When flying, you can only ride your luck for so long.
Only thirty-four Mk 2 Victors were ever built. Of them, twenty-four were subsequently converted into tankers. And one of these was destroyed in a take-off accident in 1976. On paper, the RAF had just twenty-three aircraft capable of flying to the Falklands and back. On paper. The reality was that on an average day there were rarely more than about four or five Victors available for normal training. Many would be undergoing servicing at Marham and couldn’t be generated at short notice. Others would always be in deep servicing at RAF St Athan, the RAF’s maintenance facility in South Wales. With advance notice, for a major exercise perhaps, the number of airframes flying could reach eleven or twelve. In April 1982, while the aircrews worked up, the Marham Engineering Wing laboured to bring as many Victors on line as possible. Ex-Victor personnel were drafted back to Marham to help this unprecedented effort. The chief technicians were organized into shifts so that work could go on round the clock. Such was the intensity of the work, there was little chance of getting home or even to the Sergeants’ Mess. The aircrew feeder in the Ops block, they reckoned, was the only thing saving them from starving.
Servicing periods were extended. When two Victors were collected from their major overhaul at St Athan, the aircraft scheduled to replace them stayed on the flightline. Any Victor that was unserviceable was cannibalized to keep the others in the air. It was nearly a year before one of these unlucky, stripped jets was to fly again. In anticipation of the difficulties of maintaining the Victors once they’d deployed south, parts approaching the end of their life were replaced with new ones. Needing even closer attention were the airframes themselves – they were old, the first of Marham’s current fleet having been delivered to the Air Force in 1960. Every time an aircraft manoeuvres, the airframe is put under a degree of stress. Over the course of its lifetime, the effect of that stress is cumulative. Aerobatics or combat will see the total fatigue index jump sharply, but any kind of manual handling, such as tight formation flying or air-to-air refuelling, will also see it rise. Unchecked it can lead to catastrophic failure like the cracked wing spars that grounded the RAF’s Valiants. Research that followed the tragic losses of Comet airliners in the 1950s meant that the effect of metal fatigue was well understood. Every Victor had a finite life, measured by a fatigue counter in the bomb bay, and many were approaching the end of it. It was to be an area of critical concern for the Marham engineers.
As well as maintenance work in preparation for the deployment south there were also modifications which needed to be made – a job which was again complicated by the age of the airframes. All the Victors were originally built in ‘Fred’s Shed’, Handley Page’s huge hangar at Radlett, near St Albans. It was a facility that was infamous for its ramshackle appearance – a visiting American VIP had been impressed by the Victor, but wondered aloud ‘why you had to build it in a barn’. Like the Vulcans, they were essentially hand-built. None were entirely identical, which meant that modifications couldn’t be applied in an entirely consistent way throughout the fleet.
Cameras were already installed in the jets flown by Tux, Elliott and Todd. Further work was done on their radars. The RAF’s dedicated maritime radar reconnaissance squadron, 27 Squadron, had disbanded just two days before the Argentine invasion. Their Vulcans, with radars designed to operate over land, had their sets tuned to enhance their performance over water. Engineers from 27 were recalled from new postings so that the Victors’ radars could do the same job – hunting for surface contacts at sea.
Most important of all was the upgrading of the navigation systems. For most of their long careers, Victors had flown along well-known routes supporting deployments to North America, to the Far East or, most frequently, up and down the towlines of the North Sea. Even in unfamiliar airspace there was always the option of fixing a position by using the radar to pick out ground features. The South Atlantic, though, was going to be a very different proposition. Thousands of miles from safety, over featureless water, the Victor’s ageing systems simply weren’t up to the job. There were two solutions. Most of the jets were fitted with a strap-down Inertial Navigation System, or INS, known as Carousel, a piece of kit already used successfully aboard commercial airliners. Later, others were fitted with Omega, a very low-frequency, very long-range radio device designed for the US Navy’s submarine fleet. Omega allowed the Americans to fix their boats’ positions without forcing them to surface. It could do the same for the Victors in the air, however far they might be from home. Positioning the Omega aerial was crucial, though. Get it wrong and it didn’t work. Electronic surveys of the Victor pointed to the back of the jet, underneath the tail cone. Right next to the airbrakes. These hydraulic barndoors would extend like huge 7 foot by 6 foot clamshells into the airstream to slow the aircraft. It was like dropping an anchor, but the vibration around the brakes caused by the disruption to the airflow could dislodge fillings. The Omega’s sensitive electrical connections weren’t robust enough to endure such savage treatment. The Marham engineers didn’t muck around: they just glued up the whole installation with massive amounts of Araldite. Nothing, but nothing, was going to shake those aerials loose. Ever again.
Secrecy meant that rumour and intrigue surrounded much of what was happening at Marham. Sideways glances were cast at Tux and crews training for the reconnaissance missions. Similarly, the engineering work attracted speculation. Word went round that there were plans to fit the Victors with AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. Now that, thought excited aircrews, would be great sport.
Hanging Sidewinders off the wing was about the only thing, however, that the toiling engineers hadn’t been asked to do. But they were working hard to turn the Victor into a missile carrier for the first time since it was retired from the bomber force in 1968. Developed in the 1960s, the AS37 Martel was a big 13-foot-long, 1,200lb anti-radar missile used primarily by the RAF’s Buccaneers. Marham, though, was home to the Martel servicing unit. Stress and design men from British Aerospace arrived at the Norfolk base at the beginning of April and set up drawing boards in the Engineering Wing. They began work from scratch on marrying the Martel to the Victor airframe. As designs for each component were finished they were dispatched to the station workshops for manufacture. In the hangar, Victor and Martel technicians laboured together to replace a test Victor’s wing refuelling pod with the new weapons pylon, then wire it to control panels in the cockpit.
The effort going on at Marham was extraordinary, and visiting from 1 Group in the first week of April, Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight was accompanied into one of the hangars by Jerry Price to see it for himself. As they looked on, an exhausted Corporal wriggled out from inside a Victor and practically collapsed at the AOC’s feet. The airman had been cramped into the stifling confines of the jet’s maintenance spaces for nearly ten hours. Knight was struck hard by the dedication on display.
Another anti-aircraft battery went up in Stanley behind the town hall on the waterfront on Wednesday the 14th. In the eastern part of town towards the rubbish dump, John Smith thought Argentine troops seemed well dug in. In addition to digging effective-looking covered trenches, they’d also mocked up dummy guns made of lorry wheels, gas bottles and 6-inch fuel pipes to confuse aerial reconnaissance. But interspersed amongst the fakes were the real guns. While the young Argentine conscripts couldn’t help but let their inexperience show, it was clear, Smith thought, that there were many in the professional army who knew exactly what they were doing. Smith would do what he could to get around Stanley collecting information about the military build-up. Walking the dog provided the excuse. His youngest boy, eleven-year-old Tyssen, would walk with him – always making sure to put on shorts, even with temperatures down to zero. It made him look younger and seemed to disarm the soldiers, giving him and his father more time to look around and ask questions. Peter Biggs employed a similar subterfuge. Incensed by the continual house searches, he harboured plans to petrol bomb the Argentine helicopters that sat on the open ground between the government buildings and the Governor’s mansion. Frustrated in that ambition by the blanket of Argentine guards, he wandered around town discreetly taking photographs of Argentine defences. He found that if Fran joined him he was able to avoid the attentions of the soldiers. Her pregnancy seemed to provide cover. He marked their positions on a map, photographed the map, then sent the film back to the UK on one of the last planes to leave, smuggled out in the luggage of a departing Irish schoolteacher’s wife.