If you talk to someone about the Vulcan
today they'll often associate its history with that of its use in the
Falklands conflict of 1982, when it undertook the longest bombing raid of
any RAF aircraft flying from Ascension Island. The Vulcan however wasn't
designed for that particular role. It was designed in the early stages of the
Cold War as a nuclear high level bomber. In Britain following the end of the Second
World War thoughts turned to future conflict and the decision was made to tender the aircraft
companies of the day to produce a bomber that would be able to fly fairly long range and to drop
a nuclear weapon. What's particularly interesting is that that decision was made before the
decision was made to proceed with Britain's independent nuclear weapon. The Vulcan was one
of a number of designs. Initially six aircraft companies tended for the idea; four of
which went forward to prototype stage. The first one is one that's not particularly well
known the Short Sperrin. A fairly conventional looking aeroplane, albeit with four engines, with
a pair mounted above each other in each wing. Two were made but it didn't go into production. The first production bomber that came
from that was the Vickers Valiant. Again a fairly conventional
aircraft and unfortunately it didn't progress very far due to a
change in tactics and fatigue life. The next aircraft to fly was the Vulcan; the
second to carry the V name. By this point the air ministry had decided that their previous
idea of naming bombers after famous towns and cities in the UK needed a little bit of a
change as the aircraft became more dynamic so the Vulcan became the second of the V bombers. It was
followed into service by the Hadley Page Victor: able to actually carry slightly more bombs than
the Vulcan it never went on to gain the same fame. So we're now in the pilot seat of Avro
Vulcan. It's a very cramped area to be in but probably for the pilot and the co-pilot on
my right they have at least got a fairly decent view outside - at least they can see outside
unlike the three crew members sitting behind. In this position we'll notice quite a few
interesting features of the of the Vulcan, one of which is the control column in front unlike most
bombers, it's not of the spectacle handle type but this is very much a fighter pilot style joystick,
partly because of the handling of the aircraft and the modern technology that had gone into it,
but it certainly gave the pilot and co-pilot when they were sitting in here a very different
feel to most of the other bombers of the era. In the centre we have four throttles, one
each for each engine and that's represented by quadruple instruments in front of us for
engine pressures, oil pressures and otherwise. The Vulcan itself was able to be started
in a conventional way with individual engines running but in the event
of a scramble they could actually fast start which would involve firing
all four engines simultaneously and that would allow a squadron to get
into the air in less than four minutes. A proportion of the crews that fly
the V bombers is always on hand. The Vulcan itself from the Avro aircraft
company is an aircraft not too dissimilar in some respects to the aircraft that
preceded it the Rolls-Royce merlin engine Avro Lancaster. I imagine a Lancaster
pilot sitting in the cockpit of the Vulcan other than having to deal with a number
of extra features caused by having jet engines probably would have noticed something
very similar in the instrument panel here. When this aircraft first flew in the 1950s
it really wasn't that far ahead in terms of what we're looking at from the Lancaster. Indeed
through to the end of its service by the mid-80s things hadn't changed at all either, the system
still worked, the dials still did what they needed to and they didn't really modernize it, so someone
who flew a Vulcan at the early part of its service would have noticed very few changes by the end of
its service life. One thing with the Vulcan was that it was a very electrical aircraft; it didn't
have a lot of systems in it that were unnecessary and the electric function meant that if the
electrical power to the aircraft was lost things like control on the control column would
become very difficult if not impossible. As a result just up in front of us on the instrument
panel is a release for the ram air turbine underneath the wing is a small airflow generator
that will drop and that will provide enough power for the pilot to gain control of the aircraft
in the event of electrical system failure. The Vulcan control column will allow the
aircraft to move to control the elevons on the rear surface of the wing but because of
the forces required to move it they are inputted electronically and a real feel had to be put
in to stop pilots over stressing the aircraft. What were your initial impressions
of the Vulcan? Very impressed yes, with the power and the performance of
it, the way it handled. It wasn't heavy, I mean it was very light on the controls because
the feel was artificial. In fact there was no real feel of the aircraft - that had to be fed
in to give the pilot the feeling that he was flying the airplane when it was electrics. It
wasn't supersonic but it was very close to that and I suppose the swept wing of the delta
made it possible to achieve these speeds. The Vulcan has a crew of five. Up front both
the pilot and co-pilot are sitting on ejector seats underneath a jettisonable canopy.
