On Monday afternoon, the Vulcans took off to test the Carousels and further hone the refuelling skills of their Captains. They were without the AARIs for the first time. The three co-pilots, Pete Taylor, Don Dibbens and Bill Perrins, had watched their Captains’ efforts to make contact from the ladder between the two ejection seats. Now all three got a chance to try it for themselves. Nearly three hours later they landed back at Waddington, taxied to Alpha Dispersal and parked in the same spots they’d left from. In Reeve’s jet the two Carousels showed an error of just one nautical mile. That was good enough. The CORPORATE flight could now, at least, find its way to the Falkland Islands. But while further up the RAF chain of command this was known to be the aim, the crews, as they continued training, were still in the dark. Their target had yet to be confirmed to them. No one wanted to believe that the Argentine mainland was in their sights, but the thought preyed on their minds. And if it wasn’t, they speculated, it could only be the islands themselves. And, like Beetham, Hayr and the 1 Group Planners, they knew that the only target there that made any sense at all was the hard, all-weather runway at Stanley airfield.
To much of the Argentine military, the news of the invasion was as unexpected as it was to those at Marham or Waddington. None were quite so wrong-footed as the 2nd Escuadrilla Aeronaval de Caza y Ataque, of the Argentine Navy. The unit had only taken delivery of its French Dassault Super Étendard attack jets in November the previous year. While they trained for anti-ship operations against the British task force, the squadron’s CO, Commander Jorge Colombo, explored the possibility of flying out of BAM Malvinas. Take-off and braking distances were measured and examined. It was tight, but, in the dry at least, carrying an Exocet under one wing and a fuel tank under the other, the Étendards could take off and land on Stanley’s 4,100-foot runway. And it was definitely an option as a diversion if a jet was in trouble. On 19 April, satisfied that his fledgling squadron was ready for action, Colombo deployed the first of his four Super Étendards south from their base near Buenos Aires to Rio Grande, the most southerly base on the mainland, and within range of the islands.
Two piston-engined reconnaissance planes joined the 2nd Escuadrilla at the Tierra del Fuego base. The role of the elderly, barely airworthy Neptunes of the Escuadrilla de Exploración was to fly out to sea, pick up the British ships on their radars and direct the low-flying strike fighters in to their targets.
Ironically, the first Neptunes delivered to Argentina had already had one careful owner: the Royal Air Force.
It was twenty-five years since Hugh Prior had flown in RAF Coastal Command’s old Lockheed Neptunes. Like Dick Russell, Prior joined as a national serviceman Wireless Operator/Air Gunner. Like Russell, he’d been commissioned, but then instead of going on to become a pilot, he’d trained as an AEO. He was exactly the kind of smart, well-educated operator that the RAF had hoped to attract when they decided that the V-bombers’ AEOs needed to be officers. As the fifth member of the crew, the AEO wasn’t just there to monitor electrical systems that could power a small town, look after the jet’s checklists and man the radios. The AEO’s job was to defend the bomber.
Unlike their American and Russian counterparts, the British bombers had never been armed with tail guns. Instead, the Vulcans relied on a comprehensive suite of electronic countermeasures, or ECM, to keep them safe from harm. With cheerful-sounding names like Red Shrimp, Blue Diver or Green Palm, the ECM kit didn’t sound particularly warlike and, although it had been the best available at the time, all but the Red Shrimp jammer had been overtaken by age and Soviet technology. A more recent, and still vital, addition was the 18228 Radar Warning Receiver – RWR – that alerted the AEO to the presence of enemy radars. Visual and audio warnings kicked in simultaneously. A strobe on the screen in front of the AEO would show him the direction of the threat as well as indicating the frequency band of the enemy radar. Through his headset the sound of the Pulse Recurrence Frequency, or PRF, would confirm it. Every radar emits a number of pulses per minute, reflections from which need to travel out and return for the operator to track a target. Working over greater distances, a search radar took longer to complete each sweep, resulting in a lower PRF. The higher the PRF, the greater the danger. From a slow rattle of an SA-2 Fansong fire-control radar to the angry, high-pitched buzz from the Gun Dish radar directing the fire of a ZSU-23-4’s four automatic cannons, the AEOs could identify a threat from its PRF. And knowledge never stood still. Like submarines on the hunt for new sonar footprints, 51 Squadron’s top-secret, intelligence-gathering Nimrod R1s were always searching for unknown frequencies. Once identified and analysed, the information was fed back to the RAF’s strike squadrons and added to the list.
Hugh Prior and Barry Masefield knew the sounds well. As electronic warfare instructors they’d taught others how to recognize them. When the Vulcans switched to low-level operation, their RWR kit had been upgraded. But while the 18228 usually detected a signal before it was strong enough to provide an echo back to source, both AEOs knew that it could still only buy them time. Time was crucial, though. Radar-guided weapons can only work inside a finite box – a kill zone – and they need time to lock and track. If the Vulcans could be in and out of the box before the system was ready to fire, they would survive.
The other tricks at Prior and Masefield’s disposal were limited and designed to be used against the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact arsenal. Unfortunately the Argentinians hadn’t bought their anti-aircraft weapons from the Soviets.
Simon Baldwin and his planning team had been boning up on what the Vulcan crews might expect going in against the Argentinians. Their anti-aircraft defences, it seemed, were sourced throughout the world: TPS-43 and 44 search radars from America; Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns from Switzerland – unlike Second World War pompom batteries, these were deadly accurate, radar-laid cannons firing high-explosive 35mm shells. It was modern NATO technology and the Vulcan’s vintage ECM kit was starting to look horribly inadequate.
The AEOs didn’t even know the PRF signature of a Swiss Superfledermaus or Skyguard gun-laying radar. That could be established easily though. The greater concern was what they were actually going to do about them when they found out. The powerful, but crude, Red Shrimp jammer might blind the Argentine search radars from a distance, but at close range they would burn through its barrage of white noise. The old jammers would actually act like beacons, their emissions doing little more than pinpoint their source. And against the frequencies used by the gun-laying radars they were useless. As things stood, the AEOs would be left with nothing to do but fly their bomb-run and fire bundles of chaff at the first sign of a lock-on from an enemy fire-control radar. It wasn’t enough.
Thoughts had already turned to possible alternatives. The Buccaneers at RAF Honington carried a more modern, sophisticated ECM pod – the Westinghouse AN/ALQ-101D, or Dash 10. It would work, but the two weapons pylons under each wing of the Buccaneer meant they had somewhere to hang it. The Vulcan didn’t. With a capacious internal bomb bay, it had never needed to carry stores externally. Chris Pye’s engineers again saved the day when they remembered that the reason why some of the Vulcans had been delivered with the more powerful 301 series Olympus engines was because they’d been expected to be carrying two huge Skybolt missiles – one under each wing. Despite Skybolt being cancelled, those 301-engined aircraft must somewhere still have the hardpoints that would have allowed them to carry the big weapon. The problem was, no one knew where they were and any blueprints that might have shown them were long discarded. The only thing for it was trial and error. One of the CORPORATE aircraft, XL391, was unlucky enough to be in the hangar undergoing minor servicing when the need arose. The engineers prodded, tapped and drilled at the underside of the jet until they found, just behind the point where the wing’s angle of sweep decreases, the missing hardpoints. They were, however, still a long way from being able to attach anything.