Various ways of dispersing the leaking fuel were suggested and tried, from the technical – fitting lines of vortex generators to the nose between the probe and the windscreen to churn up the airflow; and the basic – bending back a metal lip that ran underneath the glass that had, at some point, for reasons no one could remember, been hammered back on itself; to the ingenious – securing a kitchen colander around the base of the probe. None worked.
A related concern was the availability of the probes themselves. Each of the Vulcans selected began the work-up with a probe fitted, but their tips, like a lizard’s tail in the claws of a predator, were designed to sheer off, to prevent more substantial damage to the aircraft during a clumsy contact. A number of them had already been damaged. But it was no longer just Vulcans. The RAF effort in support of the Task Force had created an unprecedented demand. Design teams at companies like British Aerospace, Marshall’s of Cambridge and Flight Refuelling Ltd were working round the clock to equip the RAF’s Nimrod and Hercules fleets with probes that would enable them to operate as far south as the Falklands. By cannibalizing the rest of Waddington’s Vulcan fleet the CORPORATE flight could be kept in the air, but the supply of new probes was finite. And when they were gone, they were gone.
In November 1981, a IX Squadron Vulcan had suffered a series of severe technical faults en route to Goose Bay in Newfoundland. She was beyond economic repair, but, rather than being scrapped, was left as a gift to commemorate the RAF’s long association with the local community. She was the first to lose her probe. Urgent calls were made to aviation museums at home and around the world. The Vulcan at the RAF Museum in Hendon was raided. The jet delivered to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford by Martin Withers lost hers too. Curators of museums at Castle Air Force Base, California, and Offut, Nebraska, turned a blind eye as teams of RAF technicians arrived in a C-130 Hercules, removed the refuelling probes from their treasured exhibits, patched the holes they left behind with blanking plates, then disappeared with their booty.
The refuelling could either be made to work or it couldn’t, but Baldwin had to work on the assumption that the engineers would rectify whatever was wrong. So next on the list was navigation. The newspapers had mentioned ‘pinpoint accuracy’. As things stood, though, just finding the islands over such long distances was a demanding task. Locating the actual target on a first pass attack was highly unlikely. During the Cold War, the Vulcans’ routes over the Russian steppes were endlessly updated. As the reach of the Soviet air defences grew, the crews refined their flight plans to take them through the gaps. Over water, in the South Atlantic, they faced the same difficulties as the Victors: no charts, no ground features and, consequently, no way to fix a position using the radar. In fact, they had only one reliable method of checking where they were: a sextant. The Vulcan had two periscope sextants – great big things like donkey dicks, reckoned Reeve’s plotter, Jim Vinales. They might not have looked familiar to a sailor of Nelson’s day, but the principle was no different – they established the user’s position relative to the known position of the stars. The Vulcan crews had always practised the technique on navigation exercises, or sorties across the Atlantic, but they never really had to rely on the sextants. There was a difference between keeping a skill from going rusty and having your life depend on it. The Plotters talked a confident game. Vinales reckoned it was possible, working hard at it, to be accurate to within a few miles. The other half of Reeve’s Nav team, Mick Cooper, wasn’t so sure. He thought that over the kinds of distances involved, they’d be lucky to get within forty miles of where they were supposed to be going. John Laycock and Simon Baldwin were inclined to side with Cooper. Astro-nav demanded fairly long periods of smooth, straight and level flying. Flying in even loose formation with tanker aircraft would make that impossible. Astro-nav also depended on repetition. Without continual checking through further star shots, the tiniest error would grow exponentially. If they were going to send their crews to war they weren’t prepared to do so with navigation equipment that was hardly more accurate than a road map that could tell you only what county you were in. If the Vulcan was off track by forty miles as it ran in to a coastal airfield target at low level, the first radar fix would be too late in the attack run to guarantee a successful attack. In the worst case the aircraft might have to climb into radar and missile cover to obtain a fix and then manoeuvre to make a second attempt to fly down the runway. The defenders would love that; the Vulcan crew wouldn’t. Baldwin had devised astro techniques for bombing competitions that reduced the error to about seven miles or less, but it had taken weeks of training for crews to reach that level of expertise. They didn’t now have that luxury.
As the Vulcans flew long sorties at night while the Plotters and Radars practised their astro-nav out over the Atlantic, Laycock and Baldwin sent a signal to HQ 1 Group: some kind of new navigational aid for old V-bombers was desperately needed.
John Smith thought they sounded like German Stukas. Sinister. Argentine warplanes were now flying out of Stanley airfield. The little Pucaras wheeled and dived during bombing exercises over Yorke Bay to the north of the harbour. The buzz from their turbo-prop engines rose angrily as their speed increased. Smoke and flames rose hundreds of feet into the clear, windless sky.
Families around Stanley tried to calculate the progress of the British task force. One of Fran Biggs’s little brothers cut pictures of Harriers and ships out of magazines to annotate the map her husband Peter had pinned to the wall. The nine-year-old’s handiwork would earn icy stares from soldiers searching the house.
As the islanders waited, the first ships from Sandy Woodward’s Battle Group weighed their anchors off Ascension and set a course to the south-west. It was lunchtime on 18 April. Admiral Woodward had, at least, met the first of his deadlines.
Chapter 17
It was a beautiful day on Ascension Island. Most of them were. Temperatures hovered around the mid-seventies and, despite the humidity, the constant breeze from the south-east kept it comfortable. Bill Bryden liked to watch new arrivals from Wideawake’s small control tower. Over the last two weeks the USAF colonel had watched the British transport planes swarm into his normally sleepy mid-Atlantic base. Now he’d been asked to make space for four Victor K2s.
Wideawake’s runway was unusual. It rose from the threshold for about 1,000 feet before peaking and sloping away. Bryden’s controllers would always warn incoming traffic, but it could still catch you out. If a pilot misjudged his approach – if he failed to get his wheels down before the hump – he could end up chasing the runway as it sloped away from him and run out of Tarmac. First-time landings, he thought, as the first of the Victors settled into long finals for runway 14, were always interesting. Today, though, the surprise was on him.