Back in 1948 the Gloster Aircraft Company had responded to an Air Ministry requirement, made the previous year, for a high-performance night fighter. The company’s chief designer at Bentham, George Carter, must have been a professional of great versatility as well as one who moved with the times. Before the war he and Henry Folland had jointly designed the Gladiator and, following a visit by Frank Whittle to Gloster, he had then designed the first British jet aircraft, the E.28/39, around Whittle’s engine. He followed that immediately with drawings for the Meteor. After the war Carter was much influenced when the various radical new wing shapes that German scientists had been experimenting with came to light. He was particularly struck by the possibilities offered by the delta.

As professors Busemann and Lippisch had already determined, the delta wing looked as though it could solve some tricky transonic aerodynamic problems by delaying compressibility while at the same time providing plenty of lift, especially at altitude – not to mention offering extra space for fuel and weapons. So in 1948 Carter submitted a series of designs for the night fighter the Air Ministry wanted. The one chosen was a delta known as the GA.5:the future Javelin. By late 1951 the prototype was ready for testing and it was Bill Waterton’s job to do it. By then he must have been looking forward eagerly to flying the futuristic new aircraft after years of bread-and-butter testing so many production Meteors. Relations between certain of the company’s management and their highly skilled but frustratingly intransigent employee had already been strained by Waterton’s critical approach to technical matters such as cockpit layouts, not to mention his campaign for better pay. Gloster’s management now left him in no doubt that they expected him to polish off the Javelin’s exacting test programme in the shortest possible time. Everyone at the company was very conscious that de Havilland had just produced a much larger swept-wing development of their successful twin-boom Vampire and Venom fighters, the DH.110, which was also designed to be a high-performance night fighter. It and the Javelin were therefore two completely different outcomes of the same 1947 Air Ministry requirement and were viewed in both companies as rivals competing for the RAF’s approval and production contract. The Gloster board noted with particular anxiety that John Derry had already been flying the DH.110 for two months over at Hatfield before the Javelin could be rolled out. It was a lead Waterton was expected to wear down and then take himself.

Of the two aircraft the Javelin was by far the more radical in design: a great sixteen-ton brute with a large delta wing and a huge slab of fin topped in a ‘T’ shape with a smaller delta tailplane. Its twin Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire engines were intended to boost it quickly to a height of 50,000 ft, where it would supposedly intercept high-altitude Soviet intruders. It was the world’s first delta fighter, the first twin-engined delta aircraft and also the first delta with a tailplane. Bill Waterton had been familiar with the concept since George Carter first sketched it out three years previously, and he privately viewed it as Carter’s masterpiece that would crown the designer’s distinguished career. But even as the wooden mock-up was being built he had raised a pilot’s objections to certain design details, such as the cockpit’s restricted view. Far worse was the Javelin’s proposed control system, which was identical to that of the cancelled Gloster ‘Gormless’ and meant the controls would be so heavy at speed as to tax the limits of a pilot’s strength: a ludicrous handicap for someone expected to concentrate on using his aircraft as a weapons platform in air-to-air combat. But as so often before, Waterton’s pleas for change before it was too late went unheeded. Apparently it was already too late. The faults were faithfully incorporated into the Javelin prototype so that when it first flew, as he himself recorded, ‘I was the least surprised of anyone that its controls were hopeless. They had no positivity, and were virtually immovable at more than half speed, even with two hands.’1

The taxiing trials and early flights revealed other problems, though no more so than in any new aircraft. Waterton recorded that basically the Javelin was easy to fly, had potentially excellent performance and showed great promise, though it also had some dangerous tendencies that needed correcting. However, when he reported these, ‘only lukewarm interest was shown’. By now George Carter had retired from designing and was on Gloster’s board of directors. His former staff under the new chief designer, Richard Walker, treated the Javelin as their baby, ‘and like doting parents, they blinded themselves to its faults – and took most unkindly to anything which might reflect on their parenting’. How amazed and uncomprehending we schoolboy plane-spotters would have been had we known the absurdities that went on behind the scenes in the test flying of one of Britain’s top-secret aircraft! Not long after the Javelin’s first flight Waterton was asked to put on a demonstration to impress some visiting men in suits from the Ministry of Supply. He gave them a display artfully designed to look impressive while enabling him to keep the speed low. He performed no loops, either then or at the two Farnborough air shows at which he was subsequently to demonstrate the Javelin, because he knew he would never have the strength to pull out of a steep dive. At the end of his demonstration a senior Gloster man from the Bentham design office remarked acidly that he didn’t know why Waterton made such a fuss about the controls if he could throw the aircraft about like that.

This was all the more enraging in its revelation of how little some designers appeared to understand about flying. It also brought home to him how radically attitudes in the industry had changed in the last few years. During the war test pilots had customarily worked in league with oil-stained engineers and hands-on designers who, when there was a problem, would eagerly rush away and come back with some inspired ‘fix’, whether it was an ingeniously machined widget or a redesigned undercarriage mechanism. By contrast, it now appeared that the industry of the new Jet Age was run by accountants and boffins, none of whom ever flew in their firms’ creations and, in Waterton’s experience, always showed the greatest aversion to doing so. The accountants wanted maximum profit in the shortest time and the boffins were happy producing ‘concept’ brochures with ever more elaborate graphs and tables. Neither seemed much interested in the end users of their products. As Waterton was to reminisce later: ‘At the Central Flying Establishment a flying man ran the show. He said what he wanted, and got it. But in the industry, the men who fly the planes seemingly came second to schedules; and the chief test pilot at the end of the line was a necessary nuisance who must not be allowed to interfere in the practicalities of commercial enterprise.’2 For Waterton, who was still instinctively on the side of the average RAF pilot, this depressing new regime was made still worse by the chronic dawdling and lack of urgency that seemed to define the entire enterprise, even despite the need to overtake de Havilland’s DH.110. Nor was his mood helped by memories of his recent experiences testing the CF-100 in Canada, where problems had been instantly addressed with the utmost energy and enthusiasm.

Things came to a head in April 1952 when he handed in a letter of resignation. This must have badly shocked Gloster’s management since they immediately rejected it with a show of great affability, assuring him that he was invaluable to the company and from now on would be listened to and well looked after. Reluctantly, Waterton decided to give the company a further chance. The decision nearly cost him his life. On 29 June he took the prototype Javelin, WD 804, up for yet another test flight, its eighty-fifth. It was a Sunday and there was now a real urgency in his test schedule. The following day Fighter Command was holding its annual tactical conference at which he was due to demonstrate the Javelin and John Derry the rival DH.110. By now Waterton had already taken on the DH.110 in mock combat at 35,000 ft and believed the Javelin, with its low wing-loading, to be far superior in manoeuvrability. He was keen to show the RAF what a remarkable aircraft it really was. So now he put it into a high-speed practice run at 3,000 ft over Oxfordshire, heading roughly in the direction of Brize Norton and Witney. 

