Falklands Mission - TV on Sat 6th April
 

I assume the programme was a repeat but I had not seen it before. I found it wholly fascinating - and scary! However, among the things which disturbed me most was the revelation that the Vulcan crews did not have maps of the South Atlantic. Apparently they used N Atlantic charts, turned them upside down and pretended that the Azores were the Falklands. Can this be true? 1982 was not the dark days of WWII so why were charts not available? As far back as 1961 when I started work in London I used to visit Edward Stanford's near Leicester Square and buy their out of date nav charts. I think I had all of EU, most of AF and a good part of SA on my bedroom wall. I'm sure the RAF No. 1 AIDU at Northolt was functioning in 1982 (it was when by wife was in the mob in 1966) so why didn't the Vulcan crews have their charts?

Excellent programme.It was also on about 18+ months ago.

I found the bit about the charts hard to believe, yet nothing surprises me.

I loved the bit about the only available missing part of the refuelling probe, was being used as an ash tray !

Pity they did not add the story about the Vulcan that was nearly shot down by the Brasilian Air Force before it transmitted on 121.5 . Some believe that the Brasilians letting us land in Rio, led to the Tucano purchase?

A computer that worked with bits of bicycle chain ! - Classic.

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It would be interesting to know how many charts had already been grabbed by the RN before they sailed... I would guess that the entire stock had gone afloat or was at Northwood.

In any case.... a map is not accurate - a chart is, and just having the plotting squares was more than enough for the Nav Plotter to get down to the region. I wonder how many baby Navs at Finningley had to glue an extension onto their plotting chart of the South West route and manually add a few extra grid squares? It was quite common with manual air plot and a strong jetstream!

A very interesting program, no doubt its screening will irritate The Old Hag more tha somewhat !

Which TV Channel?

Possibly More4 - "Falklands' most daring raid"

Heathrow Director - no-one had enough maps

On the day the conflict broke out the MoD sent people round to Stanfords and the London Map Centre (off Victoria Street) to buy ALL their maps and charts of the mid Atlantic, Antarctica, the Falklands etc - and they didn't have that many

IIRC it wasn't until after the war that the islands were resurveyed for the new port and Mt Pleasant

There's fun !

As They were just flying to a Lat and Long with not a lot on the chart but water, it probably wasn't a problem.

Thread on the programme from last year.

http://www.pprune.org/military-aircr...ring-raid.html