James Wharton
A Cold War-era Bomber is pulled quietly onto a runway on a bright autumn morning at an airfield in Warwickshire. When it stops, a ground crew congregates around the aircraft.
They place chocks on its big, black wheels. Technicians with checklists busy themselves with important tasks. Three men emerge from a small office in olive green coveralls with transparent map pockets on their legs, insignia on their arms and chests denoting their attainments in the air. They walk towards their awaiting aircraft with an unmistakable swagger. These men are pilots.
An almost hidden door is opened from under the fuselage, and a thin, yellow ladder affords the crew their entry to the aircraft. Inside, the men don headsets, complete their checks and give the OK to proceed. The chocks are removed, and the wheels begin their slow rotation forward.
Ten minutes later, a noise echoes miles around the airfield; a high-pitched hum, a sound that ought to have been consigned to the history books. But not today. In the cockpit, the pilot pushes his thrust levers forward.
The Vulcan lives.
The 57-year-old aeroplane roars down the runway stopping cars on a nearby A road. Is it about to lift its nose and take to the sky?
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The engines' noise reaches deafening heights. Inside, the two men upfront look at each other and nod. The Vulcan's front wheels lift off the tarmac.
But as it does, the engines fall silent. The runway comes back into contact with the landing gear. Our brush with history has ended. The aircraft stops, and onlookers applaud the legacy this exercise has forced to the forefront of everybody's conscience. What a sight. And what a job.
But who are these men, and why is this long-retired iconic bomber teasing its nostalgic fans with daring aborted take-offs on a runway in South Warwickshire? What is going on?
The dedicated volunteers behind one of just three Avro Vulcans that can still turn on its engines and complete "fast-taxi" runs, wowing crowds with its incredible noise and presence, told of their role in keeping the Vulcan's memory alive.
During a day with them, they gave a rundown of their role as they prepared for one such demonstration.
This is the story of Avro Vulcan XM655 and three of her maintenance and preservation society members, all of whom ex-crewmembers of the iconic Bomber.
What Was Vulcan Like To Fly?
"It was exhilarating."
Those are the words of Nick Dennis, who, from 1961, was an RAF pilot responsible for flying Vulcan. Back then, the aircraft was used to carry the UK's nuclear deterrent. He recalled the days of his flying career he spent on standby for nuclear war:
"We were doing QRA [quick reaction alert], which was a duty of 24 hours and 48 hours over the weekend.
"I can remember callouts at Coningsby when it was snowing outside. And out we would go, straight into the aircraft, and we would wait and see how far we go, whether it was a taxi or just an engine start. Fortunately for us, it wasn't anything real. It was always a practice. It was an arduous job."
In the 1960s, nuclear war seemed more likely than it did later or even today.
Nick, asked how it felt knowing that the aircraft he would be firing up and possibly flying contained Britain's retaliatory nuclear weapons, said:
"The general feeling was that if we were actually sent in anger East, there was a reason for it. There was a great need to get airborne as quickly as possible because there was something incoming. So, you always felt that if you were called out in anger, there wouldn't be much left of this country. And that went on until the Royal Navy took on the deterrent.
"So, that was the very serious side of it, and it was taken very seriously by everyone on QRA. The most serious moments of my life. I was pretty young then, and I think you think you are pretty invincible and that nothing like that will happen to you. But it was serious."
During the Cold War, the Vulcan was not limited to nuclear security activities. They also found a purpose as the Royal Air Force's primary conventional bomber. Nick told us how he played a part in an unexpected operation in the Far East in 1964.
"The UK was a member of SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation], and as a result, we had to be able to reinforce the Far East, commitments such as Malaysia after its independence.
"Indonesia made threats against Malaysia, and that resulted in the Indonesian Confrontation in 1964. So, we had to at very short notice go out in support of Malaysia. And we carried 21 one-thousand-pound bombs, and within 24-hours we were on our way, and we were out there for three months."
For Nick, there were other occasions after that when he would have to rehearse responding to similar emergencies as part of standard operational training. He proudly told us this involved several circumnavigations of the planet at the controls of a Vulcan.