Then, without warning, WD 804 turned itself into a sort of crazy pneumatic drill. Landscape, instruments – everything – fuzzed into a blur. My scrambled brain registered one horrifying word: ‘flutter’ … Before I had time to close the throttles or open the air brakes there were two explosive cracks. Then an uncanny, ominous silence as the rattling ceased. The nose pointed itself downward towards the ground which was only seconds away. Something had let go, something in the vital, pitch-controlling elevator circuit – perhaps the elevators themselves. I had a vision of the whole tail having broken off. The stick confirmed my assessment: at that speed normally almost solid, it offered no resistance to forward or backward movement.

My immediate impulse was to get out. Yet I knew that no one had baled out at such a high speed and lived to tell of it. So I restrained myself and considered the faint possibility of getting higher and slower. There were one or two things worth trying. I could alter the plane’s flight path by varying engine power – perhaps by flaps and air brakes too, when speed was low. On the other hand any of these actions might upset the plane’s equilibrium. But I had to do something. With one hand on the canopy jettison handle and the stick between my knees to keep the plane flying level laterally, I gently inched the trim wheel back with my left hand. It worked. The nose rose. We started to climb, gradually the speed fell off, and I eased the throttles back gently. At 10,000 feet I levelled out doing 300 knots. Now getting out was a practical proposition.

I switched my radio to ‘transmit’ and spoke to my controller, Roy Julyan, at Moreton Valence. ‘I’ve had a spot of bother, Roy. No elevator control. The stick is no longer connected to anything fore and aft. The elevators went between Brize Norton and Witney. I’ve got up to ten thousand and I’m now heading for the Bristol Channel where I propose to dump the lot in the drink.’

That, indeed, was my plan, for no one with a conscience could abandon several tons of explosive fuel and metal where it might fall on a town. But I could not stay up for ever. The engines were thirsty brutes. Yet as I flew westwards I began to toy with the idea of achieving the seemingly impossible – of landing the Javelin. At 10,000 feet there is room to play about, so I explored my makeshift handling of the plane at circuit and landing speeds. I found I was able to fly with undercarriage down and flaps partly lowered, as for landing. I also found that I could keep the Javelin to within two hundred feet of any height I wished, and that if I were to drop too low I could put myself in a climb by applying power. Why not have a try at landing the Javelin at Boscombe Down on Salisbury Plain? My primitive instinct of self-preservation was urging me: Get out, you fool; get out of the plane, while my reason was saying: You must try to save the aircraft.

At last Boscombe Down hove in sight. I called the tower and asked the controller to get his fire tender ready. With wheels and part flap left down, I gradually went down to fifteen hundred feet, keeping my speed around the 200 mark. A wide circuit with the gentlest of turns, and I was aligned heading west towards the main runway. Now to reduce height and speed. Holding her laterally level with the stick between my knees to prevent turning over, my left hand was on the trimming wheel, my right stretched across my body to work the throttle. Now I was down to a thousand feet … now down to five hundred, with my speed 60 mph fast, for below this I found she lost steadiness and what little control I had. I would have to put her down at two-thirds above her normal touchdown speed. At this speed she would fly herself off the ground without help from the pilot; but if I could catch her on the ground with the wheel brakes I might pitch her forward and keep her down at the small risk of blown tyres and burned-out brakes. The aerodrome boundary passed and she went in as steady as one could wish. If only a gust of wind didn’t hit us. The runway loomed up. As I eased back the throttles she touched down with but the slightest bump – I had pulled off a ‘daisy cutter’. Yet a split second later all was lost.

Whether it was a fickle variation of wind, or an undulation in the runway, I shall never know. The Javelin, still very much a flying machine, bounded into the air again to drop gently back on to the runway – to be flung aloft again by her tough, springy undercarriage, aided by her great buoyant wings. In a succession of ever-increasing bunny-hops we bounced along the runway, higher and slower, higher and slower – with a heavier bang every time we grounded. Onlookers later said the Javelin could easily have cleared a hangar. Inside, it was rough and frightening, sitting waiting for something to go. It soon did.

We dropped from a near-stall with an almighty crash. This was it – a dull, heavy boom, the smell of paraffin, and a sheet of flame and black smoke slashed over the cockpit. Fuel tanks had ruptured and were exploding. This time she stayed down for a bit. The port leg, breaking away from its mountings, had been driven up through the wing. The plane lurched over, her port wing-tip dragging along the concrete, swinging the Javelin off the runway. I was thrown to the right of the cockpit despite my straps – then to the left as we were flung crabwise into the air again with momentary smoothness. Then another crumpling noise as she came down on her nose and rocked to her starboard wing-tip, slithering sideways and collapsing that undercarriage leg. Another dull boom as the starboard tanks went up. More grinding of metal signified a rapid spin. A stagger as we settled into a dust-spewing heap – then silence, except for the terrifying roar of flaming paraffin.

So far so good: now to get out. In order not to disturb the airflow over the broken tail I had left the canopy closed. It had served me well when the tanks went up, saving me from the spray of burning paraffin. But now it was to be my jailer. Flames roared fiercely behind, to each side and over me. I shut off the fuel cocks to the engines, burning my knuckles on the hot side of the cockpit. I pressed the button which operated the electric motor to push back the cumbersome and heavy metal and Perspex canopy. It did not budge.

A macabre picture flashed across my mind. I saw again the torso I had found in the ashes of a crashed Harvard. There was no head: a three-inch strip of what seemed like leather was all that remained of the neck. Twisted black rosettes represented the shoulder sockets. Streaks of darkened blood revealed one thigh joint. My gloved hand lifted a charred waistband to disclose human skin. Above everything the smell: the composite odours of flesh and oil, human fat and charred metal … The picture came and went. The hood remained jammed shut. The heat was suffocating and the sides of the cockpit made me wince when I touched them. I turned the regulator to ‘Emergency’ to breathe pure oxygen in the acrid, smoke-filled cockpit. I groped for the crowbar to lever open the canopy or break the plastic. It was not in its spring clips on the port side of the fuselage. It had shaken itself free, and was later found under the seat. I had no time to find it and again cursed all designers as the Perspex alongside my head began to melt and sag inwards.

I banged around the cockpit like a man gone mad. I cursed, pressed buttons, pulled, tugged and heaved – but nothing would yield. Neither the jettison handle nor the canopy would give a fraction of an inch. A new thought – the ejector seat. I was sitting on a miniature artillery shell capable of hurling the seat and me some sixty feet in the air through the canopy. What if the heat at the bottom of the cockpit should set it off?

My luck held. At last, persistent attempts at the actuating button combined with banging the canopy with my fist, head and forearms took effect. It gave a fraction, enough for me to get my fingers under its front arch. The sheer brute strength of desperation helped force it two-thirds open. In a flash I was out and put fifty yards between myself and the blazing wreck.3

Once the fire tenders had arrived Waterton grabbed one of the crews’ hoses and directed its plume of foam on to the Javelin’s nose where the aircraft’s all-important recording instruments were: the only bits of the wreck worth saving. Eventually the fire was brought sufficiently under control for him to retrieve them. An RAF doctor bandaged his scorched arms and anointed his singed eyebrows before he defied medical orders, borrowed some clothes to replace his own foam-soaked overalls, and scrounged a lift back to Moreton Valence. The Javelin’s elevators were later found in a field near Witney, victims of violent ‘flutter’. Not only would there be no Javelin to display to Fighter Command on the Monday but it was clear the type was still far from ready to be passed as suitable for production. The crash and Waterton’s narrow escape were headline news.

