Originally Posted by ORAC
Tankers at RS 2H at Marham, 1H transit to abeam LU, another to north of Saxa. So, 4 hours - minus however early they managed to get airborne (and to be honest they usually managed under 60 mins).
To manage to meet P-time the norm was to scramble Q1 to honour the threat, then Q2 in sequence etc. If you were lucky you could steal a tanker from a TTL as Tansor Mobile, and if activity was forecast preposition tankers at LU.
That seems to be a lot of "maybes" for one of the UK's biggest peacetime ops. I'm interested in your maths there. Assuming the wait for the tanker to pitch up was the three to four hours you mention, how far behind Q1 would Q2 need to be?
I take your point about poaching tankers, but they weren't always there even in those days. Pre-positioning is always an option, but if activity could always be predicted we wouldn't have ended up having to do rush Q generations.
I suppose my question is, what happened when all those extra needs weren't available? Could the Southern Q Lightning base(s) really cover the northern area without all the extra lucky support?