When asking the question about fuel planning on the first page I forgot that my colleague Baz H was involved in the planning and he tells me he was instructed to audit the fuel transfers by comparing what actually happened against the Victor ODM expectation. He says the ISA deviations were correct, and suspects that this snippet migrated from a later ghost trail when the F4 manuals tabled fuel flows against what they said was ISA deviation, but actually turned out to be deviation from JSA.
Baz reckons that, in answer to vascodegama's question, the short Victors were all low on fuel, some disastrously so, because the formation took much longer than expected to form up at night in radio silence, this leading in turn to the early transfers taking place at least ten minutes (he says 10 to 15 minutes) further down track than expected. This meant that all the short Victors were down by at least twenty minutes fuel plus the turn, plus the extra ten to fifteen minutes of fuel transferred. Baz says that the actual fuel burns and transfers matched exactly what the Victor ODM would predict for the modified bracket positions, the only exception being he could not account for 5000lbs missing from one tanker. Out of interest, the Vulcan 607 book records an additional 'off plan' 5000lb transfer to the Vulcan, this may be it.
The inference from this is that there was significantly more fuel in the formation than expected after the early transfers.
Last edited by Alex Whittingham; 8th Jan 2013 at 13:47.