For his skill and determination in bringing the aircraft back instead of abandoning it over the Bristol Channel Waterton was awarded the George Medal. The local Gloucestershire newspaper printed a brief ‘interview’ with him, a cutting of which he kept. ‘“Bill’s” reaction to the honour is typically modest. “I rather look upon this as a recognition for test pilots as a whole, and not particularly myself,” he told The Citizen today.’4 Beside this piece of high-minded fiction ‘Bill’ pithily scribbled ‘Balls’. The George Medal’s inaugurator, King George VI, had intended that the award should rank second only to the VC, to be awarded sparingly ‘for acts of great bravery’. In due course Waterton the Canadian received it with appropriate humility from the hands of the new Queen Elizabeth. Waterton the Gloster employee, on the other hand, was reliably less humble. He later wrote that some people would have been happier had he abandoned the aircraft. ‘Certain boffins and designers never quite forgave me for bringing back the bent plane as conclusive evidence.’5

After the accident Waterton decided he still could not resign from Gloster because he was worried people might think the experience had ‘finished’ him (as he put it) and besides, he hated to leave a job half-done. Ironically, that summer of 1952 was when John Derry had thoughts about leaving de Havilland and joining Gloster. The two men met but Derry understandably balked at the smaller salary Waterton was authorised to offer him. It would be surprising if Waterton had not also warned his fellow test pilot that other things at Gloster were not entirely rosy. At any rate nothing came of the plan. Waterton’s log book shows that on 28 August he flew Derry from Brockworth to Moreton Valence in a de Havilland Beaver, so this may have been the occasion. That must have been a busy day because later that afternoon Waterton made a flight in a Comet 2, G-ALYT, as second pilot with John Cunningham, presumably after he had returned Derry to Hatfield.

Nine days later John Derry was dead, along with Tony Richards and twenty-nine Farnborough spectators. Even as ambulances were still rushing to the scene Bill Waterton dutifully climbed into the second Javelin prototype as Neville Duke took off to ensure the show went on, then followed Duke’s Hunter into the air, sad for his friend and considerably anxious for himself lest the defect that had so recently wrecked WD 804 should recur. Not only did the show go on but his aerobatics in the Javelin, restricted though he kept them, must have looked to many as proof of the aircraft’s superiority over its de Havilland rival, now scattered in fragments all over the airfield. However, Waterton knew all too well that the Javelin might just as easily come apart in mid-air as the DH.110 had, albeit for quite different aerodynamic reasons. The vicious flutter that had affected WD 804’s elevators on that disastrous flight only two months earlier had shaken the entire aircraft enough to blur his eyesight. At the time it had seemed to last for several minutes but it was later found to have been a mere two and a half seconds before the hinges had fatigued and the elevators snapped off. Had it continued for longer the entire aircraft could easily have broken up. In the harrowing circumstances and with his burn scars still visible it must have taken a good deal of nerve as well as professionalism for him to put on a public display that afternoon at Farnborough. His log book is probably revealing of the man in that it reveals nothing – other than that he flew the Javelin at the SBAC display on each day of Farnborough Week 1952. Not even a note marks 6 September as the day of his friend’s death and the greatest airshow catastrophe to date.

Waterton was to spend nearly two more years as the Gloster Aircraft Company’s chief test pilot. In view of his differences with management it might well be asked why he stayed. Thanks to his spectacular accident and award he was now a celebrity and a household name. With the immense experience that underpinned his public acclaim one would imagine he could have found another job as a test pilot without much difficulty. On the other hand the world of aviation was comparatively small and he knew his reputation in some quarters as a ‘difficult’ or ‘bolshy’ character would count against him. Besides, his reluctance to leave the job of testing the Javelin half-finished was typical of the man, who was nothing if not doggedly conscientious where his profession was concerned. All evidence suggests that even after six years as a civilian he was still heart and soul on the side of the RAF and determined to tame the Javelin before service pilots were expected to fly it. In any case, he could not leave Gloster without first finding a suitable successor. In the autumn of 1952 he chose Peter Lawrence, an ex-navy pilot who had been chief test pilot for Blackburn Aircraft up at Brough in Yorkshire.

Meanwhile, Gloster were feeling the pinch. The government had recently struck two hundred Meteors off their order book and the Javelin was still a long way from production. The gap thus created in the firm’s revenue led to redoubled pressure on Waterton to finish the testing and approve the aircraft as soon as possible. He flew the third prototype in March 1953 while the second was being fitted with a modified wing. When that one returned to Moreton Valence he made the first dozen flights in it to establish the new wing’s handling characteristics before turning it over to Peter Lawrence for a second opinion. He was still not happy about the aircraft’s behaviour at low speeds, finding the elevator control sluggish, but he thoroughly briefed Lawrence, who already had several hours’ experience of the aircraft with its original wings. Lawrence accordingly took the aircraft up on 11 June and within the hour came news that he had crashed near Bristol and was dead. It appeared that the Javelin had experienced a deep stall. If so, it was one of the earliest instances of a then unrecognised aerodynamic phenomenon that can affect an aircraft whose tailplane is mounted T-wise on top of the fin. At a certain angle of attack the wings can prevent the airflow from reaching the tailplane, screening it off and leaving it becalmed in dead air. In such conditions the elevators become useless. At some point Lawrence’s Javelin had pitched up steeply enough for its huge wing to have acted like an air brake and without any elevator control it had stalled in this stable state, dropping vertically like the flat iron it resembled. AIB investigators later noted that the grass around the crash site had not been flattened, suggesting that at the moment of impact the aircraft had had no forward momentum. Lawrence, desperately trying everything he could think of to destabilise the Javelin and regain control, must have left his ejection too late. He was found still strapped in his seat near the aircraft’s burnt-out carcass. He was thirty-two. Waterton, deeply upset by the loss of a close friend and colleague he had personally appointed, at once hastened to perform the grim task of breaking the news to Lawrence’s wife Barbara before she could hear about it on the radio.

The exact cause of the crash was never officially established but Waterton had his own ideas about several likely contributory factors. Three years later he expressed them in print: two inflammatory sentences in his anyway provocative book The Quick and the Dead that were to be seized on by Gloster and others in a furious reaction that was given prominence by the national newspapers. ‘As a result of the accident,’ he wrote, ‘the firm altered the flaps. It was little consolation to me that it took the death of my number one to effect modifications that all my talking and reports had been unable to achieve since the aeroplane’s earliest flights.’6 No doubt at the time of the accident and in his trademark forthright manner he made it clear to his colleagues at Gloster that in his opinion the company’s sloth and selective deafness had helped kill their own test pilot. However, he must have taken good care that Barbara Lawrence did not get wind of the accusation to add to her distress. When the Daily Mail reviewed Waterton’s book in 1956 his allegation evidently came as a shock to her. She was quoted as saying, ‘I knew there were faults in the Javelin at the time of Peter’s crash, faults they didn’t seem able to put right. But perhaps in order not to worry me Peter did not say much about it. There had been a lot of unsatisfactory flights. Bill Waterton is not the man to make charges lightly. To know the crash could have been avoided is even worse than what I went through before.’7

At the time Waterton’s expressed view could hardly have improved his working relations. Yet not every prospect was glum because this was the year in which he married. Marjorie Wood was an ex-Wren who was a first-rate statistician as well as a former fashion model of striking good looks. They had known each other since July 1944 when Waterton had been testing weapons over the Wash and she had been in radio contact with him from the Ops. Room. ‘There was this confident, very kind voice with a wonderful Canadian accent,’ she later recalled. ‘I told myself that I was going to marry that man some day.’ Nine years later she did, on 26 July 1953. Bill was thirty-eight.

