Chapter 22
‘You messy bastard, you’ve left your wiper running!’ It was all Ian Stanley could think of to lighten the situation. What do you say to a pilot who’s just scrambled clear of his crashed helicopter?
The conditions endured by the SAS dropped on Fortuna Glacier had been horrific. The troopers were able to cover barely 500 yards over the treacherous crevasses and ice bridges, all the time assaulted by the biting, bruising wind. At nightfall, they tried to put up their tents only to have poles and fabric ripped from their hands. Instead, they chopped into the compacted ice to try to find some protection from the wind and snow. They made it through the night, but another one would surely bring hypothermia and frostbite. Wet, locked in a huddle and beaten by the weather, they were unable to perform any kind of military function.
Antrim received the signal asking for an evacuation at ten o’clock that morning. Humphrey and the two HU5s were going to have to run the gauntlet again.
The first attempt failed. While the two Wessex troop carriers remained in calmer conditions at low level, Ian Stanley spent half an hour searching for a route through the thick cloud to the waiting soldiers. With intermittent tail rotor control, ice building on the fuselage and a wildly fluctuating altimeter, he was forced to turn back.
Two hours later, taking advantage of a break in the cloud over the glacier, they tried again. The sky was clear and Stanley led the loose formation up over the crawling river of ice towards orange smoke grenades triggered by the stranded SAS party. The wind, though, was still ferocious. Their engines straining against it, the helicopters put down and the troops bundled in.
From the right-hand pilot’s seat of one of the HU5s, Lieutenant Mike Tidd watched anxiously as another squall of cloud and snow gusted towards him. In the back of the Wessex, his Aircrewman, Sergeant ‘Tug’ Wilson, was already pouring hot coffee for his grateful cargo. Tidd thumbed the RT, requesting immediate clearance from Stanley. Stanley let him go. The pilot increased the revs, pulled up on the cyclic and, nose down, scudded north. Then the squall overtook him. White-out. Tidd couldn’t see the rocks, but banked to avoid them. He couldn’t see anything. The altimeter spun down. Instinctively, Tidd applied full power a moment before the helicopter’s tail and main rotor clipped the ice, ripping the whole aircraft round on to its side. The Wessex scraped along the glacier before coming to a final rest eighty yards away in a bank of soft snow. Tidd went through the drills, shutting down the fuel and electrics before, along with his passengers, abandoning the wrecked helicopter. For some reason, a single wiper blade continued to sweep pathetically to and fro across the windscreen.
The unravelling of PARAQUAT provided the most acute cause of concern for the Defence Chiefs so far. After Tidd’s crash the second Wessex HU5 was also caught in a white-out and destroyed. Only Humphrey survived the appalling conditions. The operation to retake South Georgia – the much-hoped-for boost to the country’s morale – had got off to a truly disastrous start. Had it not been for some remarkable, brave flying by Stanley the situation might have been catastrophic. Wondering privately how long his luck was going to hold out, the Fleet Air Arm pilot had taken Humphrey up on to the glacier for a sixth time and had squeezed the remaining troops and marooned helicopter crews into the cramped hold. Dangerously overloaded, the old single-engined helicopter returned to Antrim. Too heavy to hover, she’d slammed into the deck in a one-chance-to-pull-it-off controlled crash landing.
On Whitehall, at a table dominated by a high-backed wooden chair that had once belonged to Mountbatten, the First Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Michael Beetham, chaired a meeting of the current Chiefs. They chewed over the disaster on Fortuna Glacier and subsequent attempts by special forces to infiltrate by inflatable boat, which had also ended in failure. While they’d been exceptionally lucky that there’d been no loss of life so far, the bottom line was that British forces had made no progress towards retaking the island. And worse, there were now intelligence reports that an Argentine diesel-electric submarine was in the area. They were at an impasse. And there seemed to be no clear way of forcing the situation forward.
The long-range missions to South Georgia had helped orientate the Victor force to operating over the huge distances involved. What had been planned in theory was working in practice. The more the Victors were flown, the more reliable they seemed to become. In reality, though, this did little to lighten the load on the shoulders of Squadron Leader Bill Lloyd, the head of the engineering detachment. The most obvious difficulty on Wideawake’s exposed pan was the abrasive volcanic dust. It was kicked up every time the wind blew. So when four Rolls-Royce Conway engines spooled up, the effect was predictable. Every effort was made to protect the jets. They were parked as far back as possible, often the entire empennage hung over the dust beyond the hardstanding. This saved limited space, but it also meant that when dirt and debris was thrown up by the jet exhausts, it was blown off the hardstanding, away from engine intakes of the other aircraft. The Tarmac, too, caused unforeseen problems. It was softened by the heat and the degrading effects of spilt Avtur, so the heavy, fuelled-up Victors would sink into it. Freeing themselves from these ruts used extra power, which blew up extra dust. So before engine start, the ground crew would tow the Victors forward a few feet so that their wheels could roll unhindered.
Despite all the precautions, the metal compressor blades of the Victors’ four turbojets soon acquired the polished appearance of mirrors.
The main headache, though, remained the HDU, the hose-drum unit. Mounted in the belly of the Victor, the HDU, pronounced ‘hoodoo’, was an old piece of kit with a reputation for being temperamental. In contrast to the airframes themselves, the more it was used, the more worn out it seemed to become. And that was a big problem.
The principle was simple: the fuel hose unfurled from the drum unit like a thread from a cotton reel. There were powerful forces at work on the mechanism, though, and these needed to be balanced. Gravity and drag would ensure that the hose trailed. Once it was in position, hydraulic motors were kept on, poised to wind in the slack caused by the impact of the receiving aircraft. Without them, when a receiver made contact with the drogue, a loop caused by even a gentle impact could travel up and down the hose like a wave, damaging either the receiver’s probe or the tanker itself. The condition of the HDU was monitored intently by the Victor’s Nav Radar. The strength of the electrical current drawn by the hydraulic motor was the main indicator of the HDU’s health. If it didn’t function, they couldn’t tank.
The last part of the refuelling system was the fuel pump. Powered by a turbine driven with compressed air from the engines, it operated at enormously high speeds. If it broke up, it did so explosively. Unrestrained kinetic energy would throw out slices of broken metal in all directions. It was like a bomb going off inside the aircraft. At the very least, it could create a ring of jagged holes around the circumference of the fuselage, weakening it like the perforations on a sheet of stamps. If you were unlucky, it would take out fuel lines and hydraulics too. A catastrophic failure of the fuel pump meant that losing the ability to refuel would be the least of the unfortunate crew’s problems.