Closing up… contact! When Wallis shared the news of Biglands’ success, his voice betrayed a hint of his relief and Tuxford’s entire crew couldn’t help but relax just a fraction. An instinctive reaction. The Nav Radar continued to stare into his scope as Biglands flew his Victor forward to trigger the HDU’s pump and get the fuel flowing.
Green on, fuel flows, Wallis told them, and kept watching behind. He knew that Biglands’ making contact was a battle won but not a war. Now Biggles had to maintain formation while the two jets continued to be hurled around the volatile skies. While the co-pilot, Glyn Rees, called out the quantities of fuel being dispensed, Wallis kept Tuxford up to date with their receiver’s uncertain progress.
‘He’s getting very unstable…’ Wallis warned.
As the tanker was bounced around the sky, the trailing hose started to oscillate dangerously. While the motors governing the hose’s travel were designed to prevent waves and ripples kicking up and down its length, there were limits to their ability to absorb extremes of movement. Wallis watched with mounting alarm until, perhaps, the inevitable happened.
Inside the cockpit of Biglands’ jet there was a heart-stopping crack felt by all five of the crew as the tip of the Victor’s four-inch thick refuelling probe sheered off under the strain – unable to cope with the enormous lateral forces imposed on it. Ernie Wallis’ instruments told him immediately that the fuel flow had been interrupted. He sagged as he watched through the periscope.
‘He’s broken his probe,’ Wallis confirmed to his own crew over the intercom.
Biglands called it in over the RT a moment later. Tux could hear the anguish in his voice. He’d received just 8,000lb of fuel, half what he needed to fly south with the Vulcan as long-slot. And he could take on no more fuel in any circumstances. Whatever he had on board had to get him home to Ascension, 3,000 miles away.
Tuxford quickly thought through what had happened. If, as well as the damage to Biglands’ Victor, his own jet’s refuelling basket had been wrecked – or if the broken tip of Biggles’ refuelling probe was still jammed into the coupling valve – it meant the end of the road.
If Biglands couldn’t fly the long-slot role, the only possible option was for him and Tuxford to swap places. For the Vulcan to press home her attack, Tux was going to have to take on the fuel to fly the long-slot while at the same time carefully making sure that Biggles’ crippled jet had enough to get back to Wideawake without any possibility of needing further refuelling. He broke radio silence to talk to Biglands.
‘White Four, have you left your probe in the basket?’
‘I don’t know,’ came the reply.
There was only one way of finding out, but for the time being Tuxford had to assume his own drogue was going to work.
‘If we’re going to get away with this,’ he told Biglands, ‘the only solution is for me to take the fuel back. Can you get the hose out?’ Then he spoke to his Nav Radar: ‘Right, Ernie, get the hose in, let’s tidy it up…’
Chapter 35
‘White Four, we’re going to have to go for a formation change.’
As Tux explained his plan to Biglands, his own crew were preparing their jet to swap roles: tanker to receiver. Ernie Wallis checked the view behind them. Clear to wind, he said, before reeling in the Victor’s eighty-foot-long hose. Winding.
After they’d cleaned up the airframe, the co-pilot, Glyn Rees, prepared the wide fuel tray that folded down between the pilots’ ejection seats. Moving fuel around the tanks in preparation to take on fuel would normally take anything up to fifteen minutes, but there was no time for that. They continued through the checklist until hearing Checks are complete from AEO Mick Beer. Tux thumbed the transmit button and cleared Steve Biglands in White Four to overtake. Forced together by the vital need to maintain visual contact as they darted through the turbulent banks of cloud, the three V-bombers were in unusually close formation. As they changed places, in boiling air and uncomfortably close proximity, Biglands and Tuxford had to keep sight of one another.
Biggles drifted across to the left. With the Vulcan maintaining her position to their right, the three jets’ formation took on the shape of an arrowhead. Then Biglands pushed forward his throttles to increase the engine rpm and his Victor started to gain on Tuxford’s. As Biggles’ broken jet nosed forward, Tux caught sight of her overtaking through the thick glass beyond his left shoulder. The electric sky raged as the three-ship streaked south in and out of the cumulus. Inside each of the V-bombers the seats creaked and complained as they resisted the forces trying to oust their occupants from them.
‘I have your visual, White Four,’ Tux told Biglands, ‘you have the lead.’
Tux then manoeuvred his jet into position behind the damaged Victor, his senses heightened by the adrenalin coursing through him. Fired up and worried that the whole mission was falling apart, he was in a dangerous mood. Too aggressive, too hot-headed, and he would make mistakes. Tuxford tried to force himself to stay calm. But he knew if he overcooked it he could rely on experienced men like Ernie Wallis to rein him in: Cool it, Bob, slow down. Around him, the rest of the crew were working. With the master switch on their own HDU now turned off, Wallis backed up Nav Plotter John Keable as he replanned the flight ahead. At the end of the fuel transfer they’d become formation leader down to bracket four, barely an hour north of the Falklands. Mick Beer monitored the old V-bomber’s hydraulics and electrics while up front Glyn Rees performed heroics rearranging the fuel tray in a fraction of the time required. Tuxford composed himself, waiting for the word from Biglands’ Nav Radar. Then his headset crackled into life.
You’re clear astern.
Tuxford reduced the power and dropped back from a loose echelon into line astern.
Clear for contact.
He nudged the throttles forward with his left hand and began to close on the flailing basket.
Making contact by the book – following the line of the hose to the tanker’s belly – could never work in these conditions, whatever was taught back in ground school at Marham. Tuxford had to go for the basket, but with the distances it was thrashing up and down that needed careful handling. If he tried to fly the Victor in pursuit of the flailing drogue, too many deliberate, opposing inputs on the control yoke would cause a PIO, a Pilot-Induced Oscillation. Each correction would become an over-correction and, like a speeding car fishtailing down an icy road, its driver wrestling the wheel from side to side, the big jet would begin to porpoise wildly. It was a difficult situation to recover from. Especially so when you were flying thirty feet behind the tail of another aircraft. Instead, Tuxford tried to pick his moment, to anticipate the path of the basket and nail it with a burst of power from the engines or a kick of the rudder pedals.
A hundred and fifty yards to the right of him, hail rattled like grapeshot against the toughened glass of the Vulcan’s windscreen as Dick Russell watched the scene unfold. The green and grey camouflage of Tuxford’s Victor was picked out by the floodlights lighting the underside of the tanker ahead. Russell didn’t like the look of what he was seeing at all; he had never seen an effort to make a transfer in turbulence like this.