VX770 outside of brief, and spec, at Syertson! I didn’t know that, and hard to believe! I thought it was simply put down to ‘airframe failure’.
I joined Vulcans as ground crew (what you’d now call avionics) at Coningsby, February 1964, and stayed with the same aircraft when they moved to Cottesmore in November ’64, and then to Waddington in ’68.
There were two other losses, aircraft and crew, which I was close to and, only years later, did I question as being ‘self inflicted’ by unnecessary procedures in training.
The first was XM601, Coningsby, evening of October the 7th 1964.
The aircraft was doing practice approaches. At around 7.30 the crash alarm went off and we left the Castle Club when it was obvious from the fire in the darkness, within the airfield boundary a half mile away, that this was no drill.
It turned out that 601 had been doing asymmetric approaches with engines 3 and 4 at flight idle. This particular approach ended up, as witnessed by the tower, well to the right of the runway centre line. No FDR’s were carried but the Board of Enquiry concluded that the crew had decided on a very late go-around, and slammed all four throttles forward.
‘Slam-Checks’ were part of ground engine tests and the Olympus would take 9 seconds to spool-up from flight idle to 100%. In the case of 601, slamming all four forward at that speed caused thrust asymmetry well beyond the control surfaces. The Vulcan rolled right, the wing tip dug into the grass and the aircraft cart-wheeled. Had the crew been ‘lucky’ the front section and cockpit would have snapped off in the cartwheel, as I think it was intended to do at a production break, and fate may have kept them well clear of the burning wings and fuel tanks. It didn’t snap off quite soon enough and the crew died with the aircraft.
A preventable accident? Of course it was. Where on earth is the value in full asymmetric approaches in a four engined aircraft, at night. Training is to prepare for ‘likely’ eventualities, not all possible eventualities. Completely losing both on one side, at night, in a Vulcan. Likely??
A slight digression. Blacksheep, and others, have recalled that V force ground crews were not noted for their ‘military’ attention to uniform and dress code. For this reason the events of the days after the accident are still fairly clear in my memory. Two (?) families of the 601 crew wanted their husbands, sons, brothers buried in the Coningsby church yard, full military funeral.
The Station Warrant Officer visited Line Squadron and hangars asking for volunteer guard party and pall bearers. Against all the rules of never volunteer, he got the people he wanted, I as a pallbearer. The SWO spent no more than a couple of hours with us in a quiet hangar explaining positioning and protocols etc, and during the morning of the funeral we, and I’m certain the SWO and CO, were left in some wonder at the military dress and precision of we usual ‘scruffs’. One family was kind enough to write to the Group Captain, he later sent the letter around the station, saying that the distress of the day had been very much eased by the care and detail the ‘friends’ of their husbands, sons, and brothers had put into the proceedings. Least we could do, but I imagine the firing party came from the Regiment.
Back to preventable (in my opinion) losses. In the early sixties the Vulcans went low level to get through the opposition’s improved defences. Terrain Following Radar (TFR) was produced (or acquired from the US??) to allow crews low level vertical nav ‘through the mountains of Eastern Europe’. They certainly needed something, the Rad Alt at that time was a 50’s Heath Robinson cathode ray tube, at the AEO’s station; a green circle simply got smaller the closer you got to Terra Firma.
TFR was fitted during the mid-sixties, it was the small radome sticking through the front end of the nose. Vertical Guidance was from a simple ‘fly up fly down’ instrument nailed to the captain’s glare shield.
Cottesmore. On the early evening of February the 11th ’66 we’d seen off several aircraft from Line Squadron. Amongst these was XM536 on TFR training . At around 8.30 four or five of us had driven across the airfield for a break and, at 9, had gone upstairs to watch the BBC news. I think it was the first item. ‘News is coming in of a Vulcan bomber missing in the Brecon Beacons’. (Welsh Mountains).
We left the club and drove back to Line Squadron. XM536 and crew would not be coming back.
Preventable accident? Of course it was. TFR was new to the crews and, at that time, confidence in its ability to visually direct a ‘pop over, now down, now climb for the next one’ wasn’t particularly high.
So who on earth tasked a crew to increase this confidence - at night - in the Brecon Beacons? Got me Chief! Any answers?