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  

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  

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