That was also the year of the Coronation, when on 2 June I and millions of other British children became New Elizabethans, exhorted to look back to the glories of the Tudor era and forward to the even greater national brilliance that the crowning of the young second Elizabeth surely presaged. Our mood was upbeat. Had not sweets just come off rationing in February, and wasn’t all sugar rationing to end in September? Was not the sky full of marvellous winged portents of British ingenuity and aerial might? And didn’t the Eagle’s centre-spreads weekly dissect the workings of such things as the Supermarine Attacker or the Bloodhound missile? Periodically, one of the Eagle’s trademark cutaway drawings was of some imaginary vehicle of the future that somehow managed to look both visionary and outmoded at the same time. ‘The Supersonic Jet Bomber of Tomorrow’ was one such: a rakish deltoid dart with six engines mounted across three rear tail fins and an ‘atomic bomb bay’ (number 14 in the key). Surely, we felt, the future was already within our grasp in the brains of our visionary boffins and in the skilled hands of men like Neville Duke and Bill Waterton. How could it go wrong?

Waterton finally left Gloster on 31 March 1954. The firm later made it clear that he was sacked. It has been suggested that the order most likely came from Hawker Siddeley Group chairman Sir Roy Dobson himself. ‘Dobbie’ had always been a notorious hirer-and-firer, quite capable in his prime of walking through a factory floor, spotting someone whose work he thought substandard and sacking him on the spot.8 Unionised industrial practice had curbed him somewhat but no doubt the instinct lingered, especially in times of crisis, and the Gloster Aircraft Company was by now in urgent need of money. It was still waiting for the injection of government funds dependent on a firm contract for the Javelin to go into production for the RAF, and it seems probable that Dobson and the other directors viewed their chief test pilot’s stubborn refusal to pass the aircraft as downright obstructive, and finally as endangering the entire company. At any rate the parting was abrupt. Waterton’s log book reveals that his last flight for Gloster, when he took a Meteor F.Mk 8 up on 31 March, also marked the last day of his employ. Once back on the ground he collected his gear and was out, after seven years and five months. In that time he had played a major part in selling some 1,200 aircraft abroad, earning the company and the country many millions of pounds. He had logged 1,800 hours in the air, much of it highly demanding and dangerous flying. Even with a few modest pay increases and bonuses over the years his annual take-home pay had averaged £1,100,9 less than an airline pilot’s and with many times the risk: not a bad bargain for the Gloster Aircraft Company. Bill Waterton’s celebrity was now such that his surprise departure was front-page news in the national dailies.

As for the Javelin, it was to be a further two years before it went into RAF service with a single squadron, no. 46. As with the Hawker Hunter, its speed was regulated and certain manoeuvres restricted pending further modification. In the following ten years it went through as many versions until it finally evolved into a useful all-weather fighter. It saw service during the Malaysian–Indonesian confrontation between 1963 and 1966, based in Singapore and flying patrols over Borneo. In 1964 it scored its only air-to-air combat victory: an Indonesian Air Force C-130 transport that crashed while trying to avoid a Javelin that had been sent to intercept it. But by then the design was nearly twenty years old, even if its active service life had been barely half that, and the type was finally withdrawn in 1968. It is quite usual for aircraft to be improved as they are flown, but the Javelin’s degree of modification was exceptional. It had been yet one more instance of a British aircraft being hustled into service before it was fully developed and its test pilots could sign it off without lingering misgivings. Bill Waterton’s conviction that the Javelin was never ready to go into RAF service while he was flying it was amply borne out by its later history.10 It turned out to be the last aircraft that Gloster ever built.

For me, a certain melancholy still surrounds the Javelin, partly because I associate it fondly with Bill Waterton but partly also because it did look wonderful in the air. There was something powerful and purposeful about that solid delta, and it retained a rakish air even on the ground, where it seemed to squat slightly nose-high as though waiting to leap up at the first sooty bang of a starter cartridge. (In actual fact the starters sometimes exploded, and wily Javelin pilots tended not to strap in until both engines were running.) Like the DH.110 it was a two-seater and its twin Sapphire engines punched it along in a way that didn’t seem lumbering, for all its size. We New Elizabethans who saw it in flight or illustrated in magazines were overawed by its futuristic design and thrilled by the ‘top secret’ aura that surrounded it for so long. None of us for a moment suspected the negative nature of many of the secrets it hid. We wanted to believe the best of it, as we wanted to believe the best of our country and the industry that had created the Javelin and all the other awesome aircraft that filled the skies above Hampshire during those magical Farnborough Weeks once a year.

As for its great rival, the DH.110, it was perhaps brave of de Havilland to continue with its development after the Farnborough crash. Also, the RAF seemed to be favouring the Javelin because they thought its design was simpler and its maintenance would be cheaper. But de Havilland persevered, and when the Royal Navy expressed interest the much-strengthened 110 was navalised for carrier-borne operation as the Sea Vixen. It gave faithful service with the Fleet Air Arm in sundry crises around the world until it was phased out in 1972 and replaced by the American F-4 Phantom. As of writing, there is still one airworthy Sea Vixen, and to see it in silhouette banking against cloud brings back a rush of memories from what feels like the dawn of the Jet Age. There is something quintessentially de Havilland about the shape of its swept-back wings, derived as they were from the third DH.108 Swallow’s, and all the more noticeably so because the twin booms and tailplane make the fuselage look truncated. And then one sees in it the small fleeting ghost of the Sea Venom; and suddenly a whole line of descent stretching back to a drawing board in the later years of the Second World War is visible in this quick shape against the twenty-first-century sky.

The real symbol of Britain’s status as an aviation world power in this post-war period was not its scrappy attempts to build a true supersonic fighter but its V-bomber fleet. Fighters were generically impressive, especially if they were supersonic; but they remained tactical: aircraft with short range and high performance that could be scrambled to meet an incoming threat or to deter movement on the ground. Bombers, on the other hand, were clearly strategic, operating as part of an internationally agreed NATO pattern of containment. At the end of the war when Germany’s remaining V-2 rockets and their research material fell into Allied hands, it was clear that in principle their technology could be developed to deliver the new atomic bomb. This meant that at some time in the future there might no longer be any need for slow, heavy aircraft to fly long and vulnerable missions deep into enemy territory in order to drop conventional bombs. Rockets could be developed to deliver atomic warheads from many thousands of miles away. The concept of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile had been born.

