Aviation Doc - UK Channel 4 Sunday
 

Sunday 18th Channel 4 8.00pm

It's about the Vulcan raid on the airfield at Stanley during the Falklands War.

Should be interesting.

I watched that and thought it was very interesting. Talk about a wing and a prayer. A good dose of British daring do and fingers crossed it will all work in the end. To fly over a vast and freezing ocean knowing your chances of making it back was, in large part, down to luck took some nerve.

No mention of course that the Argentines had filled in the crater within 24 hours: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck

Yes, would have liked some analysis of how effective the raid actually was.

An amazing plan though - all those Victor tankers in order to get one solitary bomber through.

Very well made documentary indeed, and that's from someone who has also read Vulcan 607 by Rowland White which the TV adaptation was no doubt heavily based on. I can't recommend this book highly enough - very well written and absolutely fascinating.

It is true, the effectiveness of the raids are debated - there were 6 in total, I believe, not just the 1 the TV film showed. Sharkey Ward flew Sea Harriers over the Falklands and is hugely critical over the whole Vulcan operation in his book Sea Harrier over the Falklands. Ward is certainly opinionated and hard to warm to, but his book is equally fascinating and well worth a read.

PPP

Yup - there is a quote from Ward in the notes to the Wikipedia article I linked above: "... to get twenty-one bombs to Port Stanley is going to take about one million, one hundred thousand pounds of fuel - equalled[sic] about 137,000 gallons. That was enough fuel to fly 260 Sea Harrier bombing missions over Port Stanley. Which in turn meant just over 1300 bombs. Interesting stuff!" Ward (1992), p. 186.

It was the political impact that was important. It showed the Argentinians and the world that Britain was determined to restore the freedom of the Falkland Islanders.

How quickly the craters could be filled in was of no importance.

Best Regards,
MB_Avro.

Don't you think the Argentinians might have already noticed the large fleet steaming towards the islands? Given that it had been plastered all over the news, one would have to assume that they knew it was coming. Of course, if successive governments hadn't ignored the Falklands issue entirely, there would have been no need to 'restore the freedom of the Falkland Islanders' in the first place - though there seems to be little evidence that anyone in Whitehall or Westminster actually cared much about the Falkland islanders - and they had already been engaged in secret negotiations with the Argentinians over conceding sovereignty back in the 1960s and 1970s. The whole bloody mess was about 'political impact' - with two unpopular right-wing governments stirring up nationalist sentiment to divert attention from domestic problems. That the British 'won' seems more down to luck than anything else. Good men (on both sides) laid down their lives to serve the interests of their political masters, rather than for any great 'cause'. Most wars are stupid, but this one managed to surpass most in its futility...