Vulcan over the Falklands 1982

It gives one the airplane shivers to think how those crew members would have been able (or not been able) to bail out in case of an emergency.

Submarine claustraphobia comes to my mind...

 

Ejection seats only for pilot and co-pilot ....rest of crew had to remove the bailout hatch and hit the silk....... However all academic as the Vulcan was designed as a platform to deliver a nuclear weapon ( UK developed Bluestreak)....it was always considered a one way mission even though they planned to land at locations to the east of the Russian targets.......original plan was as a high altitude weapons platform as a result they where painted in "nuclear flash" white, once the Russians started sorting out their SAM platforms the RAF reverted to low level attack.....

 

I presume you meant "Valiants"; the Vampire was a fighter.

 

I believe that the Tornado is used in the bombing and ground attack role now. Far cry from when i started watching planes and following the RAF, they had the Lightning, Buccaneer, Vulcan,Victor, F4-Phantom, Jaguar,Harrier,C130's and more im sure...now the only front line fighter is the Typhoon, and its not a pure air superiority fighter...look what having the national health system has done.....

 

Here are a couple of pics Bob. I was only a small boy when i was taken in the cockpit and even for me it seemd small compared to the size of the plane. Or maybe my eyes where just sooo wide open it looked small ..LOL

http://sobchak.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/vulcancutaway.gif

http://th06.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2011/262/5/5/avro_vulcan_b2_by_hod05-d4abdm2.jpg

I have family still in the RAF i will see if i can get a couple of better pictures

 

There could have been wind shear and other breezes that effected the trajectorybut it was a good job nevertheless.

 

Not a chance. Even in Afghanistan and Iraq (ESPECIALLY in Afghanistan and Iraq) the role of of a bomb truck is incredibly important. Something that can carry tons of weapons and loiter for long periods and/or travel long distances without refueling (strategic bombers) will NEVER go out of style. One B-52 or B-2 can do in one sortie what it would potentially take dozens of tactical fighters/bombers to do.

 

Even with the enhanced WW2 style sighting equipment I think that the Brits left a portentous calling card, " Hi there, we can reach you and can touch you with a bit of a bite. There might be more very soon." I'm sure that it was a rude awakening and caused the Argentinians to contract and to concentrate their resources. The logistics of the refueling team of Victors is a masterpiece in my mind. Having worked on the B-52 and the KC-135 that uses the flying boom to refuel, I can appreciate the skill and daring exhibited by the British air crews in using the probe and drogue, especially at night. This surfaced an incident that I witnessed some time in the early 50's when we lived near the extinct Bellevue Airport NE of Seattle and Boeing Field. Around 8 pm I could hear a large prop aircraft coming quite low and aimed at us. I ran outside in time to see a KC-97 at what sounded like max boost coming in on a long decent with a B-47 hooked up to the boom. They roared over the house low enough to reflect the street lights and headed for Boeing Field. I was never able to find out what became of the duo but I know that it was a close thing. Then that fall I witnessed a B-47 coming in to Boeing with about six feet of boom still stuck in the receiver and a damaged canopy. The landing was close to a disaster as the B-47 veered towards the flight line but corrected in time. There was a few near misses with the XB-52 and B-52A also. Looking back, there was a lot of dicey testing conducted in the early 50's that eventually went to Edwards.

 

I understood that it was on purpose. They didn´t have the precision to needle the runway from one end to the other, so they just tried to make sure that at least one bomb hit the runway. Hence the diagonal and timed drop.

 

All the ground attack Tornados are being retired, so the Eurofighter is the closest thing to a bomber the RAF will have.

I was in the UK flying F-111Fs during the Falklands War and got to see it unwind on British TV. Some amazing things were done. C-130s and other aircraft unable to refuel were modified in a matter of days. Behind the scenes, the US passed nearly all our AIM-9L Sidewinders to the RAF and whatever else they needed from USAFE, initially, and stateside later. Much of the US reluctance was for show and there was much behind the scenes activity. The only mid-Atlantic stopping point on the route from the UK to the Falklands was Ascension Island, and that built up unbelievably quickly to support the war.

The UK would have lost 19 ships, and likely the war, if the Argentineans had known to remove the set screw at 6 seconds arm time on the Mk 904 nose fuzes they were using on their bombs, and set them to 4 seconds or lower. Most of the bombs never armed because the Argentineans were flying at such low altitude. Might have blown some fighters out of the sky, too, but that is the price you sometimes pay to kill the target. As it was, one of the bombs being disarmed in a ship blew and they lost the ship. Other ships were lost to direct hits and detonation.

 

Where you based ? Lakenheath ? Mildenhall ? two more of my favorite viewing spots.

As for the bomb run, not sure if the diagonal attack was planned, i say that because if you listen to the film they had no maps of the south Atlantic, so had there northern ones upside down, and for sure no GPS so right before they climbed up to bombing height they really didn't know where they where. I think it was more "area Bombing" technique fro WW2 than the precision we are used to now.

I still think it was more to let the Argentinian public and leaders know.."hey we can get to you" more than the physical damaged imposed ...incredible effort.

 

They say in the film, that real location was within a mile of what the nav said to them. They knew their location before the bombing run.

 

RAF Lakenheath, Upper Heyford had F-111Es. The Vulcan had an excellent ground attack radar, so they knew exactly where they were when they overflew the target. Even at low altitude, and the Vulcan did not have terrain following radar, the island, and good radar offset aiming points, would have been visible from 40-60 miles away. Plenty of time to get oriented and drop relatively accurate radar bombs. From their bombing altitude, it was even possible to turn up radar power and burn out the shape of the runway complex on the radar. The Vulcan had a relatively sophisticated weapon delivery system for the 80s.

Bad news is it is almost impossible to shut down a runway with general purpose bombs, or even specialized runway attack weapons. What they did demonstrated they could do the same thing to Buenos Aires or any other mainland target they chose. More easily, in fact, because the population centers were much easier to reach.

 

Great stuff! Always had a soft spot for the Vulcan since they used to fly over the house all the time when I was a kid.

One of the only times in my life I've lost a roll of film was the day I stopped outside the fence as a Vulcan roared down the runway towards me!

Gutted to hear about XH558 but the costs to keep her in the air are just astronomical.

 

Oops... meant 'Vulcan', not Vampire... one of those 'V' planes...

 

In the A-10 when using iron (dumb) bombs we would always plan to drop a string of 6 at a diagonal to a runway/road.

 

Jim- The A-10s are now set up to drop PGMs like the JDAM and that gives much more flexibility for airfield attacks. But even with PGMs, it is difficult to shut down a runway. A better solution is something like Gator or even GPs with long timer fuzes (up to 24 hours). Timer fuzes on GPs really scare the snot out of runway repair types because they never know when one will blow.

I got credit for a runway in Desert Storm using GBU-24s, but doubt it shut the runway down for long. Not that the Iraquis were flying too much after the first few days.

 

Short TV clip from BBC i think on the Sea Harrier follow up attack after the Vulcan



[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YuFCtKoHCs[/ame]

 

Now that is a cool plane!! Are they still in service?

 

Are you asking if th A-10 is still in service????

Absolutely, will be for many, many years to come.

(Started with a gun and built a plane around it.)