The story of Black Buck 6 continues....
The GADA 601 Skyguard Fire Control Radar
An English translation of an entry into the GADA 601 Ops diary
Headlines in the Brazilian Press (made to give the impression that the Vulcan had been intercepted)
Remains of a Shrike missile from Black Buck 6
The rear crew had loaded all their classified planning material, photographic film and crypto into the aircrew ration box and added an undercarriage lock for extra weight. The spare pilot (whose role was to assist with the AAR) and the Nav Rad then edged the ration box closer to the ‘six by three foot’ escape hatch and pushed it onto the lip of the door as they stared out into the South Atlantic abyss. One extra shove and the ration box slid down the door and disappeared out of sight. The manual operating handle had now travelled into the locked-open detent position and would need to be un-locked manually. Two of the rear crew therefore straddled over the open hatch and, using an aircrew knife, were able to prise the handle out of the locked position.
All the while the AEO had been pushing out a Mayday call on the HF distress frequency asking for permission to land at a suitable airfield in Brazil. They had been pressure breathing for a full thirty minutes, which made both internal and external communications nigh on impossible. The Brazilian authorities demanded to know their origin and destination before agreeing to cooperate with the crew and so the Nav Rad’s suggestion of “tell them we’re from Huddersfield” in a Donald Duck accent whilst pressure breathing gave them that little extra time to concentrate and communicate with each other on intercom and to handle the in-flight emergency (I could just imagine the controller searching through his publications looking for a place called Huddersfield). With the escape hatch now closed and locked they were able to repressurise 597 and return to some level of normality.
An immediate tot up of the fuel tank contents revealed they had clawed back an extra five or ten minutes duration or about forty to eighty miles of range. It looked as though the cruise climb to 43,000ft had helped but then the drag from the open hatch wouldn’t have assisted much. Now, unbeknown to the crew until well after they had landed, the Brazilian air defence commander had scrambled two Northrop F-5s to intercept 597. They never did learn what their intention was or what action they would have taken had they found them. Fortunately, the duty fighter controller vectored the pair to the wrong location and so the nearest they got to 597 was when it was short finals to land. To catch it up they had to turnabout and accelerate to Mach one plus, which resulted in one F-5 delivering a supersonic boom over Copacabana beach and the bay of Rio.
Fortunately, the visibility was superb that day and there was no cloud cover whatsoever. Provided the fuel held out 597 should be able to spiral down almost in the overhead with the throttles at idle. It still did not have authority to land but the crew was going in anyway. They were talking to a controller and they were squawking emergency on the IFF. XM 597 now had a radar service. The controller could provide safe separation and de-confliction for civil airliners in their vicinity. XM 597 crossed the coastline at 16,000ft and commenced a corkscrew descent, a full thirteen and a half hours after departing Ascension Island. The controller finally gave the crew permission to land on the duty runway but that would have required a risky, downwind over-flight of the city to reach the runway threshold. They could not afford the engines to flame out over a highly populated area. Neil McDougall elected to land on the reciprocal runway, downwind, rather than into a light, five to ten knot breeze.
Neil eased back on the throttles, extended the airbrakes and bled the speed off. He then stood the bomber on its port wing-tip and pulled it into a tighter two to three G turn with sixty-five degrees of bank. His concentration was now entirely focused on getting the gear down and making sure he would nail the parameters as he approached the high and low-key positions from an approach that did not feature in the aircrew manual or flight reference cards. This was the only way Neil could trade off height against speed without exceeding the incipient stall. He needed to get the big bomber on to short finals with about 130-135 knots of airspeed. Neil was right on the money. A superb piece of skilful flying and airmanship ensured he was able to roll out on the extended centre line of the runway at three hundred feet with about one mile to run.
Now the minimum landing fuel in peacetime after diversion for a Vulcan was 8,000lbs and for operational flying 4,000lbs; the fuel gauges were notoriously unreliable. A full visual circuit required 1,700lbs of fuel. XM 597 cleared the runway, stopped short and the Nav Rad and AEO slid out down the escape hatch door onto the taxiway to disable the Shrike missile, just in case! As it taxied onto a hard standing on the military side of Galeão airfield with only fifteen hundred pounds of fuel remaining, one of the four Rolls Royce Olympus 301 engines flamed out! For his skilful flying and the part he played in Black Buck 6, Neil McDougall was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
At Galeão the crew were greeted by forty to fifty armed guards along with their base commander and were held under open arrest in the Officers Mess for a period of seven days. They were well treated and cared for. The remaining Shrike missile was confiscated by the Brazilian Air Force and taken to an armoury.
The day after their eventual release on the 10th July 1982, Pope John Paul II was travelling to visit Buenos Aires. On his way to Argentina, arrangements were rapidly being made for him to fly into Rio Galeão Airport where he was expected to say Mass to an invited congregation of nearly a hundred thousand followers. The altar for Mass was to be located on the hard standing next to where the Vulcan bomber was parked. The base commander requested that Neil taxied 597 to the other side of the airfield so that it would be out of sight. He politely declined but suggested that if he filled the tanks to full with AVTUR the crew would get out of his hair and fly back to Ascension forthwith. Our request was eventually granted, probably to save embarrassing the Pope or the President – or both.
That afternoon the Brazilian Chief of Air Staff visited the crew to wish them well before their planned departure the following day. He asked what they thought of Rio but they replied that they had not been afforded the opportunity to taste or experience the delights it had to offer. He was shocked to hear this and so immediately ordered the base commander to task one of his Super Pumas to take them on an aerial sight-seeing trip of Sugar Loaf Mountain and the beautiful coastline of Rio. He then ordered their colonel escort to arrange for a taxi to take the crew down-town to a cabaret show and a few farewell beers. They were aircrew. How could they possibly refuse his invitation? Neil the Captain though correctly elected to stay with his bomber.
The crew, less Neil, arrived at a bar to the rear of Copacabana beach. Two girls in particular showed an interest in them and proved difficult to shrug off. One had an Australian accent but claimed to be Argentinian. The crew was naturally very suspicious and tried to keep her at arm’s length. It wasn’t until thirty years after this event that the crew learned who this girl and her colleague really were. When the Foreign Office had learned that the crew of Black Buck 6 was about to hit the town before being released back to Ascension Island, someone in the Ministry of Defence must have had a fit. He was probably ex-aircrew himself and knew of the potential pitfalls that could await unsuspecting aircrew after being arrested and incarcerated in an overseas mess for a whole week. After all this was a foreign country some five thousand miles from the UK. Britain did not have any MI6 operatives in the area at the time and so a request was made to the CIA to put a tail on them, mainly for their own safety as who knows what could have happened to them that night as they sauntered around town from one cocktail bar to the next. The crew arrived back at base in the small hours of the morning and by 0930 local were airborne on their way back to Ascension Island. They had a story to tell and the debrief, as you will guess, took quite a while.
That completes this abridged account of the Black Buck SEAD missions. A full account can be seen at Chapter 14 of Tony Blackman’s book, ‘Vulcan Boys’ (
http://www.blackmanbooks.co.uk/vulca...apter%2014.pdf)