Hmmm

all British tactical nuclear bombs should have a maximum yield of no more than 10kt.

One wonders, could that be the origin of a couple of bits of Weapon Employment Course black humour

[Tasteless mode ON]

Q. Define a tactical nuclear weapon.
A. One that goes off in Germany

Q. What is the average distance between German towns?
A. About 10Kt

[Tasteless mode OFF]

exmpa:diablo:

and as if by magic!

When I saw 1969 I got quite interested as I was on the project team that year and put together the programme insert that went inside the souvenir booklet. However I happened to find I had kept a copy of the 1968 inset as well.

exmpa

Wouldn’t it have been more efficient to have flown the bombers there empty and “light,” and transport the bombs by C-130? And isn’t it difficult to land an aircraft at such high weights? Or was it all dictated by the urgency of the situation?

Try applying a bit of logic to the above:

a. The Vulcan is designed to carry bombs.

b. If you carry them in something else you need bomb trolleys and all the paraphanalia required to load them on the Vulcan, not to mention armourers.

c. If the Vulcan gets there and the bombs don’t then your journey was a waste of time. You always deploy with the critical equipment.

d. By carrying them on the delivery aircraft you have reduced your AT requirement by at least 2 aircraft. This is more efficient and they can be used for other urgent tasks.

I could go on, but I hope you see the reasoning behind loaded deployment.

exmpa

All aircraft have maximum landing weights and these are always less than the maximum take-off weight hence the need for aircraft to burn-off or jettison fuel before landing (if a landing becomes necessary before it was planned).

Not true, MTOW can equal MLW, for the Vulcan B2 MTOW and Emergency MLW were both 204,000lb. I can in fact think of one aircraft that had a MLW above its MTOW but that was a special and temporary case)

Normal MLW was 140,000

The original suggestion was that a Vulcan landing with twenty-one 1000lb bombs would be near or over its maximum landing weight but that cannot be the case since all the V-bombers were designed to carry (very heavy, early) nuclear bombs (or the Blue Steel stand-off missile).

The early nuclear weapons were considerably less than 21klbs, about IIRC 12klbs for the Violet Club/YS1. I never flew with Blue Steel but seem to recall that it weighed about 15klbs.

OTOH 21x1000lb weighed considerably more than that. With the carriers and Retard Tail Units the bomb bay load was about 25,000lb, a little less for un-retarded bombs. With standard fuel reserves this would put you over Normal MLW at most UK airfields. The normal fuel reserves were as follows:

Mimimum Fuel: 8000lbs (this was in the ’70s, I believe it was raised to 10K later) This fuel was treated as unuseable.

Plan 1 Fuel: Fuel required to divert from destination to weather diversion airfield and carry out an instrument approach, overshoot (go-around nowadays) and visual circuit to land.

Plan 2 Fuel: Crash diversion. Once in the destination circuit fuel could be reduced to Plan 2, subject to weather conditions. Plan 2 for Waddington would usually be Scampton or Cottesmore, Scampton would use Finningley or Waddington etc.

Plan 1 Fuel would typically be between 5-10k and Plan 2 2.5-4k

For a remote airfield like Ascension, with no practical alternate, you would use “Island Holding Fuel”, this is means being over destination with 2 hours fuel (calculated at cruise alt) plus approach fuel plus unuseable fuel.

So now you can do your own sums.

You must realise that nothing magical happens at Normal MLW. If you land slightly above it or even a lot above it you just make an entry in the F700/Tech Log. Dependant upon the circumstances and conditions it may mean a simple walk round and visual inspection of a few additional items, or in extreme cases in depth inspection of various airframe components. The degree of risk involved in exceding the Normal MLW on a Vulcan by up to 20k would probably be assessed as minimal.

Risk brings us to another perennial favourite: “In wartime all the limits go out the window”. No they don’t, because its all about risk management. You may be able to reduce the normal safety margins should the mission depend upon it and it is of sufficiently high importance. That is where Military Operating Standards (MOS) come in, for they enable the commander to quantify the degree of risk and weigh it against the mission priority. With the single runway at Ascension and the multiple movements required to mount the Black Buck sorties the risk management process would have been applied to the fuel reserves required by recovering aircraft. I do not know what those figures were, or even if they differed from the normal ones, but suffice to say if the Vulcan had ended up in the water halfway back from Port Stanley and the sea around Ascension littered with half the AAR force then the mission would probably not have been judged a success!

exmpa

A couple of years ago I had a pair of Seikosha Imperial Japanese Navy chiming ships bell clocks. When I took one to my clock repairer for a clean he was very sniffy about it.

Those Japanese clocks and watches, cheap copies, they’ll never catch on!

Exmpa

Where can I purchase such a clock? a USAAF Seth Thomas wall clock.

Unfortunately you can’t. Like many things in the clock world, it’s not quite what it seems. The clock has a Seth Thomas name on it but the firm of Seth Thomas became a division of General Time Instruments Corporation on 1st Jan 1931 and the last family connection ceased on 5th June 1932 with the death of the board chairman Seth E, Thomas jnr., the great grandson of the founder.

Probably the best place to ask about these clocks would be the NAWCC Message Board. The NAWCC also publish periodic Bulletins dealing with specialist subjects (You need to put on your best and biggest anorak for these!) and you may well find that someone has put together one on WW2 operations clocks. It would be worth asking.

exmpa

I remember playing with a Portugese sub once and we dropped the unit (little blue practice bomb thing with 6 codes you could program) to tell him he was dead.

It was IIRC called the Signal Underwater Sound (SUS) and released from an internal launcher. We didn’t use it very much, normally only when we had a task that might require us communicating with a submarine and then we would have a prearranged set of SUS codes for the purpose. Our normal training store was the Anti Submarine Target Indicator (ASTI) that was released from the bomb bay. Much less subtle than the SUS, it attracted the target’s attention with a series of very loud bangs.

it goes into great detail about ASW ops and the development by RCA of sonobouys. The USN asked for something and it didn’t take them long to develop it.

I think that they probably got a bit of help there. The first SSN blimp squadron was formed at NAS Lakehurst in January 1942. However the idea of expendable sonobuoys was proposed by the Chairman of the UK Admiralty Operational Research Committee in May 1941.

Although the concept was British, they were unable to spare the technical resources to develop the idea and a proposal was made for a joint development project with the US. Thus RCA, Camden and Columbia University, Connecticut carried out the initial development work in a joint effort with the Sonar Research Unit, Portland and the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough.

The proof of concept buoys were ship launched with the initial trials taking place in September 1941. If you are really keen, there is a book on UK Sonobuoy History. However I warn you it is for those with few other interests in life and who already have a good grounding in the subject. :sleeping:

exmpa