Vulcano

For roughly the first 18 years of my life one of the annual highlights was a Vulcan bomber cruising in formation low over my bedroom ceiling as part of the Queen’s birthday fly-past. 

We lived in a top floor flat in a building constructed in 1812 more of less directly behind Buckingham Palace gardens, and my bedroom was basically the attic in what had been the old servants’ quarters, a reversal of the fabled ‘upstairs, downstairs’ arrangement. (Above my door there was a little niche which once housed a bell attached to a long cord which could be yanked several floors below in say, the original living room.) 

A German bomb had landed in the street beside the house on April 16, 1941 leaving a legacy a wobbliness. Sometimes it seemed that even a passing bicycle could send a shudder through the structure, so imagine what one of these sliding by directly overhead would feel like. The effect was amplified by the original sash window in my room which didn’t so much quiver as convulse at the merest breeze. 

These extraordinary giants had first talen to the skies in 1952, then amogst the most advanced aircraft ever conceived, strategic bombers intended to deliver atomic payloads, yet which saw some real action thirty years into their lifespan when they were deployed rather daringly in the South Atlantic in June 1982 in order to degrade Argentinian anti-aircraft equipment around the Port Stanley airstrip — a mission dubbed Operation Black Buck, then the most long range series of bombing raids ever conducted. 

On one such sortie on June 3 a Vulcan attempting to return to Ascension experienced a refueling fail and had to divert to Rio’s Galeão airforce base, and as the Brazilian government of the time was relatively friendly with the Junta in B’s A’s, both aircraft and crew found themselves briefly detained. 

Although the Vulcan itself was by then a bit old school, this one had been carrying American AGM-45 Shrikes, the very latest kind of anti-radar missile, supplied in secret by the Yanks, who were not so keen that their covert miltary support of Thatcher’s task-force should be widely publicised, nor indeed that any other parties should become privy to this technology. 

The crew had attempted to ditch their remaining two Shrikes in the ocean along with a bunch of highly confidential documents, but one missile remained doggedly attached to the base of the airframe, and so a bit of a diplomatic incident ensued, with both Argentina and the US applying heavy pressure on Brasilia. 

The RAF got its plane and crew back a week later on June 10 after promising the Brazilians to supply a load of free spare parts for their fleet of Westland helicopters.