‘So how did you get on?’ Withers ventured, sounding out the others.
‘Yeah, fine.’ A stock answer from Monty.
‘And you, John?’
‘Oh, nothing to it!’ he replied, sounding like he’d rather talk about something else. There was a pause before Withers tried again.
‘Did you get it in the basket then?’
‘Erm… no,’ the other two pilots admitted reluctantly and all three laughed in solidarity.
‘It was bloody hard actually,’ confessed Monty, ‘probably need a bit more practice…’
Sport of Kings?
More like trying to stick wet spaghetti up a cat’s arse!
Or taking a running fuck at a rolling doughnut!
Over a beer at the debrief in the Ops block, Russell, Standing and Clifford appeared unconcerned. In fact they seemed to be enjoying their students’ discomfort rather a lot.
‘What are you laughing at?’ asked the bomber pilots. The AARIs tried to sound reassuring. They’d seen it all before.
‘Don’t worry,’ they told them, ‘it’s always like this. You’ll get it next time.’
The scratched paint and bent pitot tubes suffered by the Vulcans didn’t seem to support this point of view. To Mick Cooper, John Reeve’s Nav Radar, who’d listened to the drogue clanging hard against the outside of the fuselage a couple of feet from his left ear, success felt a long way off. He drew heavily on a cigarette.
In London, news reached Sir Michael Beetham in his office at the MoD that the Vulcan air-to-air refuelling training was under way. His plan appeared to be coming together. At the time of its conception, no one knew whether or not it was even still possible. Now, perhaps, it was time to let the Argentinians know what the RAF was up to. Let them worry about what might or might not be possible. But while it was true that the Vulcans had begun formating on the Victors and the AARIs at least had made some successful prods, not a single drop of fuel had yet been transferred. When they progressed from dry contacts any hope Beetham had that things were up and running would start to look a little premature.
CFIT, Controlled Flight into Terrain, is how air crash investigators describe what happens when a completely serviceable aircraft simply flies into the ground. CFIT kills hundreds of people on commercial flights every year. It’s one of aviation’s biggest killers. It can happen for a variety of reasons and flying low over the sea, with atmospheric conditions conspiring to provide no visible horizon, is one of them.
Training for the camera runs in goldfish bowl conditions like this, a few hundred feet above the North Sea, Tux had a scare. He felt uncomfortable. Disorientated. He knew something wasn’t right, before realizing with a shot of adrenalin that the Victor was a lot closer to the surface of the sea than he’d thought. The pilot lost situational awareness, they would have concluded in the accident report. At altitude, it’s easier to recover from. There’s time to check the instruments, to take stock of the situation and get your bearings. At altitude, loss of situational awareness rarely kills aircrew. But low and fast, spatial disorientation usually will. The aircraft will crash with its pilot knowing only that he’s lost it – the final, fatal view of the mountain or sea surface perhaps providing a snapshot confirming height and heading at the very moment of catastrophe. Tux caught it this time, but the danger was real. The main problem was the jet’s Radar Altimeter. Like the Victor itself, it was designed to operate at high level. Calibrated to be accurate at 50,000 feet, at 250 feet it didn’t perform well. The relative scale of the instrument meant that distinguishing 250 feet from 500 feet – or sea level – just couldn’t be done with any confidence.
This wasn’t the only problem. The profiles of the flights Tux and the other two captains were flying meant a high-level transit before descending to take pictures. As they flew down into the relatively moist, warm air at low level, the two cameras in the nose misted up. After the first flight the engineers had to come up with a fix that prevented misting by ensuring there was air flowing over the lenses to prevent it.
As an ad-hoc solution to the long-range reconnaissance problem, the Victor had no mechanism for accurately aiming the cameras. Unless some method could be worked out the whole exercise was pointless. Tux called colleagues at Wyton, home to the Canberra PR9s of 39 Squadron, the RAF’s reconnaissance specialists, and asked what they could suggest. The next morning he was sitting in a Victor on the Marham ramp drawing lines on the cockpit glass with a chinagraph pencil. Outside, two airmen moved bits of tape around the Tarmac shouting, ‘Up a bit, down a bit.’ The tape represented the targets. The chinagraph marks were calibrated so that, when they appeared over the target at a given height, the correct image would be captured by the port-facing camera. It was hardly high tech, but it worked.
