My life as a Rear Gunner on Vulcans.
The fact that Vulcans carried a Rear Gunner was a closely guarded secret, with many air crew being terminated should they have inadvertently disclosed their knowledge of such. Termination being initiated by requiring them to exit the aircraft at altitude with a malformed parachute. If the termination was carried out with extreme prejudice then the captain would lower the undercarriage before the terminatee exited. Bouncing off the nose wheel hydraulics was considered extreme prejudice.
Many would have seen evidence of the presence of a Rear Gunner by the apparent deployment of a parachute out the back of a Vulcan on landing. It was considered standard procedure for the Rear Gunner to open their hatch to get some air immediately the wheels touched the ground. The sudden inrush of air made it extremely difficult to stop the deployment of the Rear Gunners backpack parachute once the hatch had been opened, thus necessitating them to hang onto their seat like grim death as the aircraft slowed.
It was widely believed that the B2 Vulcans had four Olympus 200 series engines. This is wholly incorrect. There were in actual fact only three fitted, with the fourth, the inner starboard slot being taken up a with a revolving Gatling gun. Hence the need for a Rear Gunner. The Armourers would be required to hoist a fully loaded gun into the rear of the inner starboard jet exhaust slot prior to take off on a mission.
Whilst they were rarely mistaken in locating an inner slot, and were well aware that Port was left and Starboard was right, occasionally they assumed that left and right was looking from the back of the aircraft where they were working and would install the gun in the jet exhaust of a working engine. This had the unfortunate consequence when the engine was fired up of launching the complete loaded gun in the direction of the Tower at a high rate of knots. Bit like a cork out of a champagne bottle. The Air Traffic Controllers weren't overly impressed with this as it required them to duck under their desks, sometimes at very inopportune moments like when one had a full house in the their daily poker tournament.
An interesting aspect of the training undertaken at 230 OCU RAF Finningley in the early '60's was the ability of new pilots to undertake "asymmetrics". This initially necessitated the CFI shutting down the engines on one side of the aircraft and getting the pilot in charge to fly parallel to a line down the centre of the runway using max rudder. Once they got the hang of this it wasn't unusual for the CFI to fire off a hundred rounds or so from the Gatling gun to test their ability. This was banned when it was found that using the runway 02 direction the shells were coming uncomfortably close to RAF Bawtry, with one shell passing though the AOC Group's office window when he was in residence.
Beside having the responsibility of protecting the rear of the aircraft from enemy fire, on long missions the Rear Gunner ran the aircraft laundry. Should such a long mission be planned then one of the ECM cans was filled with warm sudsy water prior to the flight. The equipment mounted on the pointy bit at the end, often referred to as Red Steer was in actual fact a washing machine with the impeller blade easily being mistaken for a rapidly spinning antenna. By venting the relevant water containing ECM can into the radome after the addition of the crews clothing, enabled the crew to exit the aircraft on completing the mission with freshly laundered kit.
The AEO had control of the washing machine and was able to monitor their undies circulating around via his screen in a like manner to front loading machines of today. This practice was discontinued when female members of the crew became commonplace. If the front end crew forgot to send fresh coffee back at reasonable intervals then it wasn't unusual for the Rear Gunner to vent glycol into the washing machine instead of the sudsy water.
Whilst the laundry facility worked fine when Vulcans flew high altitude missions, once they changed to low level attacks in 1966, the ability to dry the clothes when the weather may have been inclement was a problem. A solution was found whereby the Rear Gunner was allowed to string a clothes line in the large bay immediately forward of his/her position. Occasionally when this was found necessary and if there was large white shiny object with fins in the way of the clothes line, it had been know for the Rear Gunner to jettison it to make more room. This, quite understandably, caused great consternation in Whitehall. Standard Operating Procedures were immediately amended specifying that any such jettisoning only took place overseas and never ever over the UK.
To be continued.......