That evening, when those who’d been on parade earlier in the day had settled down with their families to watch The Val Doonican Music Show or ITV’s popular quiz show 3-2-1 over dinner, Monty and Reeve and McDougall rumbled out for another four-hour night-time sortie.
After a clear day, cloud had settled over Lincolnshire at 300 feet. As the power came on and the bomber began its take-off roll, Monty tried to relax. While he’d been strapping himself in he’d felt disengaged, absent. He sensed that the rest of the crew’s minds weren’t really on the task in hand either. He needed to get on top of things. At about 100 knots, the jet veered violently to the left. Monty caught her quickly and straightened her up to continue down the runway.
‘What the fuck was that?’ came the inevitable question from the back. He laughed it off, but it was another warning.
The Vulcan was lightly loaded. Like this, it had bootfuls of excess power and an agility in the air that belied its imposing size and shape. Monty rocketed up through the low clouds into a beautifully clear sky above.
He continued his climb out east to the rendezvous, trying to shake himself out of his torpor. Right, he told himself, snap out of it. Up over the North Sea he spotted the tanker easily. Then he closed in on the Victor’s trailing fuel hose. Gently playing tunes with the four throttle levers as he made contact, he drove the refuelling probe into the basket. Too fast.
With a visceral ‘whumph’, the sky around him exploded and the tanker disappeared from view.
A sheet of fuel from his broken probe flushed into the engine intakes, simultaneously blowing 1 and 2 out and torching the unburnt fuel that had cascaded straight through to produce an angry, billowing fireball. The dusk sky flared and the Vulcan dropped away – down like a B-17, thought John Reeve as he looked on, recalling images of American heavy bombers shot down in flames over Germany forty years earlier.
As the Vulcan fell, Monty realized he’d lost the engines. But the bomber wasn’t on fire. They had altitude and they had time.
‘John, get the checklist,’ he told his AEO over the RT. With two engines gone, so too were two-thirds of the jet’s electrics. Hathaway was already running through his blue book.
‘Engine failure number 1…’ Hathaway began initiating the call-and-response drills to shut down both engines correctly. Once that was done it was safe to relight them.
‘Restart drill number 1 engine…’ Both ignited again without drama, but Monty had had enough. He pointed the nose back towards Waddington, their evening’s work brought to an abrupt, unnerving conclusion.
Monty’s collision with the Victor’s drogue hadn’t just ripped the tip off the Vulcan’s refuelling probe; it had also damaged the drogue itself. Unable to transfer any further fuel to Reeve, the Victor returned to Marham. A second tanker was scrambled, but that too was unserviceable. A third also had problems with trailing its hose. Reeve managed to take on just 2,000lb of fuel – barely enough to taxi down the runway and back – before a massive fuel leak sluiced over him too. And he’d been perfectly positioned behind the Victor. The air-to-air refuelling was still a lottery.
The uncomfortable truth was that the V-force was no closer to being confident that they could make this work than they were when they started. There were too many opportunities for things to go wrong. One thing was certain, though: unless Waddington came up with an immediate solution to the refuelling problem there was no hope of success; the South Atlantic was simply out of their reach.
Difficulties had been expected. But it was clear now that this was more than just teething trouble. Something essential was being overlooked, they just couldn’t pinpoint what it was. The Air-to-Air Refuelling Instructors said there was nothing wrong with the way the Vulcan Captains were flying. And the engineers were scratching their heads too. Laycock had seen clusters of them gathered in the hangars under hot lights, poring over books.
He and Baldwin decided it was time to bring together everyone involved to thrash out a solution. With the night’s training sortie scrubbed, they wasted no time. The aircrews and engineers were there, as well as Baldwin’s Ops Team. The AARIs were back from Marham and AOC 1 Group. Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight was driven down from Bawtry with Keith Filbey, a member of his Victor planning team.
As they examined the evidence, two separate problems emerged. And, as it turned out, Monty’s flame-out didn’t appear to have been caused by either of them.
When, during the Easter weekend, the engineers called Marham to ask how to test the reconstituted refuelling plumbing they did as they were told: they plugged a fuel hose from a bowser on to the end of the refuelling probe and pumped. It was what they weren’t doing that was important. At Marham, the fuel hose, with its contents, was supported by a cherry-picker parked next to the aircraft’s nose. If that information had been passed on, its importance hadn’t been realized. At Waddington the probe itself was left to take the weight. And it hadn’t been built to. In the act of actually proving the system, they were leaving it ever so slightly crooked. The damage wasn’t obvious, but in the air the bent valves were unable to form a proper seal inside the drogue. This allowed a steady stream of fuel to flow down the probe and up over the cockpit windows. Any leak at all would always be felt acutely in a Vulcan because of the position of the probe, but if using a cherry-picker was going to help reduce the number of leaks, it would be an important step forward.
The more alarming problem was the flood of unburnt fuel that could wash over the jet as the probe was withdrawn – as if the valve was somehow remaining open. When any aircraft pulled away from a tanker there was always a fine white puff of fuel as the probe disconnected, but it was little more than vapour. The Vulcans suffered from a wave that threatened to wash out the engines. The solution lay with the Engineering Wing, frustrated that the fault just made no sense. Apparently identical probes that had worked for years fitted to the Victors didn’t work on the Vulcans. To try to solve the puzzle, a Victor probe was quickly dispatched from Marham to Waddington and both were systematically stripped down on the bench. It was a eureka! moment. For something so small, the satisfaction was immense. The Vulcan probes, redundant since the late 1960s, were missing a shim in the valve assembly. All of Waddington’s probes were modified to include it. For want of a nail…
There was reason for guarded optimism now, but the engineers wouldn’t know whether or not they’d cracked it until someone flew again. Only if the next refuelling was successful would they know if this was do-able.
And ironically, given that it provoked such urgent action, Monty’s violent loss of his 1 and 2 engines looked like nothing more than ‘finger trouble’. Exhausted, he’d just hit the drogue too hard.
Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight had made up his mind that the AARIs had to fly any mission as part of the bomber crew. As he’d travelled to Waddington that evening, he considered the reaction his decision might provoke. With such store attached to V-bomber crews as cohesive units, he didn’t think it was going to be a popular move. Not only was there the possibly dented pride of the Vulcan crews to hurdle, but also the understandable surprise of the AARIs when they discovered that they’d be going in at the sharp end. Stealing himself to broach the subject, he was completely disarmed when, without prompting, John Reeve spoke up to make the suggestion himself. Knight paused, as if considering the idea, then he leaned over to Filbey and asked, ‘Is that a possibility do you think?’ Job done, Knight returned to Bawtry. He’d let John Laycock have the pleasure of telling the men from Marham.