In the event of an emergency it's often the case that the co-pilot would have ejected
that would have allowed the canopy to depart the co-pilot would have followed but it would have
allowed the aircraft itself to depressurize - very important because the three guys in the back all
facing backwards - the air electronics officer, the navigator plotter and the navigator radar -
weren't equipped with ejection seats. They would have had to open the crew access door, rotate
their seats and physically move out of those seats aided by an inflating bag in the chair to push
them towards the door and hopefully to safety. Conditions in the cockpit of the Vulcan are
very cramped. In terms of crew comforts they didn't have a huge amount. They were
equipped with a pair of food heaters one of which is behind the pilot seat the other
behind the co-pilot seat neither of which were to be relied upon for actually warming up the
can of soup that you may have put in there. The original Vulcan design catered for just
one pilot but Avro was asked to standardize by fitting two ejection seats side by side
in the extremely small cockpit compared with the Valiant or the Victor which had a very
tightly curved roof, and that is why many of us who flew the Vulcan for for many many years
have a virtual permanent crick in the neck. The head was either that way to the left or that
way to the right to to cater for the combing. Flight time in the Vulcan: the crew in here
could have been inside for eight or more hours in the case of the Falkland's mission that
was possibly doubled to around 16 hours or so. The Vulcan was designed to carry conventional
bombs but also nuclear weapons in the event of the cold war becoming hot. The Vulcan has
four engines buried deep within the wing root of that massive delta wing. When the Vulcan
was designed, the delta was a new concept, so new in fact that Avro actually built a number
of one-third scale prototypes we could call them to test out the theory of the delta wing. It
was certainly the first production aircraft in the RAF to adopt this shape and really the first
combat aircraft anywhere in the world to do so. During the later stages of the
Second World War the Germans had experimented with the delta shape
but it was still a very new concept. It was the Vulcan's delta wing as well that
enabled it to have longevity of service life. Preceding it into service was the Valiant but
when the V Force was requested to fly at low level the wings on the Valiant began to show signs
of stress and they were withdrawn from service, but the Vulcan's big thick wing protected
it when it reverted to that low level role. But originally it was designed to go in at high
level to drop nuclear weapons on Russian towns and cities in the event of that becoming a necessity.
They would have been painted overall bright white, anti-flash white but when they reverted to the
low-level role by which point they would probably have been carrying more tactical nuclear weapons
in the case of something like the blue steel standoff weapon, they gained this camouflage
surface to protect them in that environment. With the switch to low level a dark
green camouflage paint was introduced. But of course the boffins had quite failed to
appreciate that to a fighter loitering above we now stood out like the proverbial sore thumb.
Nor at low level could we use the the blackout curtains to protect against flash. Against nuclear
flash? That's absolutely right. So we couldn't use these at low level we needed to look out to make
sure we weren't going to fly into anything. And so we were issued with and were required to wear
on operations a standard black medical eye patch and in the event of being blinded we were to lift
it up switch it over and put it on the other eye. Not very scientific was it,
certainly not very comforting, but that was the primary aid to protect
against nuclear flash at that time. And so they slide past, the giants
of the US strategic air command, following them the huge white shapes
of Britain's long range heavies, their vast bulks making their
speed appear deceptively slow. That wing alone about two wing that itself
put 2000 feet on the cruise climb ceiling even without the bigger more powerful Olympus
engines were fitted to the mark II so that you know with four times 20,000 pounds of thrust
and for demonstration purposes you could get the weight down to about a hundred, hundred and
ten thousand pounds. The thrust weight ratio was absolutely astronomical. The highest I ever had
a Vulcan was sixty two and a half thousand feet. Not much fuel left I must
admit. Critical mach number, well of course in those days one was never
absolutely certain of position errors, but I dare say the fastest we ever went was
a in the region of nine six or nine seven. Our Vulcan x-ray Juliet 824 is a Vulcan B2. It's
the second variant of the Vulcan, the second main production variant, and this particular
one was used all of its life as a bomber. It flew with numerous squadrons all over
the country and indeed around the world and was delivered to Duxford in March 1982. Very
significantly it was delivered by a pilot by the name of Martin Withers who just a few weeks or
months later when the Falkland's conflict began he undertakes the first of the Black Buck
raids flying a Vulcan from Ascension island to the Falkland's where he drops bombs that
crater the main runway. This particular mission was the longest bombing raid undertaken by the
RAF and indeed by any country up to that point. And so very expensively and with a great deal
of effort we were able to mount some six attacks on the Falkland islands by Vulcans operating out
of Ascensions. I say very expensively because in order to get one Vulcan over the Falkland islands
we needed team tankers they had to actually refurbish the flight in-flight refuelling system
to the Vulcan. There was a shortage of probes and the director of the Imperial War Museum was
telling me that the RAF even borrowed a probe off a Vulcan bomber which they had in the museum.
I'm told that they did return it after the war. They were extremely long and extremely
difficult sorties for the crews involved. Flight refuelling is not perhaps
it's quite as easy as it looks, the Vulcan speed and the tanker speed have to be
coordinated they have a very small basket to aim for with their probe and of course only a small
window in which they could do this refueling. The Avro Vulcan is a truly amazing aircraft.
It has a real affinity with the British public and being able to see one
here at Duxford allows you to look at its immense size, it's immense
presence that it must have had in the sky and to compare it to an aircraft that flew just 11
years before it in the shape of the piston-engined Avro Lancaster. The Vulcan of the three V bombers
has gone down probably as the most famous partly because of its role in the Falkland's campaign,
partly also because after that conflict it was retired as a bomber within the same year
by December 1982. But the legacy of the Vulcan was such that the RAF themselves kept one airframe
on as a display aircraft for a number of years allowing the public to continue seeing this
aircraft long after it had gone out of service. Thank you for taking the time to watch our video
on the Avro Vulcan, we hope you've enjoyed it please take a moment to take a look at our YouTube
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