However, in 1946 such a weapon was still a long way from being practicable, so plans were drawn up for a generation of bombers powered by the new jet engines. These aircraft would be very much faster than the old Lancasters and Wellingtons and Halifaxes that had given such good service during the war. Also, they would be carrying atomic weapons so vastly more powerful than ordinary high explosive that even if only one bomber got through to the target the effects would still be devastating. Washington was soon making it clear that Britain had a vital part to play in containing the Soviet Empire within its already considerable post-war boundaries, and that meant nuclear deterrence. At this point Britain’s military strategists, who included the Cabinet ministers in Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government, found themselves in a dilemma. On the one hand they recognised the great desirability of close military co-operation with their American allies: had not Attlee’s predecessor Winston Churchill only that March delivered his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri, after receiving an honorary degree, where he specifically referred to the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States? On the other hand there was no question that Britain had a proud, centuries-long tradition of military and political independence to maintain.

That same year, 1946, America’s focus on consolidating its new role as a superpower led to its establishment of the Strategic Air Command (motto: ‘Peace is our Profession’) that was intended from the outset to have global reach. Britain accepted that it, too, was required to pull its weight in containing the Soviet threat and that a new nuclear-capable bomber force was a vital part of this strategy. Still, in its increasingly paranoid manner, Washington was never wholly convinced that Britain’s new Labour government wasn’t somehow soft on godless communism (and admittedly the recent sale to Stalin of Rolls-Royce Derwent and Nene turbojet engines, two of most advanced the ‘Free World’ had produced, can have done little to change this view). For its part the UK remained wary of the United States, perceiving that any apparent benignity concealed a ruthless self-interest based on its new global ascendancy. In this context an independent all-British nuclear bomber force seemed like a potent form of national self-assertion, even though the country was broke. In any case it was clear that the UK, being geographically very much closer to the USSR than the United States, was now in the strategic front line and, as Russia’s most immediate nuclear threat, would be first in line for attack in the event of war. The defence of Britain thus demanded an independent force of bombers as a deterrent.

Accordingly, in 1946 the Ministry of Defence issued OR 229, an Operational Requirement specifying a jet bomber with a range of 3,350 nautical miles (the UK to Moscow and back, with a safety margin), a maximum speed of 500 knots (575 mph, Mach 0.875) and with an over-the-target altitude capability of 50,000 ft. The bomb load, either nuclear or conventional, was to be 20,000 lb. The aircraft would carry a crew of five: two pilots, two navigators and a radio/radar countermeasures operator. Now began a curious process. Even as the designers at Vickers, Handley Page and Avro worked to produce drawings of a bomber that met these requirements, the MoD hastily issued a much lower specification for an alternative bomber as if they were suddenly worried that the first set of specifications might after all prove too difficult to achieve. Short Brothers & Harland responded to this new specification and in due course put forward their S.A.4 Sperrin, a conventional straight-winged design. This aircraft was given the official go-ahead even as the Air Staff were still trying to choose between the other submitted designs: Vickers’s Valiant, Handley Page’s Victor and Avro’s Vulcan. At this point the 1948 Soviet blockade of Berlin suddenly goosed them into panic. Now they really had to have a new aircraft to equip Bomber Command, and without delay.

The upshot was that everybody was told to build everything in case one of the aircraft didn’t work. In fact, this solution was not as ridiculous as it sounds. In an astonishing burst of technical creativity Vickers, Handley Page and Avro had each come up with a completely different wing shape, and all three designs were at the absolute limit of current aerodynamic knowledge and jet-engine technology. It was simply not possible to predict which would turn out the best, although Vickers’s Valiant, being a shade more conventional, looked like being the safest bet. Ordering the Sperrin also represented the Air Staff playing safe in case none of the alternatives proved good enough, even though they could see its design was conservative, even slightly stodgy. In 1951 it became the first of the bombers to fly, which it did well though undramatically, and its single prototype was destined to hang around at RAE Farnborough for some years and prove quite useful for research purposes. Meanwhile, contracts for prototypes of all three other aircraft had been signed. By now plenty of people were wondering how on earth Britain could afford to pay for the building and development of four different bombers merely to meet the requirements for one. They pretty soon realised there was no good answer other than that the specifications laid down by the Ministry of Defence’s Operational Requirement demanded some risky pioneering with various technologies that were still a long way from being fully developed.

In all modesty, the outcome was impressive. Each of Britain’s three V-bombers was radically different in design from its rivals, and not one of them looked even remotely like anything the Americans or anybody else was building. Of the big three firms, Vickers finished their Valiant first – and an outstandingly graceful aircraft it was, too. Its birth involved an entirely typical combination of serious funding and make-do-and-mend. If anybody wanted a comparison between the Heath Robinson order of the day that so often prevailed in British aviation and the money-no-object conditions enjoyed by the USAF, they needed to look no further than the final assembly and first flight of the prototype Valiant. Like all Vickers aircraft at the time it was completed at their Fox Warren plant, a hangar in some woods near Weybridge in Surrey, and then taken by road for final assembly at their test airfield at Wisley. Only a handful of miles as the crow flies, these road journeys still involved immense low-loader lorries and had to be conducted in the small hours of a Sunday morning when there was hardly any traffic about. They also necessitated the removal and replacement of all the telegraph poles along the route. Vickers’s airfield at Wisley was exactly that: a field. In due course in May 1951 the first of Britain’s serious nuclear bombers took off from a grass runway with Vickers’s chief test pilot Joseph ‘Mutt’ Summers at the controls, its bicycle landing gear (one narrow wheel behind the other on each leg) leaving ruts deep enough for a man to hide in.* As a result, Vickers temporarily moved its flight operations to the British Overseas Airways Corporation’s former maintenance base at Hurn, near Bournemouth, which had good hangars and a proper airstrip, while a proper concrete runway was finally laid at Wisley.

The Valiant was high winged with the inlets of its four Avons staggered at the shoulder. It was a nearly straight-winged aircraft but with some sweepback on the leading edge. The tailplanes, which were halfway up the fin, were also slightly swept. It was a lovely aircraft to look at and to fly, and ‘Robby’ Robinson retains fond memories of the brand-new one he and his crew were allotted in 1955 when it finally went into squadron service to deliver Blue Danube, Britain’s first operational nuclear weapon. It was painted anti-flash white all over as a protection against the bomb it was to drop from high altitude. ‘It smelt lovely, plasticky and gluey,’ he recalls. ‘I liked the Valiant. I can best describe it as a big Canberra in its handling, but the really big difference was that it had a very efficient pressurisation system. When we flew at 40,000 ft plus we could relax with our oxygen masks off and in a wide, warm cockpit. No more did we have to pack our boots with brown paper and wear two pairs of gloves. It even had plumbing for one’s “relief” and stowage places for one’s flight bag and rations …’11

Like all three V-bombers the Valiant was intended for high-altitude, subsonic bombing; but once it was in development the Vickers team at Weybridge came up with a variant, the B.Mk 2 Pathfinder, which was expressly designed for low-level operations. Although it looked the same externally, the airframe was very different from that of the normal Valiant in order to cope with the greater stresses of low-level flying. It made its first appearance at the Farnborough SBAC show in 1953 and immediately became known as the ‘Black Bomber’ on account of its all-over black finish for night-time operations. It looked sensational; but then so did the ordinary Valiant in its ghostly white. In 1956 Valiants saw action in the Suez campaign. That same year one also dropped Britain’s first atomic bomb in Australia and in 1957 the first hydrogen bomb on Christmas Island.

