Victors & Vulcans Falklands raid

[peterrc]

Peter Cupar,

Just to avoid us both having sleepless nights, it was RAF Finnngley. I looked it up and the Vulcans were based there. It is now re-incarnated as Robin Hood Airport. But it is quite a way from Sherwood Forrest.

Yet another Falklands prog. on tonight. This time with the man who "counted them all out and counted them all back".

Hi Don, I was not having sleepless nights but thanks for the clarification. It means at least I can remember some things from the past.
I was dissapointed with the programme as I know what effort went into it on the Victor K2 side to make it as success. Thirteen serviceable Victors and the Vulcan force could only get 1 out of 2.
Sadly 'My' Victor XH671 started to crack up after I left it but it did take part in the operation. I found a photo on Google images that lets me know how Alistair 26061 is feeling. http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=XH6...w=1025&bih=455
Peter, Cupar

[DJT]

I watched this last night on 4OD. On the face of it an amazing piece of flying and logistics. The film concluded that it was a major event in that it stopped the argies using the airport, thus saving British lives. At the time I was on a BP tanker on charter to the Iranians in the Persian Gulf; any news we had of the Falklands war was via BBC World Service. Although I knew that we had bombed the airfield using Vulcans, I knew nothing of the effort needed until last night. Pretty impressive.

I have an undying memory of seeing a Vulcan at Farnborough Air Show back in the '60s. I will never forget the way the ground seemed to shake when it stood on its tail and soared upwards. Fantastic. The English Electric Lightning did the same trick, with much the same effect on the crowd.

Dave

[Greenstag]

I read the book about this , was a logistical nightmare to get the Vulcan to the Falklands lots of mid air refueling

I do hope they don't just hand them back to the Argies

John

Its called Vulcan 607 by Rowland White ...it's a one of the best factual books I've ever read. Well worth a read if you can get hold of it

[KOY 23]

I have an undying memory of seeing a Vulcan at Farnborough Air Show back in the '60s. I will never forget the way the ground seemed to shake when it stood on its tail and soared upwards. Fantastic. The Lockheed Lightning did the same trick, with much the same effect on the crowd.

Dave

Hi Dave.

I was at Farnborough around then and saw the Lightening do that, absolutely incredible. A later experience was seeing the Harriers hovering and reversing. We've had some wonderful aircraft.

John.

[jleyton]

A couple of years ago I contributed to "Vulcan in the Sky" to keep the one flying Vulcan in the air. After that I kept getting mail shots and emails from their Chief Executive and I began to wonder what percentage of my dosh actually gets to the aircraft. Chief Executives tend to get paid a lot and to be Chief, I assume there are other executives under him, all costing money. I had in my mind a bunch of ex RAF maintenance men in their overalls all giving their time free and getting stuck in to keep the aircraft in the air, but I fear that all this marketting and management structure is sucking the funds away. So I no longer contribute.

Although I think it's great to see the last remaining Vulcan flying, I too have serious reservations about the "Vulcan to the Sky" organisation. Here's why:

I used to work in the Press office of Citroen UK and when we were about to do the C2 VTS (a sporty little hatchback) Press launch, we wanted to show off the performance of the vehicle but, of course, had to be seen to act responsibly – I.e. we couldn't let the journalists hoon the car round on public roads. So, we decided to use an airfield and let them thrash the cars there to their heart’s content - to get them in a good mood and give them a good first impression of the car, before they took it on the roads.

Anyway, when we were in the planning stage, we visited Bruntingthorpe, which is a former RAF airfield that’s widely used as a car test track and storage area and, only then, discovered that the Vulcan was being restored there. By an amazing coincidence it transpired that the project to restore the plane was going under the acronym of ‘VTS’ – Vulcan To the Skies. Well, once we’d found out, and as we were launching a VTS – that was a bit of a flyer as well – we couldn’t resist playing on it a bit.

Now, for most of our press launches, a colleague of mine did the introduction and spoke about general aspects of the particular car and I then went on to talk about the product in detail and its technical aspects etc. We knew most of the important journalists pretty well and so, although our presentations had to have a degree of formality, we had a good reputation for making punchy, effective but often humorous presentations which got across all of the key points of the particular car in a succinct way (unlike many of the German manufacturers presentations that droned on for hours !)

For the C2 VTS, our set was right in front of the partially restored Vulcan in a hangar. My colleague started talking but, as the journalists would normally expect to see me as well, they were surprised not to see any sign of me. Anyway, after a few minutes, and to the journalists’ surprise, I emerged, complete with flying jacket and helmet down the steps, from the bomb bay of the Vulcan, Top Gun style, to a certain amount of friendly heckling. I then went on to talk about the car.

Well, in my presentation we had a few slightly light hearted references to the two different VTSs, including a line something like ‘Well, to introduce you to our new little flyer, what better setting than this, and whilst I have to admit that the C2 VTS’ top speed of 125mph (?) isn’t quite as fast as this magnificent machine, when it comes to fuel consumption, we’ve got it beaten with our 50 (whatever) mpg !’

Anyway, to ensure that all went well when the Press were there, we had a final on-site rehearsal the day before the actual event. We had a small audience of staff, various people and the head of the Vulcan To the Skies programme. As I said the lines above he jumped up and demanded that we stop ! To our astonishment, he said ’you can’t say that about the Vulcan’ and although, at first, we thought he was joking, he was deadly serious as he would not allow anything that he felt was critical of the plane. We pointed out that nobody in their right mind would think that a Vulcan could achieve 50 miles to the gallon however despite explaining that we were not being critical at all and we had the utmost respect for the plane and his work of restoring it, he stuck to his veto on this and 3 or 4 other equally innocuous lines. The fact that we were paying several thousand pounds to help the project did nothing to sway him.

What a narrow minded, un-commercially minded little tw*t. Single handedly he ruined our press launch as we just didn’t have time to rewrite our presentation in another humorous way – we just had to do a plane (sic) ordinary factual one

With people like that behind the project, I'm amazed they got it flying again.

Cheers

Julian