‘I’m just going off intercom,’ he told the crew before disconnecting his PEC.
AARI Pete Standing pulled back on the stick, holding the delta in a steeply banked ascending turn, while Reeve concentrated on trying to sort out the problem with his comms. Unnoticed by Standing, though, the bomber’s nose was creeping up and vital speed bleeding off. Tucked away in the jump seat, Don Dibbens sensed something wasn’t quite right. Feels mushy, he thought for a moment before the full force of what that meant hit him. Oh shit! This bloody aircraft’s going to stall! Close to losing lift from the wings, 598 was on the verge of tumbling out of the sky. Dibbens leapt up from his seat and vaulted up the ladder to the flight deck.
‘Get the fucking power up,’ he shouted as he threw himself forward over the fuel tray to grab the four throttles. ‘Lower the nose!’
Pete Standing reacted immediately to bring the Vulcan back from the brink. The airspeed rose again. Caught by surprise at first, Reeve took control from the startled AARI.
‘OK, we’re all OK…’ calmed Reeve. Drama over. Dibbens returned, sweating, to his seat and the six of them settled again. After the scare, Reeve decided to bring her in, overweight or not. It was time to call it a day.
Around a hundred miles separated 607 from the first Victor of the BLACK BUCK formation. That was the distance Red One had flown at the point when Withers’ Vulcan was leaving Runway One Four. As the stream turned on to the southerly heading, the neat line-astern formation became muddled. With each jet covering around half a mile every ten seconds, even small variations in the point at which they initiated their turns had a major effect on their relationship to each other in the night sky. As 607 closed on the fleet of Victors, Dick Russell gave Martin Withers directions.
‘Right, at the first bracket we refuel off Blue One.’
The Captain looked out ahead at the long front of blinking navigation lights stretching across the sky in front of them.
‘And which one of all those aircraft out there is that?’ he asked.
While the organization of the three sections, Red, White and Blue, was clear on paper, in radio silence, darkness and three dimensions it was less straightforward. They weren’t hard to see. Each Victor’s white underside was illuminated by its own floodlights and red anti-collision lights pulsed. Each of the V-bombers had three anti-collision beacons above and below the fuselage that revolved like mini-lighthouses, flashing red and out of sequence with their neighbours. But scattered around the sky at different heights and distances, they all looked exactly the same. Rather than continue on his heading, Withers banked towards what, ahead and to the side, he assumed was the section they needed to join. But even the experienced Dick Russell was struggling to figure out which of the three sections they needed to refuel from, let alone which of the tankers within that section was theirs. On board 607 they had reams of paper with radio and TACAN frequencies, aircraft positions, Captains’ names and call signs. But trying to operate in radio silence meant that, right now, much of this was academic. Unhappily, Russell realized they were going to have to get on the RT and ask their tanker to identify itself. Over a discrete channel, Hugh Prior asked the section leader for a flare. Mounted in the roof of each Victor above the AEO’s station was a signal pistol. Aboard Blue One, the AEO loaded a cartridge and pulled the trigger, firing a green Verey flare into the night.
Withers and Russell craned their necks scanning the skies around them for the signal, expecting to see the glowing flare out ahead. Nothing.
‘Ask him for another one.’
Prior again pressed the transmit button, all the time scanning from side to side through his rear-facing periscope. Then he caught it at eight o’clock, behind and below them. Withers pulled back on the power and dropped down into the formation in anticipation of the first refuelling bracket, still over an hour away, over 800 miles south of Ascension.
At RAF Waddington, John Laycock finally managed to slip away from the IX Squadron dinner near midnight. He drove straight from the Officers’ Mess to the Ops block and walked briskly through to the Ops Room. A handful of staff sat at desks, surrounded by communication equipment.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked, hungry for news.
‘Absolutely nothing, boss.’
All they could tell him was that BLACK BUCK had got under way on schedule. Starved of information by radio silence and a chain of command that, now the bombers had deployed south, excluded him, he knew they faced a long, anxious night. There was absolutely nothing to be done but wait until a message filtered back indicating success or otherwise. The room was silent and tense. He decided to leave them for the night and try to get some sleep.
‘Right, I’m heading home,’ he told the Ops staff. ‘If there is anything at all, call me.’
About an hour and three-quarters into the mission, the tip of Vulcan 607’s refuelling probe locked into the drogue trailed by Blue One, and fuel flushed into her tanks.
Ahead of the first refuelling bracket, the three sections had descended 6,000 feet from their cruising altitude while the pilots carefully maintained the vertical separation between the jets. Ahead of the Vulcan, White section was refuelling at 28,000 feet and Red section at 30,000 feet. At 26,000 feet, Dick Russell gently held station below the brightly lit underside of his Blue section Victor. They were flying at around 15,000 feet below the delta-winged bomber’s optimum cruising altitude. Over the next twenty minutes, 37,000lb of fuel flowed from Blue One through her heavy eighty-foot hose to the Vulcan – 4,500lb more than expected.
At the first refuelling bracket, Bob Tuxford was going to take on 48,000lb of fuel – over 24 tons. This meant tailgating John Elliott’s Victor, White One, at over 250 knots for nearly half an hour. Over the course of transfer, while the co-pilot Glyn Rees worked hard to distribute the fuel evenly throughout the Victor’s tanks, the big jet’s centre of gravity inevitably crept forward. Unchecked, this could have a powerful effect on its handling, forcing the nose down. As the effort of keeping the Victor in formation increased, Tux tried to relieve the pressure on the controls using the thumb-mounted trim switch. The longer the transfer continued the more strength was needed to overcome growing heaviness of the controls. Hands and feet made continual adjustments as Tux maintained a finely honed balance between stick, pedals and throttles. The darkness made its own demands. By day, peripheral vision helped an experienced pilot keep station almost subconsciously. At night, without a horizon, that touchstone was gone. The intensity with which it was necessary to focus on those visual cues that remained further sapped a pilot’s energy. It was easy to become tired and disorientated. It was gruelling physical work for all concerned.
With his tanks filled to their maximum capacity of 123,000lb, Bob Tuxford notched back the throttles and allowed the Victor to lose ground slowly on White One. At the limit of its travel, the drogue pulled apart from the probe with a soft jerk. Ahead of him Tux saw the fluorescent studs that ringed the basket recede into the night above him. Three other Victors refuelled at this first bracket. All now carried more fuel than they’d taken off with, more than the weight of the aircraft itself. With the Vulcan now safely in formation things appeared to be going without a hitch. But operating in radio silence, Tux and the other three Captains were unaware that just a couple of hours into the mission, things were starting to come badly unstuck. The first four Victors to turn back for Ascension had cut deep into their own reserves to supply the combat formation with the fuel it needed to continue south. They barely had what they needed to get home safely.