Alas, this elegant, handsome aircraft came to an untimely end, being overtaken by events: specifically, the shooting down over Russia in 1960 of an American Lockheed U-2 ‘spy plane’ piloted by Gary Powers. This incident precipitated rather more than just acute embarrassment for the Americans. It revealed that sheer altitude, which hitherto both the USAF and the RAF had been relying on to keep their bombers invulnerable, was no longer protection against the USSR’s latest anti-aircraft missiles. At a stroke, therefore, the Valiant had to be redeployed as a low-level attack bomber, a role for which it had not been designed. By 1964 it was discovered that the extra stresses of low flying were causing serious fatigue fractures to appear in the airframe. Indeed, at really low level the aircraft had a flying life of only twenty-five hours. As a result, the Valiant had to be withdrawn and scrapped at the end of the year after only nine years’ service. The irony was that the Black Bomber variant would have been perfect for this role, but unfortunately it was now too late.

Handley Page’s Victor first flew in 1952 and the Mk 1 entered RAF service in 1957. It was always the oddest-looking aircraft of the three V-bombers. Its wings seemed too far forward and its nose bulged in a strange manner. At the other end the tailplanes had a sort of flyaway aspect because they were fastened on the very top of the fin with a marked dihedral: tilted upwards from the horizontal. And then there was the famously secret crescent planform of the wings, which also had rounded tips. As a plane-spotter I could never get very enthusiastic about the Victor, although it did turn out to be a useful and reliable aircraft. What was more, it was the only one of the V-bombers that could supposedly go supersonic. As Tony Blackman (who tested the Vulcan) wrote later, he wondered what the autocratic Sir Frederick Handley Page, who died in 1962, would have thought when his firm was forced to close down in 1970, whereupon his arch-enemy Avro took over the design responsibility for Victor Mk 2s and promptly converted twenty-four of his precious bombers to tankers for in-flight refuelling to replace Valiant tankers.12 Sir Frederick might have been slightly mollified had he known that Victor tankers were to play a crucial role in the Falklands War in 1982, and to a lesser extent in the Gulf War of 1991. The last Victor tanker was withdrawn in 1993. The aircraft was in service with the RAF for a respectable thirty-six years.

The Avro Vulcan remains by far the most charismatic of the three V-bombers – many would say the most charismatic of all Britain’s post-war aircraft, even including the Hawker Hunter and the English Electric Lightning. In design terms, too, it was arguably the most advanced, for when it was conceived nobody fully understood all the aerodynamic possibilities and characteristics of a pure delta wing. Certainly building one with a span of 111 ft was enough of a gamble for Avro to build three third-scale, single-seat models that flew as the Avro 707 in order to test how this novel dart-like shape behaved at different speeds. The Vulcan turned out to be a brilliant design, although for many Britons its reputation was perhaps only belatedly sealed by its performance at the very end of its career in the Falklands War, which itself took place at the furthermost end of Britain’s logistical capability. Quite apart from that, though, anyone who ever saw the Vulcan’s prodigious kinked delta tilt across the sky, spread like a cape trailing smoke and decibels sufficient to make the earth move, and did not feel their heart leap up like Wordsworth’s (who, poor fellow, had to make do with rainbows) probably had the sensibility of a cake of soap. As Roly Falk so memorably demonstrated at Farnborough air show in 1952, right from the first this magnificent aircraft could be handled like a fighter. Indeed, later Vulcans were shown to be able to outmanoeuvre McDonnell Douglas F-15 fighters in high-altitude mock dogfights.13 (To be fair, though, it is hardly surprising with a wing that size.) In its early form, however, when it still retained its pure delta shape with straight leading edges, the Vulcan could prove a handful for the incautious to fly. This may well have been a contributing factor to what happened at Heathrow in the autumn of 1956.

On 1 October that year Vulcan XA 897 was returning to the UK from Australia. Vulcans were not due to enter squadron service until the following year, leaving it to Valiants to bomb Egypt in the Suez campaign at the end of October 1956. But as the first of its kind to be accepted for service by the RAF, XA 897 had been sent on a sort of ‘show-the-flag’ world tour which had been a great success. The aircraft had performed perfectly and had awed people everywhere as the epitome of British technological expertise and air power. In the meantime someone had taken the decision that on its triumphant return this nuclear bomber should land at London Airport (as Heathrow was then still known), where a welcoming committee of top brass and international press would be assembled to greet it. It was one of those daft notions where the urge to play to the gallery had stifled commonsensical objections such as that the Vulcan, being a military aircraft, was equipped for the GCA (ground-controlled approach) system rather than the civilian ILS (instrument landing system) with which the airport’s traffic controllers were more familiar. This may have had some bearing on what was about to happen because on that day visibility was quite poor, with rain and low cloud.

Flying the Vulcan was Squadron Leader Donald Howard, DFC. Instead of his usual co-pilot he had the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Sir Harry Broadhurst, sitting in the right-hand seat. In the cramped little compartment behind them were four men: the aircraft’s three crew members from RAF Waddington – including the co-pilot – plus a support engineer from Avro. They sat strapped in as Howard brought the Vulcan in on its final approach, flared† and landed with terrific impact in a field of Brussels sprouts 600 yards short of the runway. The aircraft immediately bounced back high into the air, at which point the two pilots ejected. XA 897 fell back and disintegrated in a tangled fireball of blazing fuel and wreckage that skidded along the runway. The four crewmen were killed instantly while Howard and Broadhurst were still falling beneath their parachutes. ‘A thunderous explosion rent the air,’ as Time’s correspondent put it in characteristic prose. ‘In the grass alongside the runway where his ejector-parachute had dropped him, Pilot Howard lay, scratched and dazed but otherwise unhurt. Near by, on the concrete itself, was Sir Harry Broadhurst. His feet were broken. In a moment both airmen were in the arms of their wives who had come to cheer their return. Farther down the runway, the other greeters watched in silence as airport firemen fought the flames, and experts prepared to investigate whether mechanical or human failure had struck down the Vulcan.’14

In aviation circles debate has raged over this accident for over half a century. The definitive cause is still undecided and will remain so, but consensus has settled for pilot error with sundry mitigating circumstances. Among these was visibility. Even in perfect conditions the forward view from the Vulcan’s cockpit was never good, and its early windscreen wipers were downright bad. It is quite likely that on that day of mist and drizzle neither pilot could see the ground at all. However, had the aircraft’s official co-pilot been in the right-hand seat (instead of a brass-hat who, though a veteran pilot himself, was hardly experienced on the type), he would have been calling out the altimeter readings as was normal practice so that Howard could perhaps have decided to overshoot and go round again. Above all, it can’t have helped that the wretched squadron leader must have felt under pressure, required to land a big new bomber in poor visibility for a VIP reception at a civil airport with an air marshal sitting next to him. As for the possibility of mechanical failure, Time’s phrase about experts preparing to investigate the crash proved optimistic because they didn’t have long to examine the cooling wreckage as it hissed and spat in the rain: the airport authorities quickly sent in cutters and bulldozers to push it off the runway so that scheduled flights could resume. Evidence was almost certainly lost or obliterated. Still, what happened physically when the Vulcan’s wheels had hit the ground prematurely was established. The impact smashed both undercarriage legs backwards, driving them up into the delta wing’s trailing edges and severing all the control rods to the flying surfaces. From the moment the aircraft bounced back into the air it was no longer controllable, and the pilots wisely ejected.

