During the 1950s and 1960s, when the V-force represented the front line of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, the bombers would be kept ‘combat-ready’. Price, familiar with it from his own time spent on the Victor QRA, reverted to the old approach. All the pre-flight checks had been done up to the point where the aircraft was made live for engine start. Crews could be airborne fifteen minutes from the time they arrived at the jet. Tonight, with the success of the operation dependent on the serviceability of the whole formation, it made sense to adopt the old Cold War technique. Any problems, Price hoped, could be discovered and dealt with early. He ordered all the jets to be ‘combat-readied’ in the hours before crew-in, scheduled for 2100 that evening. Monty and the Ops crew took responsibility for the two Vulcans. They started up the engines on both and ran through the checklist: no problems. Dave Stenhouse, Monty’s Nav Radar, checked the bombs, removing the safety pins from the thousand-pounders hanging in both bomb bays: five per bomb, 210 pins in total. Vulcans 598 and 607 were ‘combat-ready’.
All the time, Price and the Ops Team continued to examine and refine the refuelling plan. The last fuel transfers, those taking place barely 300 miles off the Argentine coast, they decided, would be done in strict radio silence. RT needed to be kept to a minimum throughout, but so close to the operational area it was essential. Their main worry, though, remained fuel. Especially where the Vulcan was concerned.
Monty and Bill Perrins had been checking the refuelling plan against their own figures. By their calculations, if the refuelling failed at the third or fourth bracket – and their own experience in training showed that there was every possibility it would – the Vulcan couldn’t make it back to Ascension and would have to try for the Rio diversion. To ignore this would mean breaking the cardinal rule of air-to-air refuelling: that the receiver should never be dependent on the success of a fuel transfer for survival. Frustration at the imprecision that seemed to surround the Vulcan’s fuel burn was growing amongst the Victor contingent trying to plan BLACK BUCK. While Monty and Perrins were struggling to fill the gaps, Price realized that the Vulcan figures were overly optimistic and took action. The plan’s success couldn’t be dependent on carefully measuring out only that fuel Monty and Perrins deemed was necessary. To compensate for the uncertainty, the planning team decided to fill the Vulcan’s tanks at every transfer. But the unchangeable constant in any recalculation was that there was only a finite amount of fuel within the formation. Every decision they made regarding the fuel had repercussions elsewhere. And this one meant that the two long-slot Victors flown by Bob Tuxford and Steve Biglands – the two tankers responsible for the most distant refuellings – might not make it back to Wideawake. So Price introduced another detaiclass="underline" a terminal airborne tanker, or TAT, a Victor that would hold station one hour out from Ascension on the long-slots’ inbound track. The TAT would wait there for three-quarters of an hour at 29,000 feet ready to relay the gasping long-slot jets home.
After re-examining the figures, Monty told Price that the Vulcans could recover to Ascension if transfer three failed after all. This didn’t fill Price with confidence. The whole refuelling plan felt perilously like a house of cards. And there were now just four and a half hours until they launched.
The Vulcan crews themselves were unaware of the debate raging within the planning cell. Instead, they prepared themselves for the night ahead. They were too precious now to risk being poisoned by fish and salad from the field kitchens tonight. Instead they enjoyed the hospitality of the American commissary down near the airfield. It took the welcome form of New York steak, prime American beef, airlifted in by the USAF. I could get used to this, thought Mick Cooper.
Martin Withers’ crew were relaxed. They’d managed to sleep for most of the day without recourse to the Temazepam recommended by the Waddington doctor. Withers had never had a problem sleeping. Stress may have caused him to lose his appetite, but he could fall asleep on a log. Among Primary crew, only Cooper really seemed to be his old self. The others now, even the irrepressible John Reeve, were a little more subdued. By seven o’clock, both crews were down at the Wideawake airhead.
‘THIS IS A SECRET BRIEFING,’ announced the planner Trevor Sitch through a handheld megaphone at a volume that could be heard out at sea.
It’s not secret any more, thought John Reeve, enjoying the irony.
‘Right, gentlemen,’ Sitch continued, ‘the purpose of the exercise is to put a stick of bombs across Port Stanley airfield.’
Despite the volume, secrecy was an absolute priority. Because of the presence of the Soviet spy trawler Zaporozhive off the coast, RT traffic had been kept to a minimum all day. At 9 p.m. a telephone and telex blackout would be imposed. Even the weather was treated with suspicion. The flash signal handed out to the Vulcan crews providing details of the wind around the Falklands – light, south-west, becoming variable – was classified ‘SECRET UK EYES BRAVO’.
Following the Victor crews’ briefing on the fuel plan earlier in the day, the tent was littered with coffee cups, food wrappers and cigarette butts. Now, upwards of seventy V-bomber pilots, navigators and AEOs were sitting and listening, the legs of their folding chairs digging into the red cinder underneath them. Strengthening katabatic winds rolled down from Green Mountain whipping past the flapping canvas. Bare lightbulbs flickered above them. Monty looked around the packed tent. It’s like the Second World War, he thought, like El Alamein. He wasn’t the only one struck by the sense of history. There was also anticipation. Bob Tuxford relished the prospect of being part of an offensive force for the first time, a feeling sharpened by uncertainty. The tanker trash had long experience working together. Tux knew his own limitations, the Victor’s and those of his colleagues. Waddington’s tin triangles were an unknown element.
Martin Withers was mystified. Much of the refuelling briefing might as well have been in a foreign language. He just couldn’t picture, in his mind’s eye, how it would all work. Trevor Sitch explained the shape of the formation. It would be split into three sections, Red, White and Blue. To avoid the likelihood of a mid-air collision, the join-up plans were necessarily complex. As each section ferried out to the first refuelling bracket, it would be separated from the next by a 2,000-foot height interval. White formed up at 36,000 feet, Red at 34,000 feet and Blue at 32,000 feet. Within each section, 500-foot intervals separated the jets. Withers had understood that, but as the shape of the formation changed after the first wave of tankers returned home, then changed again after the second bracket, it became increasingly hard to follow. He wondered how, in radio silence, you were supposed to know who was refuelling whom. Withers leaned over to Dick Russell.
‘Do you understand that?’ he asked his AARI.
‘I’ve got it,’ Russell told him as he made notes on a piece of paper.
‘OK, if you understand it – I don’t – it’s all yours…’
Happy to defer to the tanker man’s expertise, Withers relaxed. He wasn’t going all the way and there didn’t seem any point in him trying to wrap his head around it.