"If you were going west-about, then you would have to fly right across America, then cross the Pacific, and you would go as far a Singapore. Then after a period out there, you would come back, continuing on west, coming back over the Indian Ocean.
"In my period, I did three circumnavigations as co-pilot and a captain. That was quite something. I was still in my twenties."
Why Did The RAF Need Vulcans?
Today, Nick is part of the XM655 Maintenance and Preservation Society, a group of dedicated ex-Vulcan crew members and volunteers working tirelessly to keep one of just three remaining aircraft in a full ground running condition.
The aircraft in question, Avro Vulcan B Mk2 XM655, is the youngest surviving Vulcan, initially delivered to IX Squadron at RAF Coningsby in November 1964. After 20 years of service, during which she flew crews worldwide, including Nick himself, in 1984, she was retired. After falling into a state of disrepair, in 1998, the society was formed. Today, the XM655 is one of just three Vulcans that remain in a taxable condition. The society proudly boasts that the rear spar of the aircraft is in excellent condition and that she is virtually complete in terms of installed equipment.
Mike Pollitt, a Vulcan pilot from 1974 and RAF officer with 34 years of service, is at the helm of the society.
Mike gave a tour around the aircraft and allowed our reporter the opportunity to sit inside the cockpit. While there, he outlined the origins of the aircraft's service.
"You've got to go back to 1945 and the end of the Second World War. In 46, the UK had decided that it was going to have its own independent Atom Bomb, and they were building it at the time. It was a device known as Blue Danube. It had a 16 to 18 kiloton yield, which is the same as the ones they dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But it's a monster of a weapon - it's over 24 feet long, it's five feet in diameter and weighs five and a quarter tonne this bomb. And the Air Ministry at the time, the predecessor of the Ministry of Defence, each armed force had its own ministry, decided they wanted to get this rather rapidly to the Soviet Union to have a credible deterrent.
"They are looking for something capable of flying over 50,000 feet, faster than 500 knots, which is 575 miles per hour, a range of 3,750 nautical miles, which just happens to coincide with the front-line bomber of the period, the Avro Lancaster. They want an all-weather capability and, if they don't want to be carrying Blue Danube around, a capability of carrying at least 20 one-thousand pounders. Three months later, Roy Chadwick and his team at Avro submitted the design of the B1 Vulcan.
"This aeroplane is capable of getting well above 50,00 feet. I've had pilots tell me they've taken it to 60,000."
Mike, asked to describe the association his life has had with this iconic aeroplane, used words like "pride" and "incredible" but also detailed how onlookers "just couldn't take [their] eyes off it once it was in motion." Nick, his co-society fellow pilot, agreed, adding:
"I can always remember the last time she flew. She did a round-robin flying to the northern airfields on the Saturday and the southern airfields in the UK on the Sunday. And I can remember standing here at Wellsborne, as I had done many times in my 13 years that I spent on the Vulcan, watching her approaching from the south and everyone went totally quiet.
"She came into this climb and put on power, and the ground literally shook, and you could feel the sound waves hitting your body. Everyone was staggered by it, the sound of it, the manoeuvrability of the aeroplane right in front of them and I can tell you, I had tears when I saw that. It was the last time I saw one flying.
"And that's the effect it had on you. That's the effect it had on me. I saw Vulcan every day, I never tired of seeing it and I thoroughly enjoyed flying it. I was a lucky man."
Vulcan And The Falklands War
Another ex-Vulcan crew member involved with XM655 is Air Electronics Officer Rod Trevaskus, a Cornwall man who served on the aircraft in the mid-1960s and from 1978 to 1982. Like Nick and Mike, Rod, who wears his original flight coveralls while working around the Vulcan, recalled his remarkable experiences of the operations he participated in during the Falklands War.
"When the balloon went up, I was sitting on the Vulcan force, which was just disbanding. We thought they were probably not going to deal with us, and anyway, we couldn't reach [the Falklands].
"And then all of a sudden, a directive came down and five crews were selected to do air-to-air refuelling which nobody had done for many, many years. They were being trained in a matter of two weeks, it was amazing."