Taking place so publicly, the accident did little for British aviation’s morale, still deeply bruised by the Comet disasters two years earlier (and discussed in Chapter 7). But the heated newspaper debate that promptly broke out was over the four dead crewmen. Why had they not had ejector seats? Was it because they were just ‘other ranks’ and not deserving of the life-saving privileges granted to the officer class on the flight deck? In fact there was provision for the crew of a Vulcan to escape, but not by using ejector seats. It meant their having to put on parachutes, hurry forward and down a ladder before dropping through a hatch in the underside of the nose. This tortuous arrangement did save lives in a few other incidents but in this particular case could never have done so. Not only had there been no time and not enough altitude, but when the undercarriage was down even this emergency exit was blocked by the leg of the nose wheel. Public feelings ran high about the issue precisely because everybody could grasp the problem. It was easy enough to arrange for a pilot to have an ejector seat in his cockpit, but what was to be done in a bomber with several crew members stationed within the body of the aircraft? As mentioned in Chapter 4, Folland’s chief test pilot ‘Teddy’ Tennant had successfully ejected from his stricken Gnat fighter only two months earlier. Having pondered the matter for a year while inquiries into the Vulcan crash proceeded, he wrote a letter to Flight:

To which the magazine’s editor – whose own life had presumably not been saved by an ejector seat recently and whose own morale was clearly unimpaired – responded in an authoritative tone: 

In the next issue of the magazine, in a note headed ‘Vulcan Exit Facilities’, a representative from A. V. Roe & Co. said his company had in fact sketched out a modification that provided upward ejection for non-pilot crew members of the Vulcan but that the Air Council had decided against it after the problem had been ‘exhaustively considered’. ‘The structural difficulties involved in the installation of upward-firing ejection seats could not be overcome without excessive delay and without imposing unacceptable penalties in the build-up of the V-bomber force; and that downward-firing seats would be entirely unacceptable for low-altitude escape.’16 This last was undoubtedly true: one or two contemporary American jet aircraft such as the Douglas X-3 Stiletto and Lockheed’s F-104 Starfighter had experimented with downward-firing ejector seats which, when used in the case of engine failure immediately after take-off or before landing, had predictably tragic results. Even the B-52 bomber had downward-ejecting seats for its rear crew which were useless below 800 ft. However, the obvious point deliberately not being addressed was why ‘official requirements’ hadn’t seen fit to design-in such ejector seats for all V-bomber crews from the start, when they needn’t have led to delays and huge extra cost.

Not that the crews’ position was always one of helpless passivity in times of crisis. As Vulcan XH 498 was landing in New Zealand in October 1959, wind shear caused it to break its port undercarriage leg on touchdown. The pilot went round again for a successful crash landing. During the circuit, the crew in the rear compartment came forward and inserted the safety pins into the two pilots’ ejector seats, announcing that either they would all get out together or nobody would. They all survived unscathed.17

The real difficulty with providing ejector seats for V-bomber crews was that since all three aircraft types were designed to fly at 50,000 ft or even higher, the flight deck and the crew’s cramped, coal-hole-like compartment had to be pressurised. An ejection at that altitude would be instantly fatal. Attempts were made to design a system whereby the whole compartment could be ejected as a unit, like the one that was to be built for the pilots of the North American B-70 Valkyrie, but it proved too complex and costly. In 1960 Martin-Baker successfully modified a Valiant with rearward-facing ejector seats for the crew, but for structural reasons it would have been much harder to do the same for the Victor. Martin-Baker also designed a Vulcan crew-ejection system that worked perfectly in all twenty tests, although such seats needed to boost the men high enough and quickly enough to clear the tall tail fin and entailed severe acceleration. Had people known in, say, 1960 that V-force aircraft would be in service for a further quarter-century, it is possible that the expense of providing their crews with ejector seats would grudgingly have been met. Despite plenty of later testimony by V-bomber crews that they were generally too busy and intent on their tasks even to think about ejector seats, the fact remains that it was an awkward subject if only because from the three bombers’ earliest designs it was obvious that the lives of the two pilots must have been valued above those of the crew.

Yet such concerns faded into the background as successive Vulcans slightly modified their wing shape and the true potential of this majestic aircraft was revealed. Reference has already been made to its being able to outmanoeuvre high-performance fighters at altitude, but this was only one of the abilities conferred on it by the 111 ft wingspan. The Vulcan’s take-off was famous, and not only because of the characteristic moan caused by the immense torrent of air gulped through its intakes, a pulse-quickening sound that could be heard for miles. Hitherto, heavy bombers had tended to leave the ground with apparent reluctance after using all available runway. Yet as the Vulcan reached flying speed and the pilot rotated and its giant wing bit into the air it seemed to leap off the ground, climbing away as steeply as a fighter. The paradox was that the aircraft weighed over a hundred tons yet always managed to suggest an inbuilt yearning to be airborne.

Gradually, as Soviet fighters improved their capability at altitude, NATO’s tactical requirements changed and the RAF’s Vulcans were reconfigured to fly below any radar. The aircraft promptly revealed a low-level capability unmatched by any large bomber either before or since. By the sixties its terrain-following radar was very advanced, and now and then ground crews claimed to find leaves and even branches wedged into a Vulcan’s control surfaces after a low-level sortie. RAF Vulcans would occasionally participate in Red Flag exercises: highly realistic war games staged from Nellis Air Force Base in Arizona, north-west of Las Vegas. After one such exercise a photograph was pinned to a notice board in the officers’ mess. It showed the deep furrow allegedly carved in the Nevada Desert by the wing-tip of a Vulcan keen to show its American hosts what low flying was really about. The Vulcan was unscathed, barring some touching-up of its camouflage paint: an extraordinary testimony to the aircraft’s structural strength. It is probably a safe bet that no other military aircraft of any nationality could have survived hitting the ground while banking steeply.

