Originally Posted by
Tankertrashnav
Slight thread drift but the current edition of
Flypast is doing a special V Force issue. As well as an excellent article about tanking on 214 in the 70s (
) there is an interesting article on Skybolt. One thing that surprised me was that if Skybolt had got into RAF service there would have been a continuous airborne alert, of the kind operated by the USAF for many years. This was to have involved airborne patrols over Norway and in the Adriatic and Aegean. How this would have worked out in practice we'll never know, but it would have been hugely expensive compared with QRA. This will be old news to many old V Force hands, but coming along a little later I hadn't heard of it myself.
In the summer of 1962, probably in July, 214 carried out an exercise where we operated 24/7 and dispatched Valiant tankers to always keep one Vulcan on continuous patrol. There was an embargo on leave so that we had 100% headcount to operate 3 shifts.
By the end of a week we were desperately struggling to supply serviceable a/c every shift. I think we kept going for a week, but we couldn't have maintained the workload on a continuous basis.
Mind you, for all we were told it might have been an exercise to find out how many more bodies and a/c we would need to do the job properly.