But the fact that each member of the three Vulcan crews had just been issued with a Browning 9mm automatic pistol meant that the comfortable familiarity of the scene was skewed. This was something none of them had really considered. It brought into sharp focus that the training was over. Although each had an annual proficiency check to make sure he knew his way round the weapon, carrying one outside the range was a different feeling altogether. Most of them reckoned that they were more likely to be a danger to themselves than anyone else. And while Hugh Prior thought he saw a flash of excitement on the face of his co-pilot, Pete Taylor, the gun offered him no comfort at all. With a thousand angry Argentinians running towards you, he thought, a few rounds in a sidearm were unlikely to calm them down – especially if you’d just tried to bomb them. He wondered whether it might be of some use trying to kill food, but that was bordering on the ridiculous. After all, it was difficult to actually hit anything with a Browning 9mm…
The crews spent the afternoon preparing for the nine-hour flight to Ascension. With two hours to go until their scheduled departure, John Reeve was becoming concerned that they had an intelligence briefing to sit through and they hadn’t yet even begun flight-planning. It wasn’t as if it was straightforward. Three fully laden Vulcans were leaving Waddington, joining up with the Victor tankers and only when the first refuelling was successful would the third Vulcan, included as an airborne reserve, return.
‘Don’t worry, John,’ he was appeased, ‘you don’t need to, it’s all been done by computer by Group.’
Wow… computers, he thought wearily, that’s a new one. After the pre-flight brief, Reeve left Don Dibbens to check the figures and joined his backseaters in aircrew feeder.
The Catering Squadron had pulled out all the stops. Nothing was too much trouble. No formica this time: all the tables were laid with white tablecloths. Reeve sat down with Mick Cooper and Barry Masefield. Cooper had already signed for the bombs. He’d been out to the jet with the armourers to check that the fusing and arming wires were all connected and the safety pins in place. The bombs had been properly decorated with messages like ‘A present from Waddington’ and ‘If found, return to Port Stanley’. Now he was tucking hungrily into a fillet steak, served blue, just the way he liked it. Cooper’s eating habits were well known, but at least watching him devour raw meat was better than having to inhale the stench from his cheese and onion sandwiches in a cramped cockpit. Back in the Ops Room, the co-pilots had finally been given the flight plans.
The bombers stood ready to go on the dispersal pans: XM598, XM607 and McDougall’s reserve, XM597. Each was fully fuelled and each modified to bombing competition standard. They had the Twin Carousel INS that would keep them on track over thousands of miles of featureless ocean. The Dash 10 ECM pod hung from the wing on its newly fashioned pylon. As a final measure to reduce their vulnerability, individual squadron markings had been painted over, and the entire underside of the bombers had been resprayed in dark sea grey to camouflage them against the murky South Atlantic skies. In their cavernous bomb bays, they carried twenty-one 1,000lb high-explosive iron bombs armed with 487 fuses and 117 ballistic tails, each one capable of smashing a crater sixty feet wide and thirty feet deep in whatever was unlucky enough to be underneath it when it landed.
But in the Ops block, the flight planning was coming badly unstuck. Fuel management and planning were the responsibility of the co-pilots, Pete Taylor and Don Dibbens. Each of them worked on the figures separately, and each kept hitting the same brick wall. Taylor worked on the fuel plan with his crew’s AARI, Dick Russell. Whichever way they ran them they kept getting the same result. Taylor and Russell called over their Captain, Martin Withers.
‘We’ve got a big problem,’ Russell told him.
Withers went through it himself and reached the same conclusion: This isn’t going to happen.
Barry Masefield came in from the feeder. Reeve had suggested his AEO go and see where their co-pilot had got to. It was immediately clear to him that something was up. By now the crews were comparing notes. And Don Dibbens looked ashen.
‘What’s the problem?’ Masefield asked.
‘We can’t get there.’
‘What are you talking about, we can’t get there?’
‘The refuelling plan we’ve got – we’re going to fall out of the sky before we get to Ascension. You’d better go and tell John…’
Dick Russell went through it again with Pete Standing, the other AARI, but the calculations remained stubbornly unworkable. After a nine-hour flight they were going to be landing with a reserve of barely 4,000lb, 10,000lb short of what they should have. Such a tiny amount spread throughout the Vulcan’s fourteen tanks counted as vapours. With relatively inaccurate fuel gauges and Ascension lying at least a thousand miles from the nearest diversion field, they were setting themselves up for disaster before they’d even started. Questions began bouncing around the Ops Room: Can we get another Victor in? Can we move the tanker bracket up or down?
They were clutching at straws.
The bulk of the thinly stretched Victor tanker force had already deployed to Wideawake along with the most frontline crews. The two Vulcans would be flying south to Ascension supported by inexperienced tanker crews. The possibilities for shuffling things around at this late stage were severely limited, to say the least.
Great, thought Simon Baldwin as he’d watched the plan unravel. John Laycock was in his office, talking with AOC 1 Group Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight, oblivious to it all. Now I’ve got to go and tell them…
Baldwin walked around the corridors to the office; the Station Commander’s door was ajar. He knocked and went in.
‘Please don’t shoot the messenger,’ he said, ‘but the Victors can’t give us enough fuel to get to Ascension. In fact, the Vulcans are likely to fall into the sea several hundred miles short of Ascension.’
When John Laycock was told he looked like he’d rather have been anywhere else on earth than standing next to his boss, the AOC, hearing the news that his Vulcans were going nowhere that night.
‘How could we have possibly overlooked something like this?’ Knight flared – he, after all, was the one who was going to have to pick up the telephone and tell Northwood – but it was momentary. There was no mileage in apportioning blame. Knight quickly realized that everyone was too busy to bear the brunt. It was a cock-up, certainly, but nothing could be done other than postpone the deployment until the following day. He passed the message up through the chain of command through gritted teeth. The launch had been scrubbed.
Once the decision was made people speculated about who’d been at fault and where it had arisen, but it wasn’t easy to pin down. What was clear was that the planners at Bawtry had been working with completely fanciful fuel consumption figures for the Vulcan. They’d certainly asked the question: how much fuel does a Vulcan burn? And someone had answered it. But the whole exchange had been too vague. The answer is that it depends. The fuel plan had been worked out using the average fuel consumption of a Vulcan cruising at high level – about 10,000lb an hour. And that bore very little relation to what the three heavily laden bombers taking off from Waddington were going to use.
The difficulties of organizing large mixed formations with complex air-to-air refuelling plans had revealed themselves. And had hinted that at the heart of the planning was a problem which, while it had caused little more than delay and annoyance today, might have far more serious repercussions in the days to come.