But the exercises that probably did most to secure the Vulcan’s reputation among NATO’s military partners were kept secret from the general public until declassified in 1997, when Russia was judged to be no longer a threat. These were Operation Skyshield, three massive exercises conducted to test US and Canadian air defences against an attack by Soviet nuclear bombers. NORAD (North American Air [now Aerospace] Defense Command) was fully aware that only one bomber needed to get through in order to wipe out a city, but its planners were confident of the effectiveness of the great chain of radar stations spread across Canada and down the north-east coast of the US. This was the DEW (or Distant Early Warning) Line. To test it, NORAD invited RAF Bomber Command to participate in a Skyshield exercise in October 1961, and two squadrons each sent four of their new B.Mk 2A Vulcans. One group flew from Scotland to ‘attack’ from the north, coming in over Labrador; the other four took off from Bermuda and came in from the south. It is doubtful if the North American defenders realised quite what stiff opposition the Vulcan presented. Not only did it carry the latest electronic countermeasures (ECM) equipment but its delta planform turned out to offer a minimal, near-stealth level of radar visibility. Only the tail fin reflected a small signal.

The four Vulcans from the north came in high at 56,000 ft. By now the airspace above the American and Canadian eastern seaboard was thick with fighters trying to detect and ‘lock on’ to the intruders. One Vulcan was intercepted and ‘shot down’ by an alert F-101 Voodoo over Goose Bay; the other three got through to land unopposed in Newfoundland, having well and truly breached the DEW Line. Three of the Vulcans coming from the south put up a joint electronic screen to jam the defenders’ radar, behind which the fourth sneaked around and landed undetected in New York State, twenty minutes’ flying time from New York City and a mere six minutes from Montreal. NORAD must have felt it was just as well the Soviets wouldn’t be flying Vulcans. In theory, the Brits could have obliterated Washington DC, New York City and even Chicago before running out of fuel. It was deeply sobering.

Two decades were to pass before this highly versatile aircraft was finally used in anger, during which time it had been steadily overtaken by technological advance: hardly surprising for a design that dated back to the original ‘V’-bomber specifications of 1946. The Vulcan had also been overtaken by strategic change. Nuclear bombers had become obsolete, their role taken over by ICBMs. In 1969, just over a year after Bomber Command and Fighter Command were merged, the V-bombers’ task of delivering Britain’s nuclear deterrent was finally taken over by the Royal Navy’s Polaris submarines. (This ironically reversed the apparent subordination of the navy to air power that had been established in the Second World War.) Yet although it had become long in the tooth the Vulcan somehow never really seemed its age and still doesn’t, even today. Maybe this is because there is something inherently ageless about big deltas: a permanently futuristic quality shared by Concorde as well as by the fabulous but aborted Mach 3-capable B-70 Valkyrie – not to mention the single most evilly beautiful aircraft of all time, Lockheed’s SR-71 Blackbird.

Whether ageing or ageless, in 1982 Vulcans and Victors, the proud remnants of Britain’s V-bomber fleet, were called upon to carry out Operation Black Buck in the Falklands War. This was a series of bombing raids on the airfield at Port Stanley designed to render it unfit for further use by the Argentinian airforce. The Vulcans and their supporting Victor tankers were based on Ascension Island, and at the time it was claimed that the Black Buck raids were the longest-range air attacks in history. At any rate they represented the Vulcan’s only ‘live’ combat role in thirty years’ RAF service. Although since 1968 the RAF’s bombers and fighters had been amalgamated as Strike Command, it is not too fanciful to view the Black Buck raids as representing in a ghostly way the swansong of the old Bomber Command. Not since 1945 had British-built bombers carried out such extreme-range sorties on a target; and they never will again. Like Bomber Command itself the Vulcan was finished, and the last few examples of this peerless aircraft were finally retired in March 1984.

Seen in retrospect, Britain’s independent nuclear V-force was magnificent. The aircraft themselves were a marvel of engineering and aerodynamic design achieved on the very frontier of what was technologically feasible at the time. That we could ever have built them seems nothing short of miraculous from the perspective of the twenty-first century, when Britain’s manufacturing capability has been almost entirely reduced to assembling foreign-designed cars in foreign-owned factories. Intended to absorb and then retaliate to a first Soviet attack well before the Americans could play any part, the RAF’s comparatively small V-bomber force probably could never have guaranteed MAD, or Mutual Assured Destruction. But it did at least make it abundantly clear to the USSR that it risked losing five major cities even though Britain itself might be rendered uninhabitable. To that extent it was a deterrent that worked triumphantly. With hindsight, it went a long way to make up for the post-war Attlee government’s complacency over the need for fighters. In fairness it has to be said that Attlee faced hideous economic problems as well as the electorate’s declared priorities, which were that Labour should implement its promises of a huge housing programme while getting the new National Health Service as well as state education up and running. In the immediate aftermath of the war military matters were unpopular and being Minister of Defence was a particularly ungrateful post to hold. The ex-Vulcan flight commander Andrew Brookes sums it up neatly:

In its iconic way the Avro Vulcan became one of the world’s great aeroplanes, instantly recognisable. It is not surprising that it alone of the three V-bombers should have been the subject of an intense private campaign to have a last airworthy specimen fly again. After copious Heritage Lottery funding and years of dedication XH 558, based at British Aviation Heritage Bruntingthorpe, near Leicester, is now flying again at air shows for as long as funding permits. To judge from the crowds’ rapturous reception the sheer spectacle of an aircraft that looks utterly unlike anything else in Britain’s skies today is, together with its sound, overwhelming. It is both an aesthetic and a nostalgic experience, exciting the young and bringing tears to the eyes of those old enough to remember the heyday of their nation’s technological prowess and lament its passing. The Vulcan is not merely a dazzling monument to what Britain as a nation could once do, but a bitter reminder of what it will never do again. Whether or not we judge that this matters, few of my generation of Britons go home without pride and an empty sense of loss.

Note – Chapter 6: Crash Landings

1 W. A. Waterton, The Quick and the Dead (Frederick Muller, 1956), p. 197.

2 Ibid., p. 127.

3 Ibid., pp. 202–9, somewhat abbreviated and edited.

4 The Citizen, 30 July 1952.

5 Waterton, op. cit., p. 210.

6 Ibid., p. 216.

7 Daily Mail, 20 July 1956.

8 Tony Blackman, Vulcan Test Pilot (Grub Street, 2007), p. 51.

9 See Waterton in the Daily Express, 22 June 1954.

10 See Derek Collier-Webb, ‘Tested and Failed: Gloster Javelin’, Aeroplane Monthly, May–June 1998.

11 Wing Commander J. A. Robinson, Jet Bomber Pilot (Old Forge, 2006), p. 67.

12 Blackman, op. cit., p. 19.

13 Ibid., p. 190.

14 Time, 15 October 1956.

15 Flight, 25 October 1957.

16 Flight, 8 November 1957, pp. 755–6.

17 See www.thunder-and-lightnings.co.uk/vulcan/gallery3. html.

18 Andrew Brookes, V-Force: The History of Britain’s Airborne Deterrent(Jane’s, 1983), p. 35.

* Summers’s nickname stemmed from his habit during his days in the RAF of urinating against the rear wheel of his plane prior to take-off, like a dog marking a lamp post: in his case not ‘for luck’, especially, but because crash-landing with a full bladder could prove fatal.

† ‘Flaring’ refers to the pilot lifting the aircraft’s nose just before touchdown. The greater angle of attack with reduced power briefly increases lift to allow a gentle landing. The same raising of the nose on take-off, but with the engines at full power, also produces more lift and is known as ‘rotating’.