One sunny day in the Fens, sitting at the holding point.
"Cleared to line up and hold after the Canberra turning finals"
"Roger" - 'That'll be the boys coming back from the wedding at a certain Scottish Airbase.'
They were 4-up in a B2. Three bang seats. Pilot up front, operating nav in the left rear, spare pilot in the right rear and spare nav on the Rhumbold seat. Bomb bay full of wedding presents.
Nice run in and break, tight circuit, finals turn a little bit close in, but no worries so far. Little bit late dropping the flaps (Two selections. Up or 40 degrees. Nothing in between and slow to travel - 20 seconds?).
Now, a quick lesson on Canberra engine handling. The Avon Mk1 is very slow to spool up, I seem to remember that the slam check on an airtest had a max allowable time from flight idle to full power of 33 seconds - if it didn't surge. For this reason one did not reduce the engines to idle until certain of impacting the runway, not below 7000 RPM rings a bell - no percentages in those days!
Back to the story: Flaps are selected down, but still travelling and the picture is starting to look high and hot. Never mind that RPM limit, throttles to idle to lose a bit of this height. Flaps bite - Oh sh1t, now we're looking a bit low. Both throttles go forward, outside (of the turn) engine spools faster than the other, 90 degrees of bank before you can blink. OK, full rudder, get that engine to idle, other engine spools up about now and we go from 90 degrees left bank to 90 degrees right bank. Getting quite low now! Navigator in left rear is starting to think that this is not a good place to be. Grabs lower seat handle and starts to pull, then realizes that all he can see through his side window (about the size of a postcard) is grass. Changes his mind and pushes the handle back in again. No loud bang, so far so good. One last desparate attempt from the front seat sees another 180 degree roll reversal, but at this point the tip tank touches the ground.
Half a cartwheel and a pirouette, miraculously no fire and the aircraft slews to a halt. The cockpit area has basically detached from the rest of the aircraft at the pressure bulkhead and the pilot and Rhumbold seat passenger effectively fall out of the hole that appears. Pilots ejection seat detaches from its mountings and the cartridges fire as it hits the ground. The rail shoots across the runway, and seat with pilot attached obey Newtons action and reaction laws in the opposite direction. Thigh guards do a very poor job of guarding at this stage and loud snaps are heard from lower limbs.
Nav on Rhumbold seat has been dragged through the carnage and is now in quite a bad way - ruptured spleen et al.
Spare pilot steps out of right rear seat, has a quick walk around until he realises he has broken his ankle, then sits down and waits for the ambulance.
Nav unstraps VERY carefully from his seat, and steps gingerly to earth with barely a scratch on him. It takes quite a long time before we find an armourer brave enough to make the seat safe!
The good news: All four flew again eventually, and I think 2 are still wearing the uniform. Not only that, when we got the wreckage to the hangar, jacked it up and opened the bomb doors, most of the wedding presents had survived, including some rather nice cut glass.
Most impresive was the photo taken by a spotter (there was a B-52 detachment on the airfield). He captured the moment a split second before impact - 90 degrees of bank and the tip tank about a foot off the ground. I used to have a copy, but can't find it I'm afraid.
Apologies to the four involved if my memory has let me down, but I think this is pretty close. We taxied back, shut down and went to the bar!
TT