I believe that attempts to burn off the oil through bombing were largely unsuccessful and made things worse - as was the Unilever and BP detergent that dispersed and broke up the oil in the water and on the shore, as it turned out to be more toxic than crude oil alone. The estimation in the aftermath was that man’s efforts to chemically disperse and burn the oil made the recovery five times as long as doing nothing and letting the wind and waves do their job!
Here is a video of just how hard it was to burn off the oil - petrol, kerosene, sodium chlorite we were all tried - even flame throwers on the beaches. You could get it lit, but after a short while it would just burn out (and the smoke would have given Greta a duck-fit!). This classified (at the time) film from the
Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) shows the difficulties of burning:
What the Torrey Canyon disaster did do was enable future ways of dealing with such a disaster for the many oil spills after. However, it still remains a really hard problem to sort, but the main methods are containment and then pumping it off (arguably in hindsight that should have been used on Torrey Canyon to pump off the remaining oil rather than trying to blow the crap out of the ship!), absorbents, dispersants, elastomasizers, burning (as long as this doesn’t make the spread worse) and finally good old fashioned elbow grease and manual clean up. Finally assisting bioremediation and natural recovery in the aftermath of the clean up.