
The first attempts at hooking up with the Victors were demoralizing. The AARIs, unfamiliar with the position of the Vulcan’s refuelling probe struggled initially. Officially, the technique was to look at neither the probe nor the drogue trailing from the tanker. Instead, the receiver had to line up on a series of black and fluorescent orange lines on the belly and wings of the tanker. Get that right and you’d make contact. Dick Russell had had twenty years to get used to the view from a Victor cockpit. Like riding a bike, refuelling in a Victor wasn’t something he thought too hard about. He could just do it. In the Vulcan, though, the picture was completely different. Instead of extending forward from above and behind the pilots’ heads, the Vulcan probe was mounted below them, right on the nose. It was virtually impossible to see both the probe and the tanker at the same time. Russell loosened his straps and leaned forward to look over the coaming a third time without success, then he handed over to Withers. Much to everyone’s surprise, the Vulcan captain made contact on his first attempt. But the 100 per cent success rate wasn’t to last long. Like the other two Vulcan captains, he was confident. Piece of piss, Monty had thought until his efforts to stick the probe in the basket attracted ridicule from the rest of his crew.
‘Would it help if we put hair around it?’ they laughed. The association was unavoidable.
Nearly three hours after taking off, the three Vulcans were back on the ground at Waddington. After shutting down and disembarking, their captains were quick to compare notes.
‘He was working like a one-armed paper hanger!’ As he described his AARI’s early efforts to make contact with the tanker Monty reached instinctively for an imaginary stick and throttle, his hands playing out his instructor’s actions.