Originally Posted by
Lordflasheart
Fon - you didn’t identify the particular accident, but you indicate there may have been a simple cause …. I don’t think there was anything simple about the Vixen.
Moving on from ORAC’s link to the Vixen Mk 2 PNs dated 1970, and for lack of any more specific answer (so far) to your question, here’s a most succinct quote from the same seavixen.org website, by the famous Jon Whaley, who is still current on type -
“Fuel management was one of the Vixen's highest workload for the crew. There are FOURTEEN tanks if you were carrying two drops, a total of 13,500 lbs or 7,670Lts.
Here is what I recall of the "incident". It was a 4 ship on bombing practice, our man was tootling along quite happily in the slot position when suddenly there was a double flameout accompanied by all the bangs associated with disrupted airflow in the inlets. The Vixen dropped out of formation and began to lose altitude, the Obs commented that the pilot's hands were suddenly a complete blur as he began switching tanks and throwing switches to find some fuel, eventually succeeding and performing an air restart. In the debrief the Boss chided him for poor formation flying. The fuel mis-management and flameouts were never mentioned by the aircrew as I assume this would have resulted in a write-up of some kind.