"Mayday!" Emergency Over The Ocean
On 3 June 1982, Rod was the Air Electronics Officer onboard XM597 for operation Black Buck Six, a bombing raid on an Argentine anti-aircraft radar position situated on the main island of the Falklands. The mission was successful. Rod and his crewmates destroyed their target of a Skyguard fire-control radar system, killing four members of the Argentine Army in the process.
However, a crisis occurred when their in-flight refuelling probe broke during the journey home, leaving Rod and his colleagues facing a life and death situation. He detailed the events that night in the flight deck:
"On the way back when we were doing our last refuelling, the Nimrod came and put us together about 700 miles of the coast of Brazil. We had one of two problems trying to get into the probe. On one particular approach, it was rather heavy, and there was a huge bang. And then we lost the tip of the probe. It stayed in the gasket of the Victor.
"It became obvious we weren't going back to Ascension Island and started to head for Brazil and think what we had to do."
At this point, the crew members on XM597 contended with conflicting priorities. As Rod explained, this involved security procedures and the prospect of the aircraft crashing into the sea. He added:
"We had all the force disposition, all the secret documents. The whole lot.
"I said, I think we're going to need to get rid of this. If we do get to Brazil, we didn't actually know how they would welcome us, if they would welcome us. And the only way to get rid of something like that in a Vulcan is to open the main door and chuck it out.
"But before that, I said we'd better get rid of the missiles too, because that's a bit incriminating because we still had the echo band [American supplied Shrike] missiles. My colleague Dave Castle swept ahead and made sure there was no ships on the ocean, and I pinged off the missile but only one went, the other hung up [failed to release]. But by then, we didn't have time to mess about."
Rod then needed to ditch the aircraft's secret documents. After stuffing them in a ration box, he dropped them in the ocean. His thoughts then shifted to that of surviving.
"I eventually got in contact with Brazil. And they wanted to know what aircraft we were. So, I said we were a four jet, and they asked what is a four jet? I just said, yes, that's correct. We wanted to get as close as the coast as we might and then they kept saying, where are you from, where are you from?"
Rod, laughing, added:
"Dave Castle yelled across all the noise, 'Eh Rod, tell them we are from Huddersfield'. The guy came back on and asked where we were from, and I said, 'Roger, point of departure Huddersfield. And there was this massive silence on the radio from the other end. I imagined the confusion in the oceanic control room, thinking, 'where?'.
"But they didn't want us to land. We weren't allowed to approach. In the end, I got the 1215, the civil emergency frequency, and declared a Mayday.
"I told them, 'Here's the situation, you either let us land, or we are going to ditch in Rio Bay'.
"Then they came back and gave us permission to land."
The crew managed to survive a hair-raising spiral landing on a runway too short to take an aircraft that size. When it landed, XM597 had less than 2,000 pounds of fuel remaining … not even enough to complete a circle of the airport. Rod and his fellow crew were not greeted with a welcoming party. Instead, "a whole load of guys with guns surrounded us." He added:
"We didn't know what to expect. They took the captain away, and we said whatever you say, we will agree with. We were supposed to carry nine-millimetre pistols, but we thought, what the hell are we going to do with a pistol? So, we didn't bother to take arms with us. Why would I want to shoot a Brazilian? They weren't in the war, they were not the enemy. We just didn't know how they would perceive us. We were treated reasonably well. Some of the younger officers were a bit anti because they were more friendly with their Argentine neighbours. They had a bit of animosity. But they treated us very well.
"Their interrogation technique was a high-ball glass filled with Jonnie Walker Black Label. I thought OK, we can cope with this."
Today, Vulcan's exploits in military service and the displays it went on to conduct after retirement are confined to history. But thanks to the careful work and attention of XM655 Maintenance and Preservation Society, her large number of admirers still have an opportunity to get up close and personal with one of just a handful of these inspiring examples of British aviation heritage.
It might not be quite as exciting as witnessing her V-shaped silhouette passing overhead, but when her thunderous engines scream as Mike, Nick and Rod fast taxi her along the tarmac, three men bound by their brotherhood experiences of flying her on operations in decades past, it is possible to visualise the golden era of this iconic Bomber once again. If only briefly.
The XM655 Maintenance & Preservation Society depends on the support of its members and attendees to regular events organised around their Vulcan. For more information or to sign up as a member, visit their website on www.xm655.com.
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