As a matter of interest PN, how do you think the V Force would have taken to flying Airborne Alert as their cousins in SAC did? Was their a different mentality required for AA compared to QRA or would the absolute professionalism of the crews just meant that they would have adapted whatever the scenario?
Stoically.
It was trials at Waddington around '63-'64 IIRC. The effort required to maintain one aircraft on orbit over the North Sea was unaffordable. We simply did not have the tanker assets for a start. The aircraft would have been about one hour out from UK therefore it would have had about 5 hours fuel at the start. To reach its QRA target and recover would take about 3 hours (rough ball parks) so it would have had 2 hours fuel in hand thus needing to be refuelled at that point with 3 hours worth of fuel.
After a further 3 hours it would have been airborne for 6 hours. One more refuel and recover would take it to around 10 hours so crew fatigue would have been a factor at that point so one bracket was probably all that could be assumed realistically. Then there is the tanker effort too.
Rather than the SAC continuous airborne alert it was trialled as a war time measure but again still too expensive.