Fooking history lesson here, however what the Vulcan actually did down south in 82 (the bits left out of Vulcan 607).
Just read Vulcan 607 - excellent book from both aircrew and groundcrew perspective. The Mission was successful, halved the distance of the runway, job done.
The really interesting part of the whole thing was how Vulcans had AAR refuel capability re-instated after 20 years of redundancy, crews trained problems (and there were many) with the fuel system ironed out in 4 weeks, from invasion 0f falkland island and the bomb hitting the runway. And to top that the story of the mission itself is quite extraordinary.
Hole was filled within 24 hours and the Argies put a fake crater in its place to fool photo reconnaissance when they were operating their Hercules supply flights right up to the night before they surrendered.
Not aware they got anything wrong, they did the job they were tasked to do, unless you know different.
Lots of mistakes done by the Vulcan boys. XM607 took off on the first black buck mission (1st May 82) as the reserve aircraft. The primary Vulcan had to abort due to the crew being unable to pressurise the aircraft (rumour has it that somebody didn't close a window panel properly). Of course there was the problems with the tankers that resulted in a Victor having to get an emergency refuel on its return leg.
They planned to bomb ACROSS the runway at a 35 degree angle so that at least 1 bomb would hit it. Don't forget that they also did this with only 1 months notice and had to use archaic inertial nav kit that first had to get them to the Falklands over 4000 miles of open ocean with no reference points. It would have been pointless to fly along the length of the runway in the dark and potentially miss it by a few feet either side etc. As already mentioned, it did stop the Argies basing fast jets at Stanley and also gave the strong message that we could have easily hit Buenos Aires.
One bomb on the runway, however if you read Sharky Wards book about the Sea Harrier in the Falklands, he states that for the same fuel load that was required to get 21 Bombs onto the ground by a Vulcan, you could have launched enough Sea Harrier raids from the carriers at maximum range to drop nearly 2000 bombs on that airfield and to do it almost as accurately.
Second attack (4th May 82) was good in length, however the bombs fell to the western end of the runway. (the story of it to stop the runway being extended is a myth, the Argies took one look at operating Skyhawks and Super Etendards from the airfield and unless the weather conditions were just right, it was a non starter, even with a runway extension (we had to do a major job to make it long enough for Phantoms).
The Argentine navy did operate jets off the airfield in the shape of Aermacchi MB326’s, a jet trainer and light attack aircraft similar to the Hawk. Even then they had a lot of problems including one pilot being killed when his aircraft crashed in bad weather when landing after sliding off the runway.
A Vulcan would been pushed to have attacked Buenos Aires as the argies did have quite a good air defence around the place. Would have been politically a non-stater anyhow and the places we would have really had to attack were the bases in the south where the Argies were launching their attacks.
The rumour that they withdrew their Mirage III interceptors from operation over the Falklands because of the Vulcan threat to BA is again a complete myth. The real reason was that the first attempt they did to intercept Sea Harriers on 1st May resulted in one of two Mirage being shot down (801 NAS Sea heap flown by Flt Lt Paul Barton, RAF). The other was badly damaged by a sidewinder proximity detonation (fired by Lt Steve Thomas RN) which resulted in the Argie pilot trying to land at Port Stanley as his fuel tanks were leaking like a sieve. He would have made it as well, had he not jettisoned his drop tanks over the airfield to lighten the aircraft. The argie conscripts manning the anti aircraft guns thought he was a British aircraft dropping bombs on them and shot him down.
The big problem the argies had were that none of their fighter aircraft (Mirage III or IAI Dagger (Israeli copy of the Mirage 5) had AAR capability, hence they didn’t have the range to stooge about over the Falklands waiting to be shot down.
Third attack (13th May 82) was cancelled after take off due to headwinds making the mission marginal as regards the Vulcan reaching the Falklands.
The forth attack was to have been a Missile attack against the Argentine Air Force TPS-43F search radar based near Port Stanley using American Shrike anti radiation missiles (ARM). The original plan was to use the Martel ARM used by the Buccaneers, and a trial fit was done and flown successfully. However the Martel had a very short carriage life while on the aircraft and if not fired would have had to be taken back to the UK to be refurbished before reuse after one Vulcan sortie. Hence we got the Shrike off the Spams which could be treated as a normal round of ammo.
The target radar was a right pain as far as we were concurred as the Argies were using it to plot the climb out point of the Navy’s Sea Harriers and thus giving them a clue of where the carrier Battle group was located (the Exocet attacks on the carrier battle group after the attack on HMS Sheffield were planned on this information). The radar was also used to warn Argentine aircraft of the location of Sea Harriers combat air patrols so they could avoid them or abort missions.
The first ARM mission (28th May 82) was flown with 2 shrikes fitted tuned to the frequency of the TPS-43 and was aborted due to Hose and Drogue failure on one of the tankers 5 hours into the mission.
The second ARM mission (31st May 82) was again flown with 2 shrikes again tuned to the frequency of the TPS-43 and both missiles were fired at the target radar. The Argie operators saw the high-speed missile tracks coming towards them and stopped transmitting. One of the missiles detonated about 15 metres from the radar, slightly damaging the antenna (one story I’ve heard was the explosion knocked the aerial over, but didn’t damage enough to put it out of commission once it had been righted).
The third ARM mission (3rd Jun 82) was flown with 4 shrikes, 2 again tuned to the frequency of the TPS-43 and 2 tuned to frequency of the Skyguard anti aircraft gun fire control radars dotted around the airfield. When the Vulcan popped up on their scopes, the TPS-43 operators switched their radar off and kept it off, however one of the skyguard system’s tried to engage the Vulcan and ended up eating one of the two shrikes fired at it, which destroyed the radar and killed some of the operators. The Vulcan at this point was low on fuel and headed north to return to Ascension. While refuelling on the return leg, the Vulcan’s refuelling probe was broken while making contact with the drogue and the aircraft had to make a hazardous diversion to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, where it was interned for some nine days before being released. The aircraft landed with bone-dry tanks and a live Shrike on one its wing pylons as it failed to fire when the crew tried to jettison it. (The Brazilians kept the missile by the way).
The last mission was flown on 12th Jun 82 and was to have dropped 21 air-burst 100 pound bombs using VT fuses to damage airfield infrastructure (VT standing for Variable Time, a fuse that will exploded a bomb at a set height above the ground (by use of a small radar in the fuse) or give a set delay after impact. Sharkly Ward in his book states that one of the Vulcan raids was a total failure as after flying 4000 miles the navigator forgot to fuse the bombs before dropping them. 5 years until the official classified history of the war is released on the 30-year rule and we will hear what actually happened on the last raid.
As for the Radars that over half of the missions were flown against, the Argie officer in charge of the TSP-43F went to work on the timing boards that controlled the radar with a hammer and poured acid into the cooling system. We captured it and decided it would be a nice piece of kit to have ourselves. We went to Westinghouse, the radar’s manufacture to get the bits to get it working and support it as the Radar Type 99 (operated by 144 SU (Wattisham), TCW (Brize Norton) and 1ACC (Boulmer and on Cyprus where it was scraped when the Radar Type 101 came into service). The man from Westinghouse, he says yes, on the provision that you pay for the radar, as the Argies haven’t.
The Skyguards were operated by an Auxiliary rock Squadron at Waddo for a while and then some of the radars went to Spadeadam, while the scuffers use at least one to spy on low flying aircraft that are flying below the minimum height that they should be. The ultimate radar gun.
