As the big jet decelerated to taxi speed, Neal swung her round tightly through 180 degrees and dumped the chute – trying, as he gunned the throttles to roll back to the dispersal, to blow the discarded heap of fabric and rope off the runway with the jet wash.
In the little red and white control tower, Bill Bryden took a few deep breaths and watched the ground crew’s pick-ups kick up dust as they sped away to recover the four drag chutes.
Barry Neal’s crew was the only one of the four who’d just landed who were going up again that night. In less than two hours, they had to be ready to take off again in order to arrive at Rio RV in time to meet the returning Vulcan. Between briefing and planning, there would just be time to have a drink and grab a sandwich before crew-in.
Chapter 33
John Smith joked that he used religion like one of the emergency services. But the strength and frequency of his prayer now bore comparison with that of his wife Ileen, whose Catholic faith had always been strong. As April had passed, others of all faiths, looking for succour and the practical assistance Monsignor Spraggon could provide in dealing with their God-fearing occupiers, had joined them for mass at Stanley’s Catholic church, St Mary’s. Some of the Argentine officers, General Menendez included, had actually worshipped with them. But as he retired for bed on the night of the 30th, thoughts of loving thine enemy were far from Smith’s mind. Television was new to the Falklands and a gift of the invaders. Like many of his fellow residents, Smith had taken advantage of the Argentine subsidy to acquire a new set. Tonight he watched with rising anger scenes of General Galtieri in Stanley handing his rosary beads to young conscripts and telling them that the Blessed Virgin Mary was on their side.
Two hundred miles away to the north-west, Admiral Woodward’s Royal Navy Battle Group plunged through the swell across an imaginary line in the sea and into the Total Exclusion Zone.
Wing Commander Colin Seymour’s return to Wideawake provided Jerry Price and Red Rag Control with a nasty shock – hard evidence of how much fuel the Vulcan was burning. Half an hour after the four first-wave Victors had shown how little margin for error there was, the 55 Squadron boss’s figures underlined it. In the thirty-four minutes between the first and second fuel transfers, 607 had burnt 9,200lb of fuel. During that time, the overloaded bomber’s weight had never even dropped to its theoretical maximum, let alone below it. They were flying outside the aircraft’s notional limits and the fuel burn reflected it: 16,250lb an hour. The BLACK BUCK fuel plan was going to the dogs. But while he could see big trouble ahead, there was little Price could actually do other than try to be ready for it when it happened.
Subsisting on tea and cigarettes, wearing the khaki short-sleeved shirts of the RAF’s tropical kit, the Ops team hunched over trestle tables and tried to prepare contingency plans. They worked through different scenarios, factored in potential ifs and buts. As soon as the returning Victors were back at dispersal, the ground crew turned them round, checking the engines and refuelling them before reserve aircrew combat-readied them again. Barry Neal’s aircraft needed to be ready to go by 0520 along with the three others flying west to the Rio RV. That was less than two hours away. With such an urgent demand on the ground crew’s resources, preparing the rest of the waiting Victor fleet for as yet unknown, but virtually certain, emergencies had to take a back seat. Extra Victors would take three hours to turn round. The engineering teams were doing what they could, but it still seemed to Price a frustratingly long time. He was going to need those jets. The crews could stand down briefly, but after that he wanted them camped out by their jets, ready when he needed them. They could sleep under the wings, if they had to.
While the planners at Ascension crunched the numbers, the ‘Balbo’ continued south, unaware of the developing problem. Aboard the three remaining Victors, all seemed well – according to the Nav Plotters and their flight plans they were on time and on target. But the effects of the physical exertion of flying each fuel transfer and the intense concentration of nearly three hours’ night flying in formation were beginning to show. Unnoticed by Bob Tuxford or his co-pilot Glyn Rees, his Victor, XL189, was developing a slow, potentially dangerous roll to port.
Disaster doesn’t give much warning when flight refuelling goes wrong. Seven years earlier, Flight Lieutenant Keith Handscomb, one of Tux’s fellow 55 Squadron Captains, was flying a routine daylight air-to-air refuelling exercise with two Buccaneer S2 strike bombers over the North Sea, 170 miles north-east of Newcastle. Through the rear-view periscope, Handscomb’s Nav Radar saw that the second Buccaneer was approaching too fast. His probe clipped the edge of the trailing drogue, sending it snaking in towards the Victor’s fuselage. The Nav Radar lost sight of the Bucc as it settled again, above and a little behind the tanker’s wing. The bomber pilot throttled back a touch and started to drop down again to tuck in behind the Victor for another approach. Then he flew into the powerful jetwash from the Victor’s Sapphire engines. The Buccaneer was rolled quickly, his starboard wing smashing into the port side of the Victor’s high T-tail and ripping it off.
‘I think this is going to be a Mayday,’ observed the pilot of the other Buccaneer over the RT as he watched the catastrophe unfold.
At the same time as his tail was struck, Handscomb felt a slight change in pitch before the control yoke went completely slack. Behind him, structurally unsound and unable to withstand the huge stresses imposed on it, the starboard side of the tailplane also sheered off. His Victor, bunting forward into an outside loop that guaranteed it would break up, was finished. Handscomb immediately lost all control. He ordered his crew to abandon the aircraft but he knew that without ejection seats his backseaters had little hope. As the dying tanker accelerated into a terminal negative ‘g’ loop, the conditions could not have been more unfavourable for them to try to make their escape. Even if they had managed to unstrap from their seats they would only have been thrown and pinned to the roof of the cabin; forced against the outside wall of a fatal centrifuge. Less than 2,000 feet above the sea, with the jet already inverted, Handscomb’s ejection seat fired. Straps around his shins and shoulders tightened immediately as his Martin-Baker Mk 3 seat began its launch sequence. He was dimly aware that the cockpit was collapsing around him as five explosive cartridges fired in quick succession, catapulting the heavy seat through the roof at a speed of 80 feet per second. Within a second of the seat being triggered he was free, while behind him the doomed Victor was consumed by a fireball from the ruptured fuel tanks. Two hours later, through the combined efforts of a German freighter, SS Hoheburgh, and a bright-yellow RAF Whirlwind search and rescue helicopter, he was finally pulled from the North Sea, freezing cold and unable to recall the moment of his escape. It was six months before he’d recovered sufficiently from severe back injuries to strap himself back in to the ejection seat of another Victor. The rest of his five-man crew all lost their lives.