Following the bitter disappointment with having to abort their first mission on Black Buck 4, Neil McDougal’s crew re-launched in a similar fashion as Black Buck 5 with a dozen Victor tankers at midnight on 30 May. This time a Russian AGI (Intelligence gathering) ship had been sighted 40 nm south of Ascension Island. It later transpired, following information provided by Argentine officers long after the conflict, that the AGI had forwarded information of the take-off time and formation size to Argentinian air defence forces on the Falklands. So there would be little or no chance of a surprise attack this time. No doubt the TPS-43 would be on maximum alert in 8 hours’ time.
XM 597 arrived at its descent point some 250 nm from the Falklands having refuelled 4 times, it descended to low level for its ingress and then commenced a climb to a sanctuary height of 16 000 ft over East Falkland with around 40 nm to run to the airfield. There then ensued a game of cat and mouse between the crew and the TPS-43 search radar, which the rear crew eventually located on the southern edge of Port Stanley. After 30 mins triangulating the radar emissions 597 eventually manoeuvred into a firing position as the TPS-43 continued to track it intermittently, and successfully launched 2 Shrikes from a 20 degree dive. The first missile impacted 6 metres from the target radar with the warhead slicing through the radar’s waveguide assembly. The second missile impacted around the same distance from the operators’ cabin blasting its door off and badly shaking the operators but (we can say fortunately now) no casualties were incurred.
XM 597 returned to Ascension after spending a total of 45 mins in the overhead of East Stanley and landed back after a total airborne time of precisely 16 hours, 5 mins longer than the bombing sortie of Black Buck 1. XM 597 and its crew slid into the record book having completed what was, up to then, the longest air-to-ground combat mission in the history of air warfare.
In 2 days, I will post here the story, very briefly, of Black Buck 6 describing how and why the crew ended up at 43,000 ft with the escape hatch open and no fuel reserves, with the Brazilian Air Force QRA scrambled to intercept it, and the intervention of Pope John Paul II and the CIA that helped secure the eventual release of the crew.
The primary crew and reserve crew for BB5
2 Shrikes with radar heads optimised against a TPS-43 radar
The Shrike AGM-45 mounted on a make-shift pylon where a Skybolt missile would have been mounted in the past
The crew chilling on their return to Ascension Island after a 16 hour mission