The Victor crews honed their new skills with low-level camera runs over the airfields and coastlines of the Scottish Western Isles. The Air Force called it Area 14. In their logbooks, the pilots recorded the more evocative names of the places they photographed: Stornoway, Islay and Macrahanish. There was pride in developing this new capability in such a short space of time and, inevitably, competition developed between Elliott, Todd and Tux over the quality of the pictures they were taking. They were enjoying themselves. But while frightening the life out of the inhabitants of coastal caravan parks was fun, in the back of their minds there was a growing anxiety about the Victor’s terrible vulnerability as a low-level camera platform.
In Vietnam, the US Navy had found tactical photo-reconnaissance to be the most hazardous task it could give its aircraft. The North American RA-5C Vigilante was dedicated to the role. In the late 1960s, the Vigilante was deemed to be a hot ship, one of the fastest jets in the sky. Her awesome low-level performance provided a degree of security, but still the Vigilantes suffered the highest loss rate over Vietnam of any Navy aircraft.
The Victor didn’t share the Vigilante’s speed advantage. In comparison she was large and lumbering. She was also defenceless. Since the Victors had been converted into tankers, all the radar-jamming equipment had been removed; so too had the chaff dispensers that might confuse radar-guided attacks and the flares that tackled heat-seeking missiles. All that was left was the RWR – Radar Warning Receiver – that could tell them when fire-control radars had locked on to them. But that was hardly a comfort. Flying down an enemy coastline or the centre-line of a heavily defended airfield the Victor would be an open target. And that was assuming she’d survived the danger inherent in using the radar altimeter to descend to low level over the pre-dawn South Atlantic.
Tux relished the challenge of being singled out for such a demanding mission, but he had no desire to go out in a blaze of glory. He collared Wing Commander Ops, David Maurice-Jones, in the bar to try to find out more.
‘Where’s all this going?’ he asked. ‘What are we doing racing around at 200 feet?’
Maurice-Jones couldn’t tell Tuxford much more than he already knew. High-level transit, low-level photo-reconnaissance run, high-level transit.
It was a daunting task. While Maurice-Jones and his superiors knew that the Victors could be ordered to run the gauntlet of the Falklands air defences, what might be waiting for them during that low-level run was left only to Tux’s imagination.
Chapter 14
The Argentinians had quickly begun preparing their air defences. An American Westinghouse TPS-43 search radar was rolled out of the back of an Air Force C-130 Hercules at 4.00 p.m. on the day of the invasion. The next day, the first anti-aircraft guns were deployed in the form of twin-barrelled 20mm Rheinmetall batteries. Heavier weaponry began to follow a week later, when, on 8 April, elements of the Marine Anti-Aircraft Battalion armed with their 30mm Hispano-Suiza cannons and British-made Tiger Cat wire-guided surface-to-air missiles flew in. What had been planned to be as unmilitary an operation as possible was rapidly changing its complexion. Since the dispatch of the British task force, the nature of the Argentine occupation had been transformed. But it was after Roger Lane-Nott’s HMS Splendid and her sister-ship Spartan began their patrol that troops, equipment, fuel, supplies and armaments really started to flood into Stanley airfield. With the British declaration of the Maritime Exclusion Zone on 12 April, everything had to come in by air. Gerald Cheek, now redundant as the head of civil aviation on the islands, watched the constant stream of aircraft flying in: C-130s; Fokker F-27s and F-28s; BAC 1-11s and Boeing 737s, which, he thought, must have been tight on Stanley’s 4,100 foot runway. But while the runway was short, skilful Argentine pilots were demonstrating its utility daily. It may not have offered much margin for error, but it didn’t stop Aerolineas Argentinas, the state carrier, landing a fully laden four-engined Boeing 707 without a mishap.