One for your lot Beags. VC10s and Vulcans! Mixed memories of that combination. During the mid sixties their Air Ships realised that staging through the Gulf Area in order to reinforce the Far East Air Force with Vulcans may be a little fraught, or even impossible. The only option was through the US and across the Pacific. Early on, with one or two Vulcans running ahead of Britannia support aircraft the odd ‘suck and it and see’ staged through Gander, Omaha, San Francisco, Honolulu, Wake, Guam, Singapore, Gan, Bahrein, Cyprus and home. Delightful trips; I don’t recall what the flying time was, but it was lonnnng.
In 67/68 we had a full scale reinforcement exercise from Cottesmore. (Would this be Exercise Moonflower?) This time the support aircraft were VC10’s. We left Cottesmore one Sunday morning aboard a ’10 bound for Gander, or was it direct Omaha? Anyway, we’d been airborne for four of five hours when my seating neighbour, a guy who knew absolutely everything, said to me ‘There’s land down there, and by my reckoning there shouldn’t be any land for another hour’. Right I thought, I shall immediately alert the Nav. Yeah, sure. We then swung into the steepest bank ever seen in a transport aircraft.
Turns out my neighbour was right! The Court Martial found that we were 510 miles North of track and there was mention of two RCAF CF-100 being launched which had actually intercepted us. (Did the Canucks still have CF-100s then? An old issue of Air Clues will confirm all of this.) The Nav was kicked out, the captain was put back on Brits, and the co-pilot was given a slapped wrist. I do recall that when we did land (it must have been Gander) we were surrounded by acres of mobile flashing lights. Much embarrassment all round.
