A little titbit about the Vulcan, offered as a Christmas period irrelevance.
In 1957 at our annual CCF camp at Waddington, a friend and I crept up the ladder of a gleaming new white painted Vulcan and sat in the two front seats. It was a Sunday, the hangar was empty, and we were wearing cadet uniforms which passed as pukka RAF ones, anyway. We read the Pilots Notes folder resting between the seats, turned to the "Performance Limitations" page, and were astonished to see "Limiting Mach No. 1.01 in a shallow dive". And sure enough, both machmeters had a bug on their dial, set at 1.01!
Despite our colossal cheek in daring to enter a nuclear bomber without a shred of authority, we were both actually very responsible young men, and kept the incredible news that the tin triangle was apparently supersonic entirely to ourselves, for over 50 years.
And then I bought Tony Blackman's excellent book on test flying the Vulcan. Only then did I learn that there was a significant position error with the Vulcan's machmeter sensors, and that the indicated mach figure was an overestimate. It was apparently only ever subsonic, and our shared "secret" was nothing of the kind. What a let-down!
