The Victor touched down beautifully and quickly streamed a large white drag chute behind it. As the speed bled off, the pilot jettisoned the chute on to the middle of the runway. Standard practice. What the hell’s he going to do now?, wondered Bryden. Ascension Auxiliary Air Force Base had just one runway with a turning head at the end. Arrivals had to taxi to the bottom, turn through 180 degrees then backtrack to the threshold to leave off a taxiway that met the runway where they had touched down. With a knot of heavy fabric sitting on the Tarmac blocking the way there was no way back. And there were three other Victors in the pattern waiting to recover. Bryden scrambled a crew of ground handlers to drive out to the runway and remove the chute. It was heavier than it looked. It was all two of them could do to bundle it into the back of a pick-up. But with the runway now clear, the stranded Victor was able to taxi back, vacate the runway and allow the second tanker in to land. Air Traffic Control radioed the second jet first to inform the captain that there was a new standard procedure. From now on, Victors would carry their chutes to the turning head before dropping them, ensuring that the runway was unobstructed.
The confusion was a clear early indication to all involved, not least the Victor pilots, of the limitations of Wideawake’s facilities. If, for any reason at all, that single runway was put out of action, nothing could come in or out. And there was nowhere else to go. Not for over 1,000 miles in any direction.
The Victor crews were greeted with cold beers by the engineering team. They’d flown in separately on transport planes, bringing with them ground equipment to support RAF operations. Each Victor had carried a passenger on board: the Crew Chief. Armed with little more than expertise and experience, he had to try to keep his Victor flying when it was deployed away from home. With Tux was one of the most committed: Roger Brooks was a man devoted to the old V-bomber.
Later in the day, Jerry Price disembarked from a VC10 after an unnerving flight via Dakar in Senegal. The only other passenger on board, squeezed in with him amongst the cargo, had been an intense, taciturn SAS man, who, it appeared, had whiled away the entire flight sharpening knives at the back of the hold. Price looked around at the barren red-brown landscape of peaks and craters of his new command. Overlooking the runway from the south side, rising like giant termite mounds, were the volcanic shapes of Round Hill and South Gannet Hill. Only Green Mountain to the north-east broke up a landscape so similar to the moon’s, that NASA had actually tested their ‘Moon Buggy’ Lunar Roving Vehicle on the island. The mountain was a freak. When Charles Darwin stopped at Ascension in 1836 during the voyage of the HMS Beagle, he described it as ‘entirely destitute of trees’. Barely 150 years later, following an ambitious and eclectic nineteenth-century planting scheme, a thriving tropical rainforest, inhabited by orange land crabs, graced its upper slopes. Clouds now formed around the peak, giving rise to blustery showers in the early afternoons. Without any other source of natural water, great effort had gone into trying to collect the rain that fell, but it couldn’t support Ascension’s 1,000-strong migrant population. Instead, fresh water came as a by-product of the island’s two power stations. More than any other factor, the water supply was going to determine the numbers Ascension could support.
The USAF outsourced the management of Wideawake. The small contingent from PanAm were contracted to handle 285 aircraft movements per year. Of those, 104 – 52 landings, 52 take-offs – were accounted for by the weekly C-141 Starlifter transport that resupplied the island from America. That left one landing or one take-off every couple of days. The pace was not expected to be energetic. But that had already changed dramatically.
The task facing Price was immediately apparent. First on the agenda was to erect the tents that would become the Operations centre. Planning, engineering, briefing, tactical communications, even medical facilities would all be housed under canvas. The aircrew, engineers and planning team all rolled up their sleeves and mucked in. Frontier stuff, thought Tux.
For Price the one real saving grace, inflexible as it might be, was the runway. In anticipation of the Apollo moon landings, NASA built a deep-space tracking station in the 1960s. At the same time, Wideawake’s runway was extended from 6,000 to 10,000 feet. Although the Apollo programme was long gone, NASA had maintained a presence on the island. And since 1981, Ascension had again become invaluable when her lengthened strip was designated as an unlikely diversion field for the Space Shuttle. The window during which, if something went wrong during a flight, Columbia could have used Wideawake was only minutes wide, but the runway was long enough should it have to. It was fortunate that the next shuttle flight wasn’t scheduled until the end of June. Until then, the British were going to need every inch of the orbiter’s runway.
In 1981, faced with rising fuel costs and increasingly stringent airport noise restrictions, British Airways put its entire fleet of fourteen Vickers Super VC10 airliners up for sale. With a number of ex-commercial VC10s already undergoing conversion into aerial tankers, and conscious of the age of its Victor force, the MoD snapped up the old jets and put them into storage. Like the Victors they were equipped with rare Rolls-Royce Conway engines and proved to be a useful and regular source of engine parts. But with the Vulcans’ desperate need for a navigation system that would be accurate in the South Atlantic, in 1982 the VC10s were ransacked again.
The first wave of Victors deploying to Ascension had been fitted with the Carousel Inertial Navigation System. If it worked for them, there was no reason it couldn’t also work for the Vulcans. The only problem was that it was needed yesterday. Then someone remembered the VC10s. The Super VC10s sitting outside at RAF Abingdon were fitted with twin Carousel INS.
An inertial navigation device is made up of gyroscopes and ultra-sensitive accelerometers. When it’s switched on, it orientates itself to true north. Once aligned, all further movement is detected by the accelerometers and measured relative to that starting point. The beauty of the Carousel was that it was self-sufficient, needing no recourse to any further input. The disadvantage was that it needed at least fifteen minutes to warm up. It couldn’t be hurried. If the warm-up was rushed or the system disturbed, small errors would creep in from the outset. Over half an hour it was probably unimportant, but over a long flight any error grew exponentially. And once an aircraft was airborne the system was impossible to reset.
A trial fit was hastily organized and a Vulcan flown to Marham, where the new navigation kit was installed. After a successful test flight the remaining CORPORATE bombers were fitted with Carousels removed from the cockpits of the neglected VC10s. The box containing the gyros was strapped down out of harm’s way in the bomb-aimer’s prone position in the nose of the jet under the pilots’ seats. The two control panels were fitted to the Nav Plotter’s station, light grey with red and yellow buttons against the scuffed black background. Then Gordon Graham, Jim Vinales and Dick Arnott were given a tutorial in how to operate it.