Beagle,
Stories from the Goose are still classified.
Tiny Mathews OTOH had a rather sudden end to his tour as OC Bomb at Akrotiri. He had done a low and go after take-off from Tehran and pulled about 1.75g at max AUW. His misdemeanour came to light when one of the linneys at Akrotiri tripped on the wing and thought the air brake had been left out. It hadn't, it was the ripples in the wing. Tiny's crime was compounded by not reporting the overstress.
Here's a couple from the memory banks both concerned with climb performance.
In 1964 we were routing Aden-Gan-Butterworth during confrontation. Out of Aden we had an interesting set of problems. Gan was almost 2,000 miles away and our nearest diversion was in Ceylon 550 miles north-east. Our take-off weight at Aden was 192,000 or thereabouts with full fuel and full bomb-load. Our min landing weight at Gan for diversion to Ceylon was above our max landing weight of 140k. Route fuel would have been about 50k with no real flex. The plan was for minimum burn to Gan and then burn off to landing weight or divert. Diversion however meant jettisoning the bomb load.
Cruise climb was flavour of the month in the 60s, especially for the Canberra where most of our plotters had originated from. Out came the ODMs and the cruise climb profile was worked out. Max climb to the trop and then cruise climb from there. Only problem, cruise climb would not start until we were above 45,000 ft and we were not prepared to done all our pressure clothing at Aden with outside temeperatures in the high 40s. Landing at Gan was interesting especially for the second aircraft, Mike Melville or Noel Steel I think. The boss, Bob Tanner had arrived first and was in the circuit burning off fuel with us calling him the front sweeping in from the east. Still we pounded the circuit and were astonished to hear him call number 2, 30 minutes behind, to descend and burn off as we would be landing soon and the runway would be clear.
No 2 duly descended and we landed. Before we could get in the crew bus the heavens opened and the vis dropped to about 400 yards. No 2 then made a GCA and we watched as the Vulcan disappeared into the wet, tail brake streaming and no sign of slowing down. Gan was only 8,000 feet and he was at 140k. ATC saw him but did not see him stop. They hit the crash button and chased off after him. He had stopped with just feet to spare.
Back home at Cottesmore in 1965 we did the delivery air test on, I think, XM655. The air test schedule required a combat power take-off and climb to maximum altitude. We had to take engine Ts and Ps every minute. Later the Vulcan was restricted to cruise power but we had about 104% on two engines and 102% on the other two. For some reason the maximum power was never uniform across all 4 engines.
Brakes off we accelerated down the runway. We had about 50% fuel so our AUW was about 137,000lbs. That was when the Mark 2 weighed in at about 97 or 98k. One minute later, passing 2,000 feet we read out all the figures to the AEO. After 2 minutes, passing 7k we started again. He had no sooner finished one set when we started on the next. We continued like a love-sick angel at 5,000 fpm. Passing 50,000 we were still climbing like a rocket just over 9 minutes after take-off.
Our ROC started to reduce but still over 2,000 fpm. Passing 55,000 we wondered just how high it would go. We had the full pressure gear on, g-pants and pressure jerkins, P or Q masks, but it was really into unknown territory. At 55,500 our ROC was approaching 500 fpm and we were passing Glasgow. We decided to call it a day and turned for home.