Jim Griff,
It were Jeremy Thorpe of the Liberals who wanted to bomb Salisbury.
There followed a delightful sketch in Punch that I remember to this day.
PM to CAS "Please bomb Salisbury"
CAS to PM "Salisbury bombed, please find attached list of recommendations for DFCs"
PM to CAS "Please bomb Salisbury RHODESIA"
There then follwed a long series from CAS as to why we could not bomb Rhodesia.
Wee Wiley Welshman,
Beagle is hedging his bets. Who said we would recover to UK?
Aircraft assigned to Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuanian could make the mission without bombbay tanks and recover to UK. Those destined for Murmansk would recover to northern Norway. Those going further east might recover to southern Norway. My favourite was Kiev. Our recovery was Yesilkoy. Where the hell is that we thought? Out came the maps and there was Turkey!
Families? No time I'm afraid. There were plans to bring those in quarters into the nuclear bomb sheds but that might not have been a particularly good option. Wales was often muted as a good refuge although our use of Brawdy, Llanbedr, Valley, St Athan, Rhoose, Pershore etc rather cocked that one up.
Beagle,
Min landing fuel varied. On the OCU in 64 it was, as you said, 10,000lbs. For operational crews it was 8,000lbs spread across 14 tanks and being burnt by 4 donks.
Operationally the min fuel was 4,000 lb Overhead!
Undercarriage Limiting Speeds
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The undercarriage retracts in 9 to 10 seconds & no difficulty is experienced in achieving a clean aircraft before the undercarriage limiting speed of 270 kts is reached. Whenever possible, the undercarriage should be completely retracted before exceeding 200 kts.
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I remember on incident at Llanbedr. As the aircraft scrambled the captain rolled off the runway, pulled across the hangars and departed asap in case of 'simulated' in bound missiles. His departure was so spirited that the nose wheel remained stuck down and the duty pilot in the tower reported him for dangerous flying. I don't recall what happened to the DP but Dick went on to become a Victor sqn cdr, 100 I think.