Originally Posted by
old,not bold
Wasn't a V-bomber lost somewhere in the frozen North (Finland?, USSR?) late 50's/early 60's?
Pilots banged out, but the rest....well, you remember the problem.
Everyone quite tight-lipped about it.
What caused that?
I have not knowledge of this but I was told in about 1964 of the VTF. The Victor Training Flight. This was a euphemism not for the later Victor OCU but for Bomber Command War Training.
The plan called for high flying, high speed penetration of the IGB, I don't know how far but the person telling the tale implied Russia, with a high speed recovery to the west.
At the same time there would be a general fighter scramble in Germany to 'delouse' the bomber as it exited. In true Bomber Command fashion the 2 TAF fighters did not know why they were scrambled except to deter the Soviet fighters from entering NATO airspace.
Then we also had radar photograph of parts of the Baltic. Looking at the radar picture and back plotting range/bearing it was obvious that the aircraft was tracking north east up the Swedish FIR boundary towards Finland.
In those days the V-bombers were employed to explore the potential for high-definition centimetric band